The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Greatest Story in the World, Period I, by Horace G. Hutchinson

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

There is much truth in the old saying about the difficulty of seeing the wood for the trees. It is the aim of this short book to keep the number of the trees as few as possible so that the wood, as a whole, may be clearly visible.

It is designed to provide scholars and their teachers with an outline of the most important facts in the history of mankind up to the date of the firm establishment of the Roman Empire and the final destruction of Jerusalem—a date at which the various threads of the story come together to a point. In order to avoid confusing the learner, and to enable him to get a clear view of the most important facts, all less important facts and names and dates have been omitted.

With such an outline in his mind, the scholar, coming to the study of a particular nation or period, should be able to fit that nation or period into its proper place. In the absence of any such outline, he must necessarily be at a loss to know the bearing of this or that episode on the whole great story.

I have to record, very gratefully, my deep obligation to Mr. R. B. Lattimer for reading this book in MS., and for many valuable suggestions and emendations.

CHAPTER I

BEFORE HISTORY WAS WRITTEN

The greatest story in the world is the story of mankind around the Mediterranean Sea. The reason why it is so great a story for us is that it is really our own story. It is the story of the doings of mankind from the earliest date at which we know anything at all about man; and it is the story of the doings which have made you and me what we are to-day, and have made our lives what they are.

You must first look at the world map to understand the story properly. Take out the atlas or the globe of the world, and have a look at the Mediterranean Sea as shown upon it. You will see how very little space this sea occupies in comparison with the whole. And I want you to observe this very particularly, because, as I hope to show you, small though this space is, it is the space in, or closely around, which nearly the whole story of man on the world, so far as we know it, was made up to—what date shall we say?—only a few hundred years ago—say the date of Columbus' discovery of America. If you know the story of what happened in and about the Mediterranean {2} Sea, you will know nearly all that anybody does know of the really important things that men did in the world up to the date of our Queen Elizabeth.

"But," you may say, "surely things were happening in other places, as in China and in Peru, and in Mexico, and all over the world, all the time?"

And so there were things happening, and things which made a very great difference, no doubt, to the people to whom they happened; but they were things that made scarcely any difference at all, so far as we are able to see, to the history of the world. They made great differences within the borders of the countries in which they happened, but not beyond. The happenings that went on round the shores of the Mediterranean were the making of the world as we know it to-day: I mean, of course, in so far as men's actions have had anything to do with the making of it.

For the first part of the story we shall be occupied with the eastern end only of the Mediterranean; and I must ask you to carry your eye just a little—not far—to the east again of the eastern shore of that sea. That shore is called the Levant, from the Latin levare, to rise, and it means the region in which the sun was seen to rise by those who gave the name—that is to say, the East.

A very short way, as it looks on the map of the Western Hemisphere, to the east of that Levant shore, you may see the two rivers Euphrates and Tigris, rising very near together only a little south of the Black Sea, yet not finding their way out into the sea till they have gone a very long way south. Then, after coming together, they go out in each other's company into the Persian Gulf. A great part of that space between the two rivers is called Mesopotamia, {3} and is the country where our armies had hard fighting in the Great War. Mesopotamia is from Greek μέσος, meaning the middle, and πόταμος, a river, and means the land in the middle of, or between, the two rivers. Mediterranean, the name of the big sea, is from Latin medius, meaning, again, the middle, and terra, the earth; that is to say, the sea in the middle of the land. It is almost entirely shut in by the land, its only way out being by the narrow Straits of Gibraltar at the western end.

So there you see those two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, running south and making the land in the neighbourhood of their course very rich and fertile, producing splendid crops and vegetation of all kinds. And now, if you will carry your eye just a little to the west and south of these, across Arabia and the Red Sea, you will see another great river, only this time it is a river running, not from the north to the south, but from the south to the north. It is the Nile, the river of Egypt. It goes out into the Mediterranean past a city called Alexandria. At its mouth it spreads out into a number of channels, making an area intersected by water channels. This area has something of the shape of the letter in the Greek alphabet which corresponds to our "d" and is drawn thus Δ. That is roughly the shape of the space occupied by these many mouths of the Nile, and the region is therefore called the "Delta," which is the name of that letter of the Greek alphabet.

I want you to take particular notice of these two great river-courses, those of the Nile and of the Euphrates with the Tigris. I say Euphrates "with Tigris," because the two are together the fertilisers and waterers of the country lying between and around {4} them. The Nile does his business of watering his own valley by himself. It is most important that you should give your attention to these two great water-courses, because it is along them that arose the two greatest empires, the two strongest and most formidable powers, of which the early history of the world has anything to tell us.

You may easily understand how this should be so. Man, at first, from what we are able to learn about him, knew very little of farming. Such ideas as a "rotation of crops," or of manuring the fields were probably quite unknown to him for very many ages. The first men whom we are able to learn anything about seem to have depended on the hunting of other animals for their living. Then came a time when they began to live on their flocks and herds. Now, both for the hunting and for the living by keeping cattle and sheep, they had to be constantly on the move. They would kill out all the game in one district and therefore have to move on to another. Or their cows and sheep would eat up all the pasture in one place and so they had to be moved to fresh feeding-grounds. These two first stages, which all the scholars recognise, in man's story require that the people who lived in them should be always moving, or at least ready to move. The stages are called the Hunting Age and the Pastoral Age respectively. The next age is called the Agricultural Age, when man began to give "culture" to the "ager," or field. He was able to settle then. It was not necessary for him to be constantly on the move when he had begun to live by the crops which he grew. But he was not yet a very clever or scientific farmer. He could grow good crops only when Nature helped him very freely, only {5} on the best soils, only in the river valleys or lands watered by the rivers, and in a favourable climate.

The soil of Mesopotamia is still considered the most t naturally rich in all the world: the Nile overflows its banks every year, and the overflow leaves a wonderfully rich mud behind it; the climate both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt is very favourable to the growth of vegetation. Therefore, it is not to be wondered at that when men began to lead a settled life they settled themselves down along the courses of these two great rivers—I write two, because I am regarding the Euphrates and Tigris as one, for the moment—and here formed themselves into communities and nations so many in number and so prosperous that they became stronger than any of their neighbours.

And now you are very likely to ask me, "What do we know about the early history of man on the earth, and how do we know it?"

The first thing that we know about man on the earth is what we know by finding the weapons or tools that show signs of his handiwork. It is one of the most distinguishing marks of man, setting him most clearly apart from all other animals, that he has been a maker of tools and weapons for an immense number of years. Intelligent though some dogs and monkeys and other animals are, not one of them has thought of doing this. The oldest sort of tools or weapons that we find are made of stone, generally of flint, chipped to a sharp edge or point, so as to make axe or spear-head. We know them to be older than any of the metal tools or weapons that we find, because we find them in a deeper layer, or stratum, of the earth—a stratum deposited before those which lie above it. And we find them in company with fossil remains of animals which are {6} of less-developed species than those in the strata above.

After a while—an immensely long while—there can be little doubt that man discovered that the ore of metals, which is found in the ground, can be fused, that is to say, melted by fire; that it can be separated from its earthy surroundings, and so be made useful. Man then began to make weapons and implements of metal, and found them better than the weapons of stone. We may infer this from the fact that the stone implements, of sharp and shapen flint, become less numerous as we come to higher strata, or layers, in the ground, and the metal implements are more numerous.

The metal of which the earliest metal implements were made is either pure copper or bronze, which is a mixture of copper and tin. Copper is not a very hard metal. I suppose that the more tin that was put into the mixture, in comparison with the copper, the harder it would be. And then, after a while—again a very very long while—man discovered another, a harder, and therefore a better, kind of metal, that is to say iron. And he has never found a better metal in all the long years of his story since. Gold and platinum may be more precious, because they are less common; but iron is a great deal more useful to man. His weapons, his swords, bayonets, and cannons are made of it; so are his ships; and you hardly can open your eyes in a room without their resting on something made of iron. As soon as he had found out the hardness of iron we may suppose that man quickly gave up the use of the soft bronze, as he had formerly given up the use of the stone in favour of the bronze. Thus it comes that you may read of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. They refer to these three stages {7} in man's history: first, when he was using stone implements, made of the chipped flint or the like hard stone; second, when he was using the bronze weapons and tools; and third, when he was using iron.

"But," you will say, "all this is hardly history. It is not man's story. We don't want to know so much what kind of tools and weapons man had; we want to know what he did with them. You are not telling us this."

It is quite true; I am not. But the reason why I have told you all this about man's tools, before telling you what he did with them, is that I want you to get clearly into your heads this truth—that even the best and most learned of the men who have searched back into history are able to tell us only a very small part of the whole story of man's doings on the earth. They have found out, perhaps, all that there is to find about the records that man has intentionally left of himself. But the records begin rather far on—at what we may call a late chapter—in the story. They begin only about six or seven thousand years ago. And though that sounds a long time you must understand that it really is quite short in comparison with all the time that man has been living on the earth.

It is very difficult for us, who have lived only a few years, to form an idea in our minds of a great many years. I hardly know how best I may help you to do so. Suppose we take a thousand years as a length for our consideration in the first place. Consider this, next, that there are, certainly, people alive now who are a hundred years old, and perhaps a little older. Imagine, if you can, the lives of ten such persons who have lived one after the other. Imagine that each {8} as a baby saw one of the others when that other was a hundred years old. Thus it would only take ten of such happenings to cover the whole stretch of a thousand years of which I want you to form some idea. The years of the lives of ten very long-lived men would cover it.

It is quite possible that you may have seen a living oak tree of much more than a thousand years old. The people who have studied trees tell us that there are oaks alive in England now which were alive in the Saxon times; that is to say, some 1500 years ago—one and a half thousand years. I know that these hints are not very effectual towards helping you to get an idea of what a thousand years mean, but they are the best that I can give you. They seem to help me to realise just a little what this great stretch of years is. We can do no better.

I wrote, a little while ago (p. 7), "the records that man has intentionally left of himself." I put in that word "intentionally" because, of course, the weapons and tools and implements and ornaments that we find were not left, by those who used them, with any intention that they should give us any information about their users. They were just left, as a rule, accidentally. We can imagine something from them about the kind of life that their users led, and what kind of men they were that used them, but they were not trying to give us any such information.

What we may call, I think, the intentional records began when we find that man began to carve designs on stone of what he had been doing, or to paint pictures showing his doings, and, especially, when he began to cut written words on the stone. When we {9} begin to get records of this kind, then we really do begin to read the story—-we begin to know what man was doing. And the first records of the kind are of date some five thousand years before the birth of Christ; that is to say, some seven thousand years ago.

And what do we find, from these carvings and pictures and writings, that man was doing? The records that we are best able to read now are those which we find in the more westerly of the two great river-courses on which, as we have seen, man congregated. It is along the Nile, in Egypt, that we find the record most clear. I have little doubt that we might find it no less clear along the other great river-courses, those of the Euphrates and Tigris, also, were it not for this difference—that Egypt and the Nile region was very much better supplied with hard stone than the Euphrates and Tigris region. The result of that is that the inscriptions and figures cut on the hard Egyptian stone are legible still. The other, more eastern, records, cut on the brick which, in the absence of stone, the builders made use of for nearly all building purposes, have crumbled to pieces. The wonder, after so many years, is that anything at all should be left, rather than that much has been lost. The Egyptian climate is very dry, except near the river's mouth, at the Delta, and that dryness has helped to preserve the records.

If we had the same records for the eastern as for the western river-course, we should find, I expect, that the way the people lived was very much alike in both. We may gather that it was a very pleasant life, on the whole. The climate was delightfully warm; the soil gave them plentiful crops with very {10} little work for it. Probably the eastern people were the more pastoral, that is to say, kept more cattle and sheep, but there were flocks and herds in the Nile region also. And in both there were wild beasts for the hunting.

CHAPTER II

EGYPT DOWN TO 1500 B.C.

I told you that one of the ways by which man, at different ages of the world, has been described is to speak of him in the Hunting stage, the Pastoral, and the Agricultural. Although these people along the great rivers probably settled down into the agricultural stage earlier than others, still, that did not prevent them from keeping cattle and hunting wild creatures. The older the inscriptions and records, the more we see of the hunting, so that we may imagine, as we should expect, that the quieter business of farming gradually came to occupy more of their lives as time went on, and that the hunting occupied them less. The wild beasts would no doubt get hunted farther and farther back from the country that man had settled in. An interesting fact is that one of the very oldest of all the Egyptian engravings portrays ostriches, showing that these great birds were inhabitants of Egypt at that time, though they do not appear in any later engravings and are, of course, not living in any part of Egypt now. These ostriches are carved on the face of a sandstone rock, standing as nature placed it, and not worked into any building. It is near a place which in the old days was called Silsilla, and it was nearly at the southern end of the Egypt of those times. For that Egypt did not extend nearly as far {12} south as the country which we call by that name now. It ended at the first cataract, where is now the town called Assouan. In ancient times this Assouan was called Syene. Farther south than this, the country was no longer called Egypt, but Nubia, though some Egyptians inhabited the region a little south of the cataract. Look at your map and you will very likely see that region still written down as the "Nubian Desert." Look to the west of the line of the Nile and you may read "Libyan Desert." Look to the right, again, and there is "Arabian Desert."

You will realise now what this means: that these people were here living all along the banks of the great river, and that on either side were deserts—sandy, barren wastes—which, for all they knew, stretched away without end. They lived along this narrow and very fertile strip which depended almost entirely on the river for its fertility, and which that river fertilised in a very peculiar way.

At a certain time in the year it came down in a great flood and inundated, that is to say, flowed over, all the low land lying on either side of its course. This happened just about the season that the star which we call Sirius, or the Dog-Star, but which they called Sothis, or the star of their god Seth, showed itself above the horizon at the moment of sunrise; and they dated the beginning of their year from this rising with the sun of this exceedingly bright and large star. This occurred in middle summer, so that the beginning of their year, their "New Year's Day," was very different from ours. It came nearly at the season of our Midsummer's Day. But they had a very good reason for counting the beginning of their year from it, because it was such a very important date for them. {13} It really did begin a new year for them, for it was this inundation, or overflow of the river, which gave their seeds, when they put them into the ground, a chance of growing and giving them good crops. After a time, during which the water had lain out over the low land, it fell back again into the usual channel of the river and left all the land which it had covered with a deposit, or layer, of rich dark mud, better than any manure they could have given it.

We know now what it was that caused, and that still every year causes, this overflow; it is the excessively heavy rainfall which occurs annually in the interior of the country, where the sources of the river are. But they did not know the reason, and made many curious guesses to account for it.

Although there were these deserts around them, it seems certain that the country quite close about the river had more trees and bushes on it than it has now. For one thing, as the people settled in the country and their numbers grew, they would be likely to clear off patches of the woodland for their crops, and in the second place a great eating down of the vegetation must have happened when they began, as we know they did begin, to keep goats and, later, camels.

The long-necked camels would be able to reach up to the tops of small trees, and to the lower branches of the taller ones, and, together, it seems that the goats and camels made a great difference after a while in the number of the trees. When a country is much stripped of its trees, one of the results is that less rain falls there; so it is quite sure that this stripping of the trees by the goats and camels in Egypt caused the rainfall to be less than it had been before those creatures were brought in. The country had to {14} depend more than ever, for its crops, on the overflow of the river. Of course the cutting down of the trees by carpenters with the stone or bronze axes would help to reduce the numbers, and we know that the ancient Egyptians understood the use of charcoal, which is made by burning wood. So it is easy to understand that, in a country which had no great supply of woodland to start with, what there was of it was soon almost destroyed.

But until that destruction happened there was woodland enough to give shelter to numbers of wild animals. Many of the animals which the early Egyptians hunted were of kinds that are able to live in sandy places where there is very little shelter, and, as it seems, very little grass for them to eat. We find, by the old carvings and written records, that they hunted the lion, leopard, jackal, wild boars, antelopes of many kinds, wild sheep and oxen, the hippopotamus in the river, and that they caught a variety of fish in the river and in the Lake Moeris, into which water was led from the river by a canal. The making of canals, to carry the water to places where it was required, was done in very early days, and at the season of the river's overflow water was led by a canal into this big lake which acted as a reservoir, or storing place, for the water, from which they could draw it off when wanted. The crocodiles, by which the Nile was infested, were looked on as sacred.

They understood the use of nets for fishing, and used nets also for surrounding four-footed animals and for catching birds. For the killing of the larger and dangerous animals they had spears of various make, and bows and arrows. It is doubtful whether they used the boomerang—that wooden, flat, curved {15} weapon, used still by the natives of Australia, which returns to the thrower after going out to a distance of more than a hundred yards. There are carved figures which look as if they might be figures of boomerangs, but they might be "throwing sticks" such as some savage people still use to give greater length of "leverage"—if you know what that means—to increase the length and force of their throw of a spear. There were immense numbers of wild-fowl about the river and the marshes. So the ancient Egyptians must have had splendid sport.

They seem to have kept, as domestic animals, ducks and geese, but it was not till several thousand years later than the date of those engravings in which we see the ostriches that our domestic fowls were introduced. Hairy-coated sheep are shown on some of the early carvings, but later a better sort of sheep, with woollier coat, and curved, instead of straight, horns appears. They had oxen, which drew their wooden ploughs and trod out the corn from the straw on the threshing-floors, and were also used to draw weights. They had, after a time, as we have seen, goats and camels, but the donkey was the most common beast of burden, both when they traversed the desert and when they were in their own fertile strip of country. Horses were only brought in at rather a late date in the story. At first they seem to have been used only for drawing chariots, and we find them thus harnessed a long while before we are shown a rider mounted on a horse, or, indeed, on any animal. They do not seem to have known either the elephant or the giraffe, which are perhaps the most remarkable creatures in all Africa. We know that they kept bees for their honey. They had dogs, of a variety of breeds, and {16} used them for hunting, apparently not regarding them as the unclean creatures that most people in the East consider them now. They kept cats and monkeys as pets, and used the cats to catch birds.

But the great business of their lives was the cultivation of their crops. Egypt was a great corn-producing country. Make a note of that in your minds, for the corn supply of Egypt became of great importance in the later story of the Mediterranean and its shores.

The corn was principally of the kinds that we call wheat and barley. And they had vegetables, such as lettuce, beans, peas, onions, and so on. We may imagine a certain amount of sowing and hoeing, and weeding and harvesting going on at the right seasons; but a great deal of their time must have been taken up with the watering under the scorching Egyptian sun. When the big flood had ceased to come down from the rain-filled lakes in the south, and the river had gone back into its ordinary channel, they had, after a while, to refresh the ground again by raising water in buckets hung by a rope to a long pole. The pole worked on a hinge about three-quarters of the way down from the end to which the rope was fastened, so that the bucket could be let down or drawn up by a man working at the end of the pole. There are many pictures and carvings of this apparatus. Probably very little rain fell at any part of the year in Egypt itself after most of the trees had gone.

They had the palm trees on which the dates grow, and fig trees and pomegranates. The wood of the palm must have been useful to them for timber, in a country where timber trees were so scarce. And they had the flax, of which they made linen. In early days there does not seem to have been any cultivation of {17} the vine, though the wine made in Egypt became quite important later. And they had the papyrus.

The papyrus was a plant which grew wild in the marshes, and it was of the greatest importance to them, and also to us, because it was on strips cut from the stalk and fastened flat together that the substance was made which served them for paper, on which very much of the story which I am now telling you was written. I have said that much of the story is taken from the writings and pictures on stone, whether on {18} the rocks as they stood where nature had put them, or as the stone was worked into the tombs or monuments of kings and great people, into pyramids and the like. But the greatest part of the record is written on the papyrus. The stem of the plant was used also for the building of boats, and it supplied them with material for ropes. Though it was found wild, they cultivated it, and so increased the natural supply.

It is likely that their houses were commonly built of brick. You will have noticed that as the country was so poorly supplied with timber-trees few wooden houses could be built. But the brick of which the houses of most of the people were made would not be of the brick that we know. You will remember that one of the burdens imposed on the Israelites in Egypt was to make bricks "without straw," and it may have happened to you to wonder at that, because, as you know, our bricks are not made with straw. But straw and pieces of reed were used in the making of much of the ancient brick, because the clay often was not burnt in a kiln, but only dried by the sun's heat. This did not give nearly so hard or lasting a brick as the brick that was burnt by the fire in a kiln, but a mixture of the straw helped to hold the clay together and to prevent its crumbling.

They knew all about the proper burning of bricks, to make them durable, also, but this sun-drying was a less troublesome way, and was used for the commoner kind of brick.

At a very early period they became skilful in the making of pottery, by which I mean vessels for household use, such as jugs, etc., in clay, and they were clever workers of glass. They made ornaments of gold, and engraved jewels. They were interested in {19} medicine, and knew the use of splints for setting broken bones. They knew something of the movement of the stars, as seen from the earth. We have noticed that they began their New Year at the date of the rising of Sothis, as they called the Dog-Star, about the season that the Nile began to rise. The carvings and drawings on stone and on papyrus are remarkable, even from the first, for the correctness and firmness of the outline. The earliest show the hands and feet left in a curiously unfinished state, and many of the figures have the two legs shown as one. As time went on they came to draw the figure very much more perfectly and with attention to finishing the hands and feet. The faces indicate quite clearly the race of men to which the originals of the portraits belonged.

But, of course, the achievements of the old Egyptians by which they are best known to us are those gigantic monuments the Pyramids, that strange head of the Sphinx, the many temples and the mummied corpses found within them. All these, as well as their hieroglyphical or picture writing, are connected very closely with their religious beliefs; and this is such a very curious and interesting subject that I propose to write about it in a chapter of its own.

I do not know whether you will agree, but it seems to me that the story of mankind is much more amusing, and will do us much more good, if we try to see how the peoples of the world lived from time to time, what kind of people they were, and how they worked and played and fought, rather than if we just study a list of the names of their kings and of their towns. I do not think the names can help us much, unless we know what the people that the names belonged to did, or what happened in the towns so called. For that {20} reason I have avoided mentioning any names that do not seem to have that kind of interest in the story. I think they only confuse us and get in the way of our seeing how the things happened that really did make a difference in the world.

But you are not to suppose that when these Egyptian people had settled themselves down along the course of this pleasant river, they were allowed to remain there quite peaceably, without any interference from their neighbours who lived in a far less fertile and agreeable country. The greatest of all facts in Egypt was the Nile. It went from end to end of the country. People went along it in boats and ships, they fished in it, hunted the hippopotamus, and possibly the crocodile, in it. Sometimes they were killed by either of these, and especially by the latter. The Nile was their life. Without it they would have died.

There was desert all about them, but it was not desert so deserted that it was quite without inhabitants. There were "oases," or fertile patches, in the desert itself, and the deserts had their limits; there were tolerably fertile lands beyond them again. And it has always been a wonder how the desert-dwellers, such as the Arabs and some kinds of antelopes, do manage to subsist where there seems to be so little for them to eat, and almost nothing for them to drink.

But there were people—Libyans on the west, Nubians on the south, Ethiopians (what we should call negroes)—of various tribes who probably were envious enough of the easy life that they saw their neighbours living along the river-bank. Therefore, although it sounds as if it were a very peaceful, as well as pleasant, life that I have tried to show you that these {21} ancient Egyptians were leading, you are not to suppose that they were not beset, from time to time, by incursions and invasions and attacks by the peoples round about them. It would take far too long to recite all these invasions against which they succeeded more or less in holding their own. That they were not always successful is quite evident from the records.

The record of Egyptian kings is given to us by an Egyptian priest, named Manctho, and the date of the earliest king, the founder of what is called the First Dynasty, has been estimated by some students to have been as far back as 5500 years before Christ was born. That is to say, more than seven thousand years ago. Other learned men have supposed the date of this first king to be quite two thousand years later in the story. This shows the very great difficulty of fixing the dates of these events that happened so very long ago.

What is more important is that we know at least one of the great acts of this first Egyptian king, whose name was Menes. It is known, from inscriptions, that he united into one kingdom what had, before him, been two countries, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt.

And here I must warn you of a difficulty which may perplex you. On the map you may see that Lower Egypt is the part near the Delta, that is the mouth, or mouths, of the Nile where it flows into the sea. Upper Egypt is the more southern part reaching as far south as the first cataract. But, as you look at the map, this Lower Egypt looks upper, to your eye. You must not pay any attention to that, but must remember that the northern part must be lower, really, because it is the part towards which the river runs; and a river, as you know, must run from higher ground to {22} lower. Remember, then, that Lower Egypt is the northern part, near the sea and Upper Egypt the southern.

Menes united these into one kingdom, but they were separated for a time again, under later kings, and this shows that not only were the Egyptians sometimes at war with the tribes from the deserts, who invaded them, but also that the people along the river-banks were sometimes fighting among themselves.

By a dynasty is meant both the king who is the founder, the first, of that dynasty, and also those of his children and grandchildren, or relatives, who followed him on the throne. It is as we may speak of the Stuart dynasty or the Hanover dynasty, of our own kings. When there were no more relations of a dynasty to come to the throne, or when one king was conquered by a foreign invader, or by a revolution of his own subjects, the next king was called the founder of a new dynasty, which went on till his family also died out or was turned out.

In the long history of Egypt, from the time of Menes, the founder of the first dynasty, to the conquest of Egypt by Alexander of Macedon in 332 B.C.—that is, 332 years before the birth of Christ—there were thirty-one of these dynasties, or kingly families, which ruled Egypt one after the other.

We speak of the rulers of all these dynasties as kings, but it is evident that they did not all have the same authority over their subjects. In our own history we know that sometimes the barons were very powerful, and the king of England had great difficulty in keeping them under his rule. Something of the same kind happened at various times in Egypt. There were local chiefs, with a large following of men, who {23} were nearly independent of the actual king. But in the end the kings regained the authority over them.

The capital city, in the earliest times, was Memphis, in Lower Egypt, and so it remained until the ninth and tenth dynasties, when the power of the Memphis kings was overthrown by conquerors from the north, and the country was distracted by revolutions, so far as we can learn, for a long period. Then a people called the Hyksos, coming from the north-east, from Syria, invaded Egypt and established their power there for many generations. And then came a new dynasty, which is thought to have arisen from a combining together of the chief men in Upper Egypt, of which Thebes was the capital. This rising drove out the foreign Hyksos and gave a military strength to Egypt which it never had before. The greatest king of this the greatest period of Egypt in the old days was Tethmosis III. He was a stepson of Hatshepsut, the wife of his father Tethmosis II., and Hatshepsut herself ruled as queen until Tethmosis came of age. That was in, or about, 1500 B.C.

The date of the founding of this, the eighteenth, dynasty was 1580 B.C.; and with this period begins what is called the New Empire. The word "empire," taking the place of that of kingdom, seems to show that the Egyptians were claiming to extend their power beyond their own country. And we know that they actually did so.

I do not want, for the moment, to follow down the story of Egypt any further than this, because it is time that we turned our eyes eastward, to see what was going on along that other great river-fed region, where the Euphrates and the Tigris flow down together. The point which we have now come to in the Egyptian {24} story is a point at or about which new and great things began to happen. The two great world forces—that of Egypt on the one side and that of Babylonia, which is the name given to the empire established in the east, on the other—began to clash together as they had not clashed before. Their rivalry, and the wars between them, and the catching up into these wars and the squeezing between them of the unfortunate smaller peoples that lived in the country by which the two big empires were divided—these are the principal things in the story of the world for a thousand years and more after the time of the founding of the eighteenth dynasty. So we must now try to make out something of the story of that other great power along those more eastern rivers.

But before we go to that eastern story I want to put in a chapter, the chapter that I spoke of a few pages back, to tell you something about the religion of the old Egyptians, the strange gods that they worshipped, the burial of their dead, their tombs, their language, and their sacred writing or hieroglyphic.

I think, however, before we begin the new chapter, I should like you to take a look at the map again and observe the position of the two great river-courses—the western, which we have been talking about, and the eastern, to which we are soon to come—because these are the real big facts which matter in the world's story. The Egyptian religion and all connected with it are most interesting, but the clash of the big empires was what made the early history of the world.

You will see, then, these great river regions and will imagine the two powerful empires established in them, and then you will see that there lies between the two a country in which lies the land of Palestine, {25} where the Jews lived. You will see that the big empires are divided from each other, nearly separated, by the Red Sea running up into the land with two arms, the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Akaba. Between these two stretches or arms lies the Sinai Peninsula, and northward of Egypt and westward of Palestine there is the Mediterranean Sea. The result of this distribution of sea and land is that the only way by which the two big empires could come into touch with one another was by way of Palestine. The southern desert, even where those big arms of the sea did not run up into it, was almost as impassable for the passage of armies as the sea itself. Neither of the empires, in the early days, had much of a fleet, by which they could get at one another across sea. The consequence is that we have to regard that stretch of land which is occupied on the map by Palestine as the bridge, and the only bridge, by which they could come into contact, either for purposes of trade or of war.

It is only natural to think, therefore, that when they began, as they did in the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, to make big wars on each other, the tribes that held, or that vainly tried to hold, that bridge, would be terribly squeezed and harassed by first one and then the other of the big neighbours coming upon them, with very little respect for their rights. That is, in fact, exactly what we know did happen. And it is only a wonder that the Jews at that time were not squeezed utterly out of existence between the two. It is one of the biggest wonders, as well as one of the biggest facts, in history that they were not so squeezed out. When I say it is one of the biggest facts, I mean that it made an enormous difference to the history of {26} the world, for if they had allowed themselves to be squeezed out, if they had not even then showed that extraordinary toughness and tenacity which has always been a great part of their national character, the history of the world would have been very different from what it has been, Christianity could not have spread through the world as it has spread, and the whole course of events would have been largely changed.

In what way it would have been changed we cannot say; but that it would have been changed enormously we cannot doubt.

Keep, then, these great facts clearly in your minds: the position of these two big empires to west and east, and the comparatively narrow bridge between them, by which they could communicate with each other. If you have this, like a map without any of the other names filled in, in the background of your minds, you will be able to fit in the happenings as they occur.

CHAPTER III

EGYPTIAN RELIGIONS, SACRED WRITINGS, ETC.

Talking, if you will carefully think of it, you will find to be just sending messages to one another by means of sounds. You learned to talk—that is to say, to send messages in this way—when you were a child, before you learned to write. So did the early Egyptians and all early peoples. But the difference between you and them is that you had some one to teach you to write, and they had not. They had to invent a way of doing this for themselves.

When you were a child you saw the sun rising, winter and summer following each other, and all the rest of the events in Nature, and you had some one to tell you how they all happened. The early Egyptians and the others saw all these things, but they had no one to tell them how they happened. They had to puzzle them out, or try to do so, for themselves.

They saw that such things were entirely beyond the power of any mere man to make to happen; therefore they attributed the happenings to some invisible power or powers immensely stronger and more gifted than themselves. And of course they were perfectly right in so doing. Only the mistake, or one of the mistakes, they made was this: they imagined each of the greatest marvels that they saw to be caused by a power which was busied with that particular marvel. {28} Thus they thought that it was one power which made the corn to grow in the spring-time, for instance; another power that caused the sun to rise in the morning, and so on. They would see the flowing of a river, with its appearance of being a live thing as it went along, now smooth, now rippling, and they would go so far as to imagine that each stream had its own particular power or god looking after it.

Or they might actually look on the marvellous thing as itself a god. The sun, for instance, which they saw to give them light and warmth and to be a very splendid object—many races thought, and not unnaturally, that the sun itself was a god, and a very great god. They saw the moon, and to some of them it seemed that the moon was a power not unlike the sun, but less strong, and so it occurred to them that perhaps the moon was a goddess and the wife of the great god the sun. But the Egyptians, unlike others, looked on the moon as a male deity. When they had gone thus far in guesses about the heavenly bodies, they did not have to go any great way farther in order to ascribe all sorts of power—less than the power of the sun or of the moon—to the other planets and stars.

And, once more, these early, unlearned men, who had no one to teach them, but had to find out everything for themselves, saw indeed that they received great good from, let us say, the warmth of the sun and the overflowing of the river, and the growing of their crops, to give them food. They could worship the power that they thought had given them all this. But then, again, they would sometimes find themselves visited by some dreadful disaster, perhaps an earthquake, or terrible pestilence, or famine when the river did not overflow in its usual way. And these evil {29} things they had to ascribe to some power very much more strong than themselves. Thence they got the idea of evil gods, or devils, as well as of the good and kind gods. The idea arose that they must do something to avert these calamities, by giving to the powers or gods who caused the calamities something that the gods would like. And since men had to think that the gods would like the things that they themselves liked, they sacrificed to them, as it was called—that is to say, gave them gifts of such things as they themselves liked best. It was rather a puzzle, perhaps, to know how to give a gift to a being who was invisible, and who would not come and take the gift away; but they solved that puzzle as best they could. They burned some of the gifts, or sacrifices, so that the solid flesh of the sacrificed creature was turned into smoke and went up into the air and disappeared. Or they poured libation of wine or of blood upon the earth, where it soaked in. So in both instances it became invisible, and therefore it might be supposed that it had been accepted by the invisible god.

And then, finally, there is this other point that I want you to notice about the speculations, or guesses, of man in his earliest ages, about the powers by which he was surrounded and which he was trying to understand—early man did not distinguish so clearly as we do between himself and the other animals. He regarded them as closely related to himself. Many of the Red Indians and other tribes even to-day believe themselves to be descended from some animal who was the founder, the first ancestor, of their tribe. Men of that tribe will on no account kill an animal of the species to which they believe that their first ancestor belonged. Thus a tribe which believes its ancestor to {30} have been a beaver, let us say, would hold all beavers sacred, would never kill one, and very likely would use the figure of a beaver as a kind of family crest. The beaver would become a kind of god to them, and when it was looked on in this way it was called the "totem" of the tribe.

I mention this idea of "totem" worship because it may have been somewhat in this way that the Egyptians came to consider as sacred such curious, and so many, animals as they did—cats, hawks, bulls, crocodiles, even beetles. I do not say that it was thus that the worship of these creatures came to prevail among the Egyptians. I do not think that there is any at all clear evidence that it came about in this way; but it may have been so, and it is rather difficult to see how else it grew.

You may have noticed that I wrote, for the heading of this chapter, "religions" in the plural, with an "s," not "religion." And this I did because the religion of the ancient Egyptians was not one. There are at least three different lines of religious thought and speculation to be traced, so tangled up together that the whole subject becomes very difficult to understand, but beyond all doubt there are these three. There is this animal worship; there is the worship of the sun and moon; and there is the worship of the two opposed and yet connected powers that bring good and evil.

The invention, the imagination, of the mind of early man was disposed to making up stories about these gods. If the stories explained the events that people saw happening, so much the better. Now there was a god, by name Osiris, who was first worshipped, as it seems, only in a town called Busiris. Near by {31} was a town called Buto, where it is thought that a goddess, to whom they gave the name of Tsis, was worshipped. For some reason which we do not know, the worship of Osiris extended until it spread over the whole of Egypt, and with it the worship of Isis, who was supposed to be the wife of Osiris. The story of Osiris and Isis was told very differently at different times and in different places. According to the Greek writer, Plutarch, the legend which he heard about them went thus: that Osiris a very long time ago reigned as a great king over all Egypt. He civilised the people and taught them arts and science. He had a wicked brother Seth, who made a conspiracy against him and killed him, and put his body into a coffin and threw it into the Nile. The wife of Osiris, Isis, after long search, found the body and brought it back. Then she went on a visit to her son, Horus, who lived at Buto; and while she was away the wicked Seth came back, found the body (mummified, as we may suppose) of Osiris, took it away and cut it up into fourteen pieces, so that Isis might never again have it as a whole body.

From that point there seem to be two versions of the story. One is that Isis, having found the fourteen pieces, buried each piece where she found it. Another is that she collected the pieces, put them all together again, and that Osiris, thus made whole again, ruled in the under-world as king of the dead.

Horus, according to one story, later attacked and slew his uncle, the wicked Seth, to avenge his father; and in this contest between the good Osiris and the bad Seth we perhaps see an attempt to account for the good and evil in the world. If that is so, the good finally triumphed in that story, because Horus, {32} the good son of the good father, killed the bad Seth.

Another story, however, says that the struggle between Horus and Seth was so equal that Egypt was divided between them, Lower Egypt going to Horus and Upper Egypt to Seth.

On the inscriptions, in the hieroglyphic, or sacred graving, to which we will come directly, Horus is represented by the figure of a falcon, Seth by that of some animal which has been variously guessed to be a jerboa or an okapi, but which looks very much as if it might be some kind of dog. It has been conjectured that the contest recorded between Horus and Seth may be a growth from wars waged between tribes represented the one by the falcon and the other by this four-footed animal of Seth's, whatever it may be.

The story, and the different shapes it takes, and the way in which the incidents get transformed so as to fit in with the incidents of quite a different story, may help you to understand something of the way in which the legends grew. They not only grew, separately, into very strange shapes, but they grew into one another, like neighbouring trees with their branches inter-tangled, so that it is very hard to distinguish them.

One thing you may have noticed in the story—that Osiris, according to one version at least, becomes king of the dead in the nether world. That means, of course, that these people so very long ago believed in the life of a man's soul after his body was dead. That is curious, is it not, seeing that they had had no revelation, so far as we know, to tell them that it was so? We may speak of that a little more, in a minute or two.

Probably you may have seen pictures of some of the {33} hieroglyphics or sacred inscriptions, and if you have you may have noticed that some of the figures have human bodies and beasts' heads.

Thus Horus is often shown with a man's body and a falcon's head. Anubis has a man's body and a jackal's head, and the like happens with many of the other animal gods. We may take it all as sign of the confusion in the minds of these early people with regard to the difference between gods and man and other animals.

The confusion of religions in Egypt is particularly great, very likely because different tribes brought in different beliefs and gods, and they grew confused with the beliefs and gods already there. Where they believed that there was such a great number of gods, it was almost necessary that the power of each god must be supposed to be restricted to a certain place. Otherwise the fighting between them for mastery would be endless. We have seen, however, how, as time went on, the idea grew of Osiris as a god universal throughout Egypt. That was a long step forward in the direction of belief in a single god, ruler and maker of all the universe. And yet then a further confusion arose, which led a step farther again in the same right direction, when Osiris began to be identified with—that is to say, to be considered the same as—the Sun-god, whom they called Re or Ra.

They had very many and various stories and fancies about this great god Re, the Sun—that at dawn he began to sail across the sky in a boat called the boat of the dawn, and again, at night, that he got into another boat, the boat of the dark, and sailed along underneath the earth all night to catch his morning boat again. Another story was that he was born a baby in the dawn, {34} grew to his full manly strength at midday, and then declined again into an old man, dying at night. Stories of the same sort were invented to account for the apparent movements of the moon and stars and other planets. Of course they had no knowledge of the earth turning on its own axis, or travelling round the sun.

It seems curious enough that Osiris should be at one time identified with the sun, the god of the heavens, and yet be the ruler of the under-world, where the souls of dead men and women went after death. Perhaps it seems less curious when we remember that the sun himself was supposed to sail nightly underneath the earth. But it is quite impossible for us to have any clear idea of how they reasoned about these things, partly because the accounts we have of it are all very vague and given to us only by the records of the inscriptions which survive, and by travellers, like the Greek Herodotus, to whom the priests would not tell a great deal, and partly because the ideas of the people even who held those beliefs must have been very far from clear.

We know that they worshipped a great number of gods, and different gods in different places. The bull, Apis, was a sacred animal which was worshipped especially at Memphis, the capital of Lower Egypt. Bast was the cat goddess, worshipped principally at Bubastis, where thousands of mummied bodies of cats have been found. Horus, the falcon; Seth, an animal not quite clearly identified; and Anubis, the jackal, I have mentioned already. And they worshipped the crocodile, the serpent, the ram, and many other creatures, but especially the sacred beetle, the scarabæus, in whose likeness those "scarabs" which we have in great numbers from Egypt, were made. {35} Very often the "scarabs," in stone or glazed pottery, were engraved with the crests of the kings and used as seals.

There were a very great many priests. Every town seems to have had its temple to one or other of the many gods, and there were priests attached to every temple. But all the priests were not only priests and nothing else. I mean, that they might do other business as well; rather as if a clergyman here were to be a tradesman or a lawyer as well as doing his work in the Church. Sometimes the principal priest would be the great man of the district, the chief land-owner. But where religions were so many and so different, the customs must have differed very much too.

During the course of the eighteenth dynasty, with which the new empire and the great power of Egypt began, one of the kings tried to do away with all these different religions and to extend the worship of Osiris, identified with Ra, the Sun-god, over the whole of Egypt. And he succeeded; but his success was only for a time, and after a short period the Egyptians went back to the worship of their many gods again.

It was very important, in the opinion of the Egyptians, that the gods at each place, and of each kind, should be worshipped with the exactly right ceremonies. If the ceremonies were not rightly performed the god might be angry and bring all kinds of calamities upon you. It seemed to them far more important that these rites should be properly performed than that those who performed them should lead very good lives. They had their laws and their customs which regulated their conduct, but they do not seem to have feared that the gods would visit them with punishment in {36} this life for any wrong-doing. They did, however, consider that any acts of injustice, such as robbery or dishonesty, would affect the state of their soul after death. That would be the business of Osiris, the ruler of the dead, to look after. We will speak of that in a minute.

The priests were the people who knew exactly how the worship of the gods at each place should be performed. They could read the religious instructions which were written in what is called the hieroglyphic—the sacred engravings. The hieroglyphic was probably the beginning of all writing.

If you can imagine a time when writing was unknown, and when there was need to send communications from one to another, and that these communications must not be known to the bearer of the message, how would you set about doing it?

Well, one way, at least, of doing it would be by sending signs marked on papyrus or parchment or on a slate, or whatever you might have convenient for making marks on, and to hope that the man you were sending them to would be clever enough to understand what you meant, and that the man by whom you were sending them would not. And if you wanted to send a message about any particular thing, the most easy and obvious way to begin would be by making a simple drawing of that thing. So, if you wanted to send a message about a bird, you would draw the figure, or outline, of a bird. If you wanted to send a message about an eye, a human eye, you might draw the figure of an eye. I suggest these two things because they are two of the most simple figures that actually do appear in the picture-writing which is the old Egyptian hieroglyphic.

Now we can go a step farther. The eye is the thing that we see with. Therefore, if we want to send a message to our friend and tell him that we "see a bird," if we put the picture of an eye, which is the organ of sight, and a bird next to it, our friend, if he is at all intelligent, may understand the message to mean "I see a bird."

That, or something like that, may have been—I do not say that it was, but I think it most likely—the way in which this picture-writing began. I ought not to call it picture-writing, really, for it was not that. Hieros is Greek for sacred, or for a priest; glyphein is Greek for to grave, or engrave. So hieroglyphic meant sacred characters engraved; that is, cut in on stone. The word for the sacred writing was hieratic, meaning simply sacred, without the meaning of engraving. The hieratic was written on papyrus. It was derived from the hieroglyphic, the hieroglyphic being the older, but it was not quite the same because the pictures, so to call them, had become a good deal simplified so that they could be drawn much more quickly. The figures were not so carefully made, and certain signs, sometimes not very like the original figures, came to be understood as representing these figures.

That was one alteration from the hieroglyphic that was made, as time went on; and then there came another, further change, still in the direction of making simpler and simpler signs in place of the original figures; and when this third kind of writing had established itself it seems to have been found the easiest of the three and best suited for everyday use. It was called "Demotic," from "demos," meaning the populace, whence we get our "democracy" and {38} the like words. "Demotic," then, meant that it was the writing of the common people, of the nation at large, as contrasted with the "hieratic," which was the writing used and known by the priests.

All the old religious writings and the instructions about the ceremonies to be performed at the worship of the various gods were, of course, in the sacred writing. And when the priests added to them they were careful to do it in their own sacred script. And so, by knowing this script, or writing, which the others did not, they grew to have a knowledge of their own, which they kept rather jealously to themselves. It gave them all the greater importance. And their importance and power were very great.

They were distinguished from the rest of the people, probably on all occasions, and certainly on the occasions of performing the religious rites, by a peculiar costume. The costume in which we see the common people figured in the earliest engravings is extremely simple. The climate was warm and they did not require much covering. The dress consists simply in a cloth wound around the loins and passing between the legs, just as the most savage peoples in the world to-day wear the loin-cloth.

A little later we find the engravings showing us the cloth lengthening downward, perhaps as far as the knees, or even a little lower in the female costume, but the upper part of the body was generally bare in both sexes. Linen woven from the flax, for the art of weaving was very early known, was the light material of which this costume was made.

And then we find them wearing something not unlike a night-gown to-day, rather open at the neck, and without sleeves. Another variety of the linen {39} dress was as if it were a night-gown with the front closed up to the neck, but all the right shoulder and sleeve taken out of it, so that the left shoulder was covered, but the right arm and shoulder were left all free.

That was the kind of dress of the common people. At first we see them bare-foot. Gradually they took more and more to sandals, and there are pictures of great men going along bare-foot, but followed by a servant carrying their sandals—perhaps to put on when they came to rough ground. But it is also likely that the wearing of the sandals had a meaning in a religious rite which they might be going to perform.

The head was at first always uncovered; but we see at one time a fillet, or simple band for the hair, beginning to be worn; then we come to a curious low cap, and next to a high, almost mitre-like cap, and finally to a variety of headgear. The hair and the beard are sometimes elaborately curled; but as a rule the Egyptians were clean-shaven. The beard, however, was recognised as so important in some of the religious ceremonies that it is said that a false beard was sometimes worn on these sacred occasions. It is rather like the wearing of wigs by our judges and barristers in Court.

At the beginning of the great eighteenth dynasty, we find the longer gowns, which are like our night-gowns, worn more and more, and the priestly garments and those of the great men becoming more and more rich and long. Likely enough this change was due to the closer intercourse which the Egyptians now began to have with the Eastern Empire, where the longer and richer garments were commonly worn.

But, after all, when you hear or read the words Ancient Egypt, what, at first, do you begin to think of? I know what ideas the words first suggest to me—pyramids and mummies. They are both so extraordinary and unlike what we find in other countries. And they both have rather the same meaning at the back of them, namely, that the Egyptians paid a very great respect to the bodies of the dead. For the mummifying was, of course, to preserve the body, and the pyramids were only one form of the immense and immensely expensive tombs which they built for the mummies to be laid in.

And I do not want you to be misled by something that I wrote a few pages back about the Egyptians not supposing that the favour of the gods was to be won by good behaviour, but rather by very exact ritual and ceremonies. That is true, but I also said then that they did think that the behaviour of a person while alive made a great difference to his future after death.

That is a fact that we may be quite certain of. There is a very famous old Egyptian book, called The Book of the Dead, illustrated with pictures showing all that happened, after his death, to a certain illustrious Egyptian; how he passed through several gates, each guarded by its own horrible demons, how he arrived at the great judgment-seat at last, and how there his good deeds in this life were weighed against his bad, and the good were found to be more than the bad, so that he was allowed to go on to a place in which it hardly seems as if he was likely to be very, very happy, but at least it was far better fortune for him than if he had been found guilty and been given to the tormentor. The tormentor is shown in many of {41} the pictures waiting for him. He is a terrible creature, with teeth and claws.

The inner walls of some of the pyramids are covered with texts describing events of this kind in the after-death life of kings. Some are of such antiquity that they go back before the uniting into one of the two kingdoms by Menes; and even in those far-away times the instructions were lengthy and very precise about the kind of food and drink, and means of protection from evil things, that should be buried with the king for his use in the after-life. They had much the same thoughts as we have about the difference between good conduct and bad. One of the evil acts which would most certainly condemn the doer to punishment after death was oppression of the poor. Even as long ago as that it was accounted a virtue to be kindly and generous to those who had been less fortunate than yourself. It seems probable they were a kindly, rather gentle people, inclined to peace and arts rather than to war, but compelled to be in a constant state of defence against the incursions of enemies who lived in less fertile lands. In the course of such defence and resistance many prisoners would be taken. The prisoners would be retained alive, as valuable slaves. It does not follow that because they were slaves they would be ill-treated. A kind master would treat a slave well out of kindness; and a sensible master, even if he were not kind of heart, would treat a slave well because the better a slave, like a horse, was fed and cared for, the more work could be got out of him.

And that brings us again to the pyramids and the other great tombs of the kings and temples of the gods; for it is very certain that but for "slave labour," as it is called, the building of the pyramids would have {42} been an impossibility. As it is, with all allowance made for the multitude of the labourers and the cheapness of their food and of the material for the building, the pyramids remain perhaps the greatest wonder of man's making in all the world, especially when we consider their age and the small engineering appliances that the builders had for their making. How they dealt with the huge blocks of stone is a marvel.

You probably know, roughly, the shape of a pyramid. The largest now standing is the Great Pyramid, or the Pyramid of Cheops, near Gizeh. Its base, or lowest and largest part, covers 13 acres, and its top is 150 feet higher than the top of St. Paul's Cathedral. A space of 13 acres measures about 250 yards each way and well over half a mile round. Ask somebody to show you a piece of ground, near where you live, that is about the size of 13 acres. Then remember that 150 feet is 50 yards, or more than the length of two cricket pitches, and imagine St. Paul's dome all that higher. With that idea for the height, and with an idea of the size of the piece of ground for the size of the base, you may perhaps form some kind of idea of the immense appearance of this pyramid rising out of the desert in the clear Egyptian air. And the purpose of all this vast construction is to make a covering over two little burial chambers in the middle of it all, in which were laid, thousands of years ago, the mummied bodies of King Cheops and of the queen who was his wife.

This is certainly the biggest pyramid now standing, and probably the largest ever built; but there are many pyramids to which reference is made in the inscriptions or writings which have entirely disappeared. Probably their materials have been used for other {43} buildings, and sand-storms from the desert have helped to cover their foundations.

A temple, in which the pious people might worship, was often connected with the pyramid. When this was so, the temple always seems to have been placed to the east of the burial pyramid, so that the worshippers should look towards the body and to the west. It was towards the west of the burial chamber that a passage was made, with a door of exit for the soul to go out into the under-world. We have to remember that even in life the Egyptian king was regarded as a kind of god. It is difficult for us to find our way back into the thoughts of these ancient people, who saw far less difference than we know that we are obliged to see between the human nature and the divine; but we must try to get back into their thoughts, if we want to understand them.

And this, and a great deal more that I have written in this chapter and in the one before, is true not of the early Egyptians only, but of early man all the world over. I shall not keep you nearly so long in my description of what went on in the old days along the Euphrates and Tigris and elsewhere, because a good deal of what I am telling you now about these old Egyptians applies to dwellers in those other places.

Some of the inscriptions speak of the important part which a priest accompanying the spirit in the under-world played in getting the spirit through the various demon-guarded doors and arguing his case, as a barrister might, before the judge. I say spirit, but in the pictures the body is shown, very substantially. Of course it was all the more to the priests' advantage to prove how useful they could be in the after-life, as well as in this.

The mummies, as you must know, were dead bodies preserved by putting chemicals into them and over them, and wrapping them round, and often by painting their faces, and giving them altogether an appearance which to us, discovering them after all these years, seems rather dreadful, but no doubt was much admired. We have no record of the time when the Egyptians began thus to "mummy" their dead; we may almost say that we have no record of a time when they did not do so. There were mummies long before Menes, whose date, you may remember, has been guessed so early as 5500 years B.C. and so late as 3300 B.C. At first it seems as if only kings were mummied. The kings were always looked on as semi-divine, and later the people began to regard the king as being almost identical with—almost the same as—Osiris. It is as if they thought that the god came down in spirit to live in the body of the reigning king.

Later on in the story, many great people, as well as the kings, were mummied, and yet later again it became quite common with all classes. Sacred animals, such as the cats in Bubastis, hawks in the temples of Horus, and even crocodiles and quite large creatures, have been found, mummied, in great numbers. The art and trade {45} of making mummies was a very important one, and grew to greater perfection as the artists began to learn more of the preserving power of chemicals. Generally, they are the mummies of royal personages that have come down to us in the best preservation, no doubt because the greatest care and expense were given to their embalming. One of the best is of that famous king Tethmosis III. who was the greatest hero of that greatest eighteenth dynasty up, or down, to which we have now brought our story.

I have said, and you will be ready to agree with it, that all this care for the dead body shows what high value the Egyptians placed on the corpse, although life and the soul had left it. But they had the idea that the soul could be brought back again, by incantations, to go into the body again through the mouth, and so make the mouth and the legs and other parts move, almost as they did before death. That idea explains perhaps why they took so much pains about keeping the body perfect. It may explain why the wicked Seth, in his malice, cut up the body of Osiris, whom he had murdered, and scattered the pieces in fourteen different places, and also why the faithful Isis collected them and put them all together again.

The Egyptians, like other ancient people and like many savage races to-day, believed that a man possessed and had in his body, but capable of separation from it, two souls, or spirits, and perhaps more, and though that is an idea so very different from ours it is not very difficult for us to understand a way in which it might have come into their minds.

It has been thought likely by many who have given much learned and deep attention to the subject, that the idea arose from what people saw in dreams. {46} They would know, perhaps, that a friend of theirs had gone away on a journey, yet they might go to sleep, and see, in a dream, the friend beside them. What were they likely to think? They had not our knowledge about dreams, and did not know that all that they saw in them came from their own fancy. They would be very likely to think, then, that their friend, in his soul or spirit with something that looked like his body, really had come and had stood beside them, although what we should call his real self was far away. They would say, then, that he had a second self, or spirit, which could be in one place and doing one thing while his other self was in another place and doing quite a different thing. Thus they might get the idea of one kind of soul and body which would be different from the man whom they actually saw and spoke to when they were awake.

And then, when a friend had died, had gone through that great change which we call death, they would often, still in dreams, see him again, as he had been in life, though they knew that his body had not moved from the place where it had been buried. Other friends might be able to assure them as to this. Therefore they might say, "Here is another self or spirit of my friend, who is dead, which I saw come and do this or that. It is the soul not of a living man, but of a dead man." Thus the idea might arise of a second soul different from that which was seen while the friend was alive.

You must understand that I am not saying that it certainly was thus that the idea of more than one soul arose; but it may have been in this way. It is a way in which we can easily see that it might have come into their minds.

Many of the old writings and inscriptions give instructions about the prayers and ceremonies and forms of words to be used for bringing back the soul into the dead body, and these, of course, were best understood by the priests. This, again, helped to make the priests very important persons. The greatest people in the land performed the priests' duties; and some of what we may call professed priests, those whose whole business was the performance of these rites and ceremonies, became the greatest people. Also some of these very same people acted as judges and decided points of law, and gave punishments for the breaking of the laws. You may realise, then, how extensive their power was.

We do not know a great deal about their laws, but it is singular that all we do know shows that they had very much the same ideas as to what was right or wrong as we have. The king issued decrees. We find decrees against the oppression of the poor by the large landowners. Crime was punished by death, by fines, by mutilation, such as by cutting off the nose or by the infliction of other wounds, and by banishment out of the kingdom. They had their codes of laws, for they are referred to in inscriptions, but the codes themselves have not been found.

I do not know whether this short account will help you to get a picture into your minds of the life of the ancient Egyptians. A large part of the picture should be filled by the religious ceremonies, by the worship of the gods and by the offerings which had to be made, at stated times, to the souls of dead relations. The power and the number of the priesthood became so great as to rival that of the king, and actually one of the ruling dynasties was set up by the priest class itself.

So now, with that picture, such as I have been able to set it before your minds, of the people living along the Nile, let us go eastward and see what was being done all that while along the courses of the Tigris and Euphrates.

CHAPTER IV

BABYLONIA.

If you will look at the map once more you will see that the Euphrates and the Tigris draw together near their outgoing into the Persian Gulf and flow together as one stream. It was not always so, however. At the earliest times of which we have any knowledge at all the sea stretched up northward into the land to a point at which the two rivers ran in separate channels, so that each went out by its own mouth into the gulf.

I told you that I did not mean to make this story about the eastern rivers nearly as long as that about the Nile. There are two reasons for this. In the first place there is not so much to tell. The records are not so many nor so full. The cause of that is plain. Egypt is a land well furnished with hard stone, granite, and the like. In the land which we will call Babylonia there is very little stone. Therefore the builders built with brick. The inscriptions were engraven on brick. And brick is not so long lasting a material as stone. It does not take the mark of the graving tool as sharply at the first cutting, and it is more liable to wear away in the course of years. Moreover, the climate of Egypt, in its upper part at least, is so dry that it is probably the best preserving climate in the world—the climate in which inscriptions on stone or papyrus would last and keep fresh longer than in any other. For these {50} reasons we have more records from Egypt than from Babylonia.

But that is only a part, and the smaller part, of the whole reason why this story that we are telling now may be told more shortly. The larger reason is that a good deal of it has been told already in the Egyptian story. There is no need for me to go back and re-tell you the history of these Babylonians living through their ages of stone weapons, bronze weapons, and iron weapons, and through their hunting stage, their flock-keeping stage, and their agricultural stage; there is no need to tell this, for it was told to you about the Egyptians, and it is the story common to all mankind as they lived and worked their way up from the most primitive conditions to civilisation.

You must please take all that for granted, as being true of the Babylonians as of the rest of the world. You may imagine, too, that the same puzzles beset them as beset the Egyptians when they began to wonder how things, including themselves, had happened—how the world had come into being and what the sun, moon, and stars were, and so on. They, like the Egyptians, wondered about the invisible forces by which they found themselves surrounded and more or less controlled. They made rather different answers to the puzzles, but the puzzles were the same.

And so a great deal of the life-story of the Egyptians, of their way of living and so on, may be considered to be the way that the Babylonians followed also. What will perhaps bring the life of the Babylonians most clearly before your eyes will be to see, so far as we can, the chief differences between their lives and the lives of those old Egyptians.

Both nations lived along river-courses—we have {51} seen that. And both were very dependent on the overflow of the rivers for the fertilisation of their fields and for the growth of their crops. But, though this was in a measure true of both, the dependence of the Egyptians on the overflow of the Nile was much more complete {52} than the dependence of these others on the overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris. Those rivers were not so punctual in the date of the overflow, and the difference between their lowest and highest flow was not so great as in the Nile. Both countries, however, depended largely on irrigation, that is to say, on leading the water by canals from the main rivers to the fields where it was wanted. Egypt, even when it had more trees than it has now, had probably less rainfall than Babylonia; but in both countries the rivers were the sources and givers of their food supply.

We have seen the Egyptians living along a river which went down between desert country, barren country, on either side. The country on either side the courses of the Euphrates and Tigris was not nearly so barren and desert as that which lay about the Nile.

But now it becomes necessary to look at the map again. If you will do so you will see just how this Babylonia is situated in relation to the countries round about it. I speak of it as Babylonia, and speak of the "other countries," but you are not to suppose that even at the latest date to which we have brought down the story at present men had at all the same distinct idea that we have now about where one country ended and another began. You may have heard of "boundary commissions," meaning committees of men appointed to trace out the boundary line between two countries. The nations we are speaking of had no boundary commissions: they had no clear idea of boundaries, or of one nation having a right to live and to bear rule up to a certain point or line and no farther. It was all very shifting, and one nation took from another what it could get.

The shifting perhaps did not matter so much in {53} those days, because people had not learnt to look on their homes as very settled, or lasting. A good many of those among whom the story is to take us now were, if not dwellers in tents themselves, at least the descendants of those who had dwelt in tents only a generation or two before.

But a look at the map will show you that this country, which we may call, in a general way of speaking, Babylonia, had its bounds, its limits, though it was not nearly as closely limited as Egypt was between the deserts. Babylonia, you will see, has the Mediterranean Sea on its west, but with Palestine and Syria between itself and that sea. On the south there is the Persian Gulf; and Arabia, which is largely desert and barren, also lies to the south and south-west. On the north, away up towards the sources of the great rivers, is a wild mountainous region whence, as we shall see, wild, fierce people were apt to come down to harass the dwellers in the rich plain.

So, on these three sides we find Babylonia bounded, though the boundaries are large as compared with the narrow boundaries of the people along the Nile; but on the fourth, the eastern side, away towards Persia and the heart of Asia, there seems no limit whatever, either of mountain or of desert or of sea. The possibilities of peoples coming in by that way seem without any limit. In this respect, then, the situations of the two ancient empires of the world were very different.

I am speaking of all this country as Babylonia, and it may occur to you to wonder at that because you will have heard so much from your Bibles of the Assyrians coming upon Palestine from this very country round about the Euphrates. And so they {54} did; and at one period in the story the Assyrians became so powerful that they took possession of all this land, and just at that time it would be more correct to call the land Assyria instead of Babylonia. But this was for a period only. At the beginning of our knowledge of this region Assyria was only a province, a northern province, of Babylonia, and was ruled from Babylon. But the Assyrians became very strong and revolted, and conquered those who had been their masters, and it was during this victorious period that they made those incursions into Palestine of which the Bible tells us. But at length the Babylonians, their old masters, rose up against them and got the mastery over them again, and after this blaze of glory Assyria sinks back into its old place as a province of Babylon, in the northern part of the empire.

Now who were they, where did they come from—the earliest of the people whom we find to have lived in Babylonia? We do not quite know that. What it is quite useful to note, however, is that we do seem to know who they were not. They were not Semites—not a Semitic people. It is useful to know they were not this, because Semitic is just what most of the people whom we now meet in the human story were.

The name comes from Shem, the name of one of the sons of Noah in the book of Genesis; and the so-called Semites appear, coming into the story of mankind, out of Arabia, that strange desert country. They came up thence into Babylonia, and in Babylonia, when they came to it, there was already a people with a high civilisation, as we know by evidences that have been found. It was different from the civilisation of the Semitic people. The name given to that earlier people and that earlier civilisation is Sumerian, and I {55} really do not think you need trouble to inquire precisely what is meant by that, for even the most learned have very little to tell us about it. It had to have a name. Let us call it Sumerian, and say it was different from the Semitic, probably older, and so leave it.

It is a curious thing about these Semites, who at a very early date came in and took possession of all Babylonia, that though they apparently came from Arabia and the south, they made their first appearance in history in the north of Babylonia. How that happened we cannot tell. Perhaps some records of a southern invasion have been lost. Or they may have skirted round on the eastern side. It is all guess-work. They appeared in the north, and they quickly overran the country—not only of Babylonia, but of Palestine and of Syria also—except, it may be, a strip of Syria along the Mediterranean shore which is called on the map Phœnicia. That is an exception which you will do well to bear in mind. It is important, because these Phœnicians belonged to one of the greatest civilisations of the old world, and because they too were great makers of history, as you shall see before very long.

On their western border, therefore, the people of the powerful empire which began to be formed along the Tigris and Euphrates had tribes very closely akin to themselves. On the east and on the north they had neighbours of a different race from their own. It seems to have been in the south of Babylonia, near the outgoing of the great rivers, that the first capital of the empire was formed. Probably this southern Babylonia is that "Ur of the Chaldees" from which we are told that Abraham came and established himself in Palestine. He came, as we see, living with {56} his family and his dependants in tents, with flocks and herds, easily moving on from one place to another when the sheep or oxen had eaten the grass or when water failed. He was the patriarch (pater=father, and arch=ruler), the father-ruler of the small tribe or large family that came with him. In your history books you will sometimes read that "society was in the patriarchal stage." That means that the people of whom the historian is writing were living in the way in which Abraham and his dependent people lived; and we may be sure that it was the way of life of the greater number of those Semites who came up from Arabia and took possession of Syria and Palestine at a very early date. They took possession of the country of Babylonia also, and as they settled along the fertile river-banks we may imagine that they would begin to unite together into a nation and become strong, with a feeling of union, in a way that it was not at all likely that the small tribes of patriarchs and their families, moving about with their flocks and herds, would unite. So the Babylonians and the Syrians and the dwellers in Palestine would easily fall into the way of regarding each other as of different nations, although really they were of the same race.

There would be this difference, then: the settlers along the rivers really would begin to lead settled lives, like the people who tilled the soil in Egypt, but beyond those limits there would be wanderers, with their cattle—wanderers for the most part of the same race as the settlers, but growing more and more distinct and divided from them in manners and feelings as time went on and they lived such different lives.

I spoke of these Babylonians having just the same puzzles presented to their minds by what we call "the {57} forces of Nature" as the Egyptians had, but said that they answered them a little differently. The Egyptians, as we saw, tried three different kinds of answer. They made a great god of the sun, they made a great god of Osiris, who was originally just the god of one place (like many others), and they made gods of all sorts of animals. Now, trying to understand the religion of the ancient Babylonians, we may rule out entirely all idea of animal worship—that is to say, the third kind of answer which the Egyptians made to their puzzles. It does not seem to have been thought of by the Babylonians at all. Let us forget those sacred cats and crocodiles of the Nile.

And then, having cast them aside, we may see a very remarkable likeness between the other guesses that the two peoples made, and the way in which they tried to work the different guesses in with one another. For you may remember that the Egyptians, after forming the idea of Ra, the sun-god—a god that had his eye over all the world—and after imagining Osiris to be so powerful as to rule divinely over all Egypt: after they had thus exalted these two gods at the expense of all the others, they then began to regard the two as one—the one being but one form of the other—Osiris, as Ra, traversing the heavens, and Ra, as Osiris, ruling the earth. And since Ra, the Sun, was supposed to go under the earth at night, in order to get back to the east to begin his journey across the sky again the next morning, there was no great difficulty in imagining him, again as Osiris, ruling over the dead in the under-world also.

And now, in Babylonia, we find that almost exactly the same thing happened. Shamash was their name for the sun-god, the Egyptians' Ra. Then there was a {58} god whom they called Merodach, or Marduk: he was the god of Babylon. But Babylon was not always a great city. The earliest capital city was south of Babylon. So Marduk was only as one god among many. But then, as Babylon grew and became the great centre, Marduk came to be regarded as the great god of all the country, exactly as had happened with Osiris in Egypt. And then, again just as in Egypt, they began to look on Shamash and on Marduk as two forms of one and the same great deity. Thus, it is wonderful how like each other were the guesses at truth in the two empires. Bel-Merodach, as he was sometimes called (Bel or Baal means Lord), became of such immense importance that the king was never considered to be properly appointed as ruler until he had been received by Merodach at Babylon, in the god's great temple there. The Assyrian kings, whose capital was Nineveh, in the north of Babylonia, when they had conquered their former masters of Babylon, still came to Babylon and paid their homage to the Babylonian god.

But, again as in Egypt, there were a number of other gods besides Marduk, in other places, whose authority was considered very powerful just in these places; and there were other heavenly bodies besides Shamash, the sun, that had worship. There was Sin, the moon, and especially there was Ishtar, the planet Venus, the Ashtaroth that you read of in the Bible. Ishtar was goddess of the spring and of all the life-giving forces in Nature.

And in Babylonia, as in Egypt, there were immense numbers of priests, and their power was great. They were occupied in the ceremonies to the gods, and in care of the temples, and a great part of their time was {59} taken up in watching the stars and planets. They saw that many of the happenings on earth depended on the heavenly bodies—the sun made the seed grow in the damp warm earth; perhaps they knew that the moon affected the tides. At all events they saw that certain events on earth happened at the same time as certain other events in the heavens; so they grew to think that the earthly happenings were caused by the changes of the planets in the sky far more than they are.

But this mistaken idea about the influence of the stars on the earth had the excellent effect that it made these old Babylonian priests to be great star-gazers. They were great astronomers, and in spite of their errors made great steps in knowledge. And because you can go very little way in astronomy without mathematics, they became mathematicians too. We owe a great deal to what these wise men of the East, watching the stars so long ago, found out for us.

Some of the Babylonians also believed in fearful demons and powers of evil, and it seems as if they imagined their gods to take much more notice of their behaviour, their good and bad conduct, than the Egyptians' gods were supposed to take. We saw that the Egyptian idea was that so long as they performed all the religious rites exactly, that was all that the gods cared about. But the Babylonians thought that their gods did interest themselves a great deal about the right or wrong conduct of the men over whom they ruled, and punished or rewarded them in this life accordingly.

And through all this that I am telling you about the religion of the early Babylonians, I want you to bear in mind that Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation, came from "Ur of the Chaldees," that is, from the south of Babylonia. That means that he {60} came carrying with him beliefs and customs that he and his clan (if I may call it so) had learnt in Babylonia. Telling you these Babylonian beliefs, I am really telling you the origins of the beliefs which have come down to us through the Israelites. That is what makes their story so particularly interesting for us.

The Babylonians, then, had an idea of a deity who punished their wrong-doing by sending them illnesses and famine and so on. The Egyptians had not this idea nearly so clearly, but they had the idea that the man who did well in this life would have his reward in the life after death. The Babylonians did not have this idea of the life after death; we find, at least, no reason to think that they had it. Abraham, therefore, came from Ur without this belief in a life after death. It was only at a far later period—possibly, though by no means certainly, as something they learned from the Egyptians—that the belief in a future life came to the Jews and Israelites.

But although Abraham brought traditions from Ur, so soon as we are allowed to know anything about the beliefs held by him and his people we find them to be very much more pure and free from superstitions than the Babylonian ones. The Babylonian idea of the creation was that there was at first a great dragon of prodigious size. Merodach, the chief of the gods, identified with the sun, then fought the dragon, killed him, cut him in two; of one half of his body made the firmament of heaven, of the other half made the earth. Then in the heavens, as stars, he set the lesser gods, with the moon. The moon ruled the night and regulated the division of the year into months (moon-eths). Mona is the old Anglo-Saxon word for moon.

This account is inscribed on tablets, and so much is {61} readable, but there is much more which has crumbled away so that it cannot be read. The account of the Creation given in Genesis is, of course, free of all this fantastic account of the fight with the dragon.

There are other Babylonian tablets which give an account of the Flood, but here again we find the idea that it is sent not by one great god, but by several gods, working together. Over them all seems to be the sun-god, here called Shamash, who is in Heaven. The flood is so dreadful that it compels the lesser gods living on the earth to fly to Heaven for refuge. There Ishtar (Venus), taking pity on mankind, prays Shamash to stop the flood, and he consents to do so. One of the earth gods had warned a certain man, named Ut-napistim, that the flood was coming, and advised him to make a ship to save himself from it. So Ut-napistim built the ship, made it water-tight with pitch, put in it his family, pairs of all the animals, workmen and a pilot, and so they floated for seven days until the ship came to ground on a mountain to the east of the Tigris. Then, apparently after another seven days, Ut-napistim sent out first a dove, then a swallow, then a raven. The first two came back, but the last did not, from which Ut-napistim concluded that the raven had found dry ground somewhere.

You will see how like this is to the story of Noah and the Ark in the Bible, and almost certainly it was with some such tradition as this in their minds that Abraham and his people came from Ur.

It is my purpose, in this story of mankind around the Mediterranean, to bother you as little as possible with names, either of persons or of places, and as little as possible with dates, because the more we have of them, the more difficult it becomes to remember those {62} that are really important. For the years very far back it is impossible to fix the dates at all exactly. What is important is to know in what order the great events in the story happened.

The date at which Abraham came out of Ur and settled in the southern part of what was afterwards called Judah has been determined by scholars to have been about 2250 or 2300 B.C. You will remember that the date to which we brought down the Egyptian story was about 1500 B.C. So Abraham came to Palestine about 750 years earlier than that.

Abraham's date is more or less fixed by the evidence of what is by far the most famous code of ancient laws and customs that has come down to us, far beyond anything of the kind that has been found in Egypt, the code of Khammurabi. Khammurabi was king of Babylon, and it is considered nearly sure that it is he who is meant by "Amraphel, king of Shinar" mentioned in Genesis. He lived at the same time as Abraham.

Now, this code, or list, of laws engraved on tablets is most interesting to us not only because it is ancient, but also because it is so very modern. I mean that although these laws were made so very long ago, they are laws which we could very nearly accept as suitable for us to live under to-day. Our lives would be very little altered if we were to try to lead them according to those laws instead of according to the laws under which we actually do live.

If Khammurabi, in 2250 B.C., had these laws engraven, we may be nearly sure that they were the laws by which the country was governed many years before that. How long before, we cannot tell. Tablets on which some of them were recorded were found in {63} what has been called the library (though I do not suppose that there were exactly what we should call books in it, and the name "library" comes from liber, a book)—collected by a certain great king of Assyria, Assurbanipal or Sardanapalus, by name, who reigned in Nineveh, which was the capital of Assyria, about 700 B.C. or a little later. A great many similar records and tablets collected by this king have been found. But a far more complete list of the laws was found later at Susa, a city which was afterwards called Persepolis.

Not only are the laws themselves such as we might make and use, but they seem to show that there existed in Babylon at that far-away time a society and a kind of life not at all unlike ours. There were doctors, lawyers and merchants, and the fees of the doctors and the ways in which the merchants were to carry on their trade were fixed by the laws. It is clear that there were a great many slaves employed—that is a difference, of course, from our society. The punishments for law-breaking were more severe than ours. Murder is the only crime which we now punish with death. In Khammurabi's code, burglary and stealing are punished by death; so is any attempt to induce witnesses in a case at law to give false witness; and there are numerous other offences for which death was the punishment in Babylon, but for which we should make the offender pay a fine or go to prison for a while. But we have to remember that it is not so very many years ago even in this country since a man could be hanged for forgery or for stealing a sheep. The laws of Khammurabi are not more severe than ours were not much more than a hundred years ago.

When there were serfs in England, labourers almost {64} in a state of slavery, English law made a great distinction between them and freemen. An offence against the laws, if committed by a serf, was very much more heavily punished than the same offence committed by a freeman. And we find exactly the same distinction made in this ancient code; the slave suffers far more heavily than the freeman.

Some of the laws show the importance of the canals for watering the land, and each owner of land beside a canal was made responsible for the canal bank which ran through or beside his property. If he let it fall into bad repair, and the water, overflowing, damaged his neighbour's land or drowned his sheep, he had to make good the loss caused to his neighbour.

The law of "a tooth for a tooth" and "an eye for an eye" which we find in the Bible, in the book of Exodus, we find here too. If you knocked out a man's eye in a fight, you would have to submit to having an eye of your own knocked out. If you knocked out a tooth, a tooth of yours would be knocked out.

Susa, where the full code of Khammurabi was found, was the capital of the kingdom of a people called Elamites, of whom you hear in the Bible. Elam lay on the eastern, the Persian, side of Babylonia, and the Elamites gave continual trouble to the Babylonian conquerors. The code is cut on a great block of black stone eight feet high. It is in forty-four columns and consists of no less than 3654 lines—a lengthy document. And at the top of it there is cut the figure of King Khammurabi receiving the tablets of the law from Shamash, the great sun-god. It must remind us of Moses receiving the tablets with the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.

There can be little doubt that these laws, more or {65} less as they are graven on this stone, were those under which the greater number of the Semitic tribes lived which inhabited Syria and Palestine. Among these tribes were the Jews. For this reason we may imagine that when the Babylonians made attacks upon them and reduced them, as they did from time to time, to submission, their own laws and customs were not much altered. They had to pay tribute, perhaps, and their homes were broken up, and some of them, like the Jews, were taken away into Babylonia, but they went among a people not altogether different from themselves either in nationality or in their ways of living.

And just as we are surprised by the advanced state of civilisation which these old laws show us, so we have to be no less astonished by the fine works of art which they made. Stone, as we have said, was rare in Babylonia; therefore they looked on it as precious, and kept it for engraving. Some of the cut stones of very early date are finely finished. In the Louvre in Paris there is a splendidly worked Babylonian vase with a hunting scene of lions upon it, and it is thought to have been made long before the time of this Khammurabi, whose code we have been speaking of. There were lions in this country then, though there are none now. You may remember many references to lions in the Bible.

We know, then, that the Babylonians had their artists and their workers in gold. Probably the gold came to them either through Egypt or across the Red Sea from Nubia and Africa farther south; Babylonia had no gold. Some, however, may have come from the East. They made ornaments of the gold and of the cut stones, and their costume would seem to have been like that of the Egyptians, but with more flowing {66} skirts. We have seen that the Egyptians, just about the time that they began to know more of the Babylonians, that is a little before 1500 B.C., began to lengthen their skirts also. Probably the dresses of the Babylonians were more rich in ornament than the Egyptian. With both, as with the dwellers in all the warm climates of the world, there can be little doubt that the dress was a natural development from the cloth round the loins—the skirts lengthened downwards and some species of jacket drawn on over the upper part of the body. Or a long robe of light material, which I have likened to a nightgown, was put on over the shoulders and hung down to the ankles, perhaps, so that it did for both skirt and jacket in one. To this it would be very easy and natural to add a girdle or sash, to tie it in round the waist and prevent its flapping in too inconvenient a manner.

Once you get the long robe, you come to something which would need very little change to become the sort of robe which the Greeks and Romans wore—what the Romans called the "toga." I should think these long skirts would be very much in the way when those who wore them wanted to run or make any swift movement, and I suppose that when we read in {67} the Bible of people "girding up their loins," when they were going on any expedition, it means that they tucked up these skirts and fastened them round with the girdle about their waists, so that they should not hang around their legs.

In order to make this story pleasant and easy reading, as it ought to be, I have said that I want to bother you about dates as little as possible, but it is necessary to take some notice of them. In the first place, for the understanding of this particular part of the great story—the part that has to do with Babylonia—you ought to know that the date at which the Assyrians, in the northeen section of the country, with their capital of Nineveh, revolted against the rule of Babylon, to which we find that they were subject when the story opens, was about 1900 B.C. That is to say, about 400 years before the great period of the Egyptian power, dating from 1500 B.C., or thereabouts. Assyria, which at first was subject to Babylon, revolted and became master of Babylon about 1900 B.C. and retained that mastery, with some ups and downs, for about 1500 years. This greatest story in the world deals with big spaces of time! Then the Assyrian power went to pieces and Babylon established itself again as the master power about the time of that Nebuchadnezzar of whom the Bible tells us.

So we have to realise that when, in 1500 B.C., or rather sooner, Egypt and Babylonia, according to the Egyptian records, began to clash against each other harder than ever before, with the result of squeezing very uncomfortably those Semitic tribes in Palestine, it was a Babylonia under the Assyrian domination. And the Assyrians were a more war-like people than the Babylonians. They had a better-ordered and doubtless {68} a better-equipped army. Theirs seems to have been almost what we should call a military state, constituted for war, and they called themselves masters of the whole country north of the Persian Gulf and of Egypt and of all east of the Mediterranean Sea.

In the story of mankind we find it happening again and again that after a people have been comfortably settled for a while in the fertile plains and river valleys they lose the warlike habits by means of which they got possession of these good lands, and are overthrown by others coming from a more mountainous and barren country where they have been obliged to live hardier lives. Thus, these Assyrians from the north got the better of the Babylonians, and the Assyrians in their turn were constantly being troubled by the attacks of a people called the Hittites, from farther north again.

You read of the Hittites in the Bible. Not a very great deal is known about them, but it is certain that they were a great power in all that country lying north and north-west of Assyria which is now called Asia Minor. They made incursions and attacks down south, and it is probable that after their great attacks were repulsed they left some of their tribes in the south, separated from the rest of the nation. In the latter part of our story it is these scattered tribes that we hear most about.

Now, the earliest of the inscriptions which tell us anything about these people of Babylonia goes back to the time before the Semites had come up from Arabia in the south. Edim, or the plain of Babylonia, from which we may suppose that the name Eden, in Genesis, came, was probably then inhabited by those Sumerians of whom we know very little. We know little, but we find inscriptions by them, and the inscriptions are in {69} a very curious form of writing, a writing which went on being used for thousands of years. It is called cuneiform, from "cuneus," meaning a wedge, because all the lines of the writing are inclined to go into the shape of a wedge.

You will remember something about the Egyptian hieroglyphic and picture writing. Probably all writing began in this way, with making pictures. Then it was found troublesome to make a picture of everything that you wanted to say, and a few dashes or lines, very roughly representing the thing, were used instead, and began to be understood as standing for a sign of that thing.

This wedge writing of the Babylonians doubtless began in this way. I say doubtless, because some of it is almost picture-writing, and the older the inscriptions the more like actual pictures of the thing as we see it the signs are. Thus, the sign which they made to mean heaven was something like this *, which we call an asterisk, from "aster," meaning a star. They made a drawing like a star to give the idea of heaven, because heaven is the place where the stars are. The rays, as we call them, of the star, were more wedge-shaped than the lines of our asterisk, but that is a small difference. It is said that when the "stilus," which is the tool they used for making the inscriptions, is used to make the mark of a line on wet clay, the shape into which that mark would naturally go is that of a wedge; they had much clay for their bricks, and very likely that is why we see this writing in the form that it has.

You may remember how we cited, as an instance of the way in which the Egyptians developed their writing, that we had first the picture of an eye, and then {70} the picture of a bird, and, putting the eye before the bird, we got the idea "I see a bird." Now, in much the same way, in the wedge-writing we find that an arrangement of three upright wedges is taken as the sign which means "water." There is an arrangement of a good many wedges which is the sign that means "mouth," and this arrangement is in such a shape that it must make us think that it came from an original drawing of a mouth. So, having this sign for water and this other sign for a mouth, what these cuneiform writers did when they wanted to make a sign which should mean "drinking" was to put the sign for water inside the sign for mouth. A good idea!

But all this writing, so far, proceeded on the plan of making signs to represent things that you saw or the ideas that came from what you saw. And then, I imagine, it occurred to some inventive genius to say, "Suppose, instead of making these signs to represent things that we see, that we make them represent sounds—make them stand for the names that we call them by? Now, suppose we take the word 'dog': (only he, of course, would make use of the Babylonian sound, whatever it was, which they used for 'dog'). "Suppose we take the word 'dog,'" he said, "and suppose we take one of our signs, which we use to represent things, and let it stand for the first sound that we make in saying the word. Suppose that we take another sign to stand for the second sound, the middle sound, in the word, and a third sign to stand for the last sound."

"Well," the people to whom he suggested the idea might say, "you do not seem to gain much by that. It would be much simpler and easier to go on making the sign for a dog, as we always have done."

"Yes," he might answer, "that is quite true, so far as writing about a dog, and a dog only, is concerned, but the advantage that I claim for my idea is that these signs, which I say we might use to stand for the sound that we make when we say 'dog,' may be used over and over again, whenever we have to make those sounds. And we do not make a very large number of different sounds—not nearly so many as there are ideas and objects that we wish to write about. So, on my plan, we shall not need nearly so many signs as we have been using."

I take it that it was thus, or in some way rather like this, that what we call writing (that is to say, making signs on paper or some other substance to represent the sounds by which we call things), came to take the place of the more primitive way of sending messages, or of making records, which was by drawing pictures of them. We, as you know, have twenty-six signs, twenty-six letters, in what we call our alphabet—twenty-six signs for the sounds that we make in speaking. The alphabet is called so from the first two letters "alpha" and "beta," corresponding to our "a" and "b," in the Greek alphabet. Different alphabets have different numbers of letters, standing for different sounds. In our own alphabet we know that the same letter, that is to say the same sign, may stand for different sounds. Take the very first letter "a," and take the words "father," "paper," and "many"; there you have three quite different sounds for each of which the one sign "a" does the work. An alphabet with signs enough to include all the sounds we make in talking would be terribly long.

The cuneiform writing was in use up to within 100 years of the birth of Christ, and its use extended {72} from very far up in the north of Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf and away south-westward of the Red Sea in Upper Egypt. It is there found on some very important tablets of just about that greatest date in all Egyptian history, 1500. And it was in use for trading and correspondence from Elam on the eastern boundary of Babylonia, right to the Mediterranean Sea.

Thus it was of far more general use in those old days than the picture-writing of the Egyptians. Probably it was far more convenient. Then, in its turn, it fell out of use because of the invention of a mode of writing more convenient still, and not unlike ours—from which, indeed, ours is taken. But that is "another story," as Rudyard Kipling says.

Let us just take a look now and see what Abraham and his descendants were doing in this interval between their coming up from Ur, which was in the land of the Chaldee, in the south of Babylonia, and the year 1500 B.C. The story will not be long in the telling, because we know so little about it.

What we do know is that they lived for many many years in the southern part of the country which, later on, was called Judah. We may imagine that they increased and multiplied, till they became a large and formidable tribe. It is thought that they stayed in this Southern Judah, leading a pastoral life, with sheep and cattle, for some 600 years. And then there came upon them a time of famine, when there was no food for their sheep or oxen and very little for themselves. But they lived right on the great road by which the traders and merchants travelled when they went from Egypt into Babylonia, or vice versâ, and it was told to them that "there is corn in Egypt."

You will remember that, about the corn in Egypt, from the story of Joseph and his brethren, as told in the Bible. And the end of that story, as you know, is that the whole tribe—all the children of Israel, as the Bible says—moved down into that "land of Goshen" which was in the north-east of Egypt. It was a country of rich land, lying low.

Now, what are we to suppose was the reason that the Egyptians allowed these foreigners to come down, as they did, and settle on this land over which they claimed to rule? We may answer that question in this way.

If the Israelites, as we now may call them—the tribe of which Jacob, who was also called Israel, was the head—were in the south of Judah for 600 years, between the time that they came from Chaldæa and the time that they went into the land of Goshen, it must have been in somewhere about the year 1700 B.C. that they made this later journey. That is 200 years before the rule of the famous eighteenth dynasty. And in 1700 B.C. the dynasty then ruling in Egypt was the so-called Hyksos dynasty. It was also called the dynasty of the Shepherd Kings. The Egyptians, as we have seen, had become weakened as a nation. They were constantly quarrelling among themselves, rather as the old English barons used to quarrel among themselves or against the king. The result was that foreign invaders came in from time to time, in the course of the story, and took the kingship for a while, excluding all the native Egyptian great men from the throne.

These Hyksos, who had the rule in Egypt when the Israelites were welcomed there, were invaders of this kind, foreigners who had seized the throne and the {74} power. They were shepherds, living the pastoral life—though perhaps they left off that when they became the rulers of Egypt—and wherever they came from, whether direct from Arabia or, as is more likely, from farther north, probably from Syria, all scholars are, I think, agreed that they were Semites. Josephus, the historian of the Jews, asserts that they actually were the Israelites. Modern historians think him mistaken there. But, though not Israelites, they were almost certainly of the same Arabian origin.

And there you have the answer to the question how it came about that the Israelites found a welcome in Egypt. The powerful people in the country were their relations.

And so things went well with them for many years, perhaps about three or four hundred; but other powers—"a Pharaoh that knew not Joseph"—at length threw off the yoke of the Hyksos, the Shepherds, and took the throne from them. The Israelites were shown no favour then. They were set hard tasks, were treated like slaves, until finally, under the leadership of a very great man and prophet, Moses, they decided to flee away into the desert, away from the land of Goshen, in which they were made so unhappy, although it was a fertile land.

Probably they were very useful slaves and tillers of the soil, and probably that was the reason why, as we are told in the Bible, Pharaoh was so unwilling to let them go. At length, however, go they did—only, as we are further told, to be pursued, and only, as the Bible also tells us, to be saved by a miracle at the passage of the Red Sea.

This Exodus, as it is called, probably took place in 1200 B.C. or a little earlier, and the Israelites wandered {75} some forty years in the wilderness, living in tents, and moving about as the manner of pastoral tribes was, and is, with their flocks and herds. We see, then, that 1150 B.C. or a few years sooner, would be about the date at which they would begin, under Joshua, the invasion of Canaan. Our story has not reached that point yet.

CHAPTER V

THE MINOANS IN CRETE

Those, then, were the two great powers on land in the very old days of the story of mankind. There was Egypt along the Nile, and Babylonia—for a thousand and more years, rather to be called Assyria—along the Euphrates and Tigris.

But there was also yet a third power, very great, very ancient, and highly civilised, a sea-power, with its capital in the big island, which you will sec on the map, lying to the south of Greece, Crete.

You will observe, perhaps, that it quite agrees with all that we find in the later story of mankind, that a nation living on an island should be powerful at sea. To-day you see the great sea-powers, ourselves and Japan. We live on islands that are small when compared with the lands of Germany, France, America, Russia, China; but we have more power in ships and seamen. Perhaps America is going to have a greater power than Japan, but at the time that I am writing she has not.

It is only of rather recent years that we have come to know much about this very ancient Cretan civilisation, and chiefly it is owing to the work of a great antiquary, Sir Arthur Evans, that we have discovered the story. It must be very interesting to be an antiquary and to dig—or to order a gang of diggers to {77} dig under your directions—and not to know what you may be going to turn up next: now a gold ear-ring, now a bronze sword, now the edge of a worked stone that may be the corner-stone of a building which more digging may prove to be one of the greatest and most marvellous buildings in the world!

It sounds like a fairy story; but it was a fairy story which Sir Arthur Evans made come true at a place in Crete where the ancient city of Knossos used to be. He found wonderful things—an immense palace, a place which inscriptions, also there discovered, show to have been a temple of the gods as well. The king, it is evident, was high-priest as well as king: we have seen that union of the two offices, the king's and the priest's, before, both in Egypt and in Babylonia. (When I say before, I mean that I wrote of it earlier in the story. I do not mean that it came any earlier in the time of its actual happening.) There is evidence to show that the Cretan people were civilised, could make fine works of art and so on, right back to the very earliest date at which the evidences from the peoples living along the river-courses have anything to show us. Maybe the Cretans acquired their civilisation even earlier than the others.

We cannot be sure of that. What we can be sure of is that an enormous number of years ago they were marvellous engineers and architects, as well as workers of ornaments, and of fine pottery and glazed ware. The palace at Knossos is an immense place, with great columns, walls, halls. We wonder as much at the splendid imagination of the architect who could plan buildings on such a grand scale so very long ago as we do at the engineer's power to work and lift into position such huge stones as we find were used in the building. And {78} the delicacy of the finish is wonderful too. It is not only the vastness of the size that amazes us. That is the chief wonder of the Egyptian pyramids. But the buildings and other remains in Crete are more wonderful still.

This Cretan civilisation at so very early a date makes an extraordinary chapter in the world's story. It would still have been a story very extraordinary if it had been only just the story of what happened in the island of Crete, and did not spread beyond it. But, as a matter of fact, it did spread very far beyond that island. It spread out north, east, south, and west—up into Greece, across to Syria, down to Egypt, and away to Sicily.

In your books you are likely to read about all this as "the Minoan civilisation." Probably there really was some great king of old in Crete whose name was Minos. It is possible that there were many of the name, and that all the kings of his dynasty were called Minos, with some other name besides to distinguish them. However that may be, the Cretan legendary story was that Minos was a very great king, half divine, who gave laws and the arts of civilisation to his people, rather as Khammurabi was supposed to have given laws to the Babylonians. And, again like Khammurabi, Minos was supposed to have received these laws from a deity, the greatest deity that the Minoans, as they were called, knew. But this deity of theirs was supposed to be female, a goddess, the goddess Ishtar of the Babylonians—the Ashtaroth of the Bible. The Cretans, however, made her the chief of all the gods. The Babylonians held her in second place, as spouse of the chief god Shamash, the sun-god.

These splendid buildings of the Minoans, as they {79} have been discovered for us by the digger, have a much more modern, a much less strange, appearance than those either of Babylonia or of Egypt. The Babylonian buildings especially look to us, as we make pictures of them in our minds, like palaces of some great ogre. The supports at each side of the doors and gates are very often in the form of huge winged bulls. Human heads and figures of colossal size are to be seen everywhere. And the human heads have generally great beards, and perhaps the rest of the hair worked up into a square pattern, with curls, so that they look horrible. All the insides of the Babylonian palaces seem to have been adorned with enormous hunting scenes, worked in a kind of gypsum which was found in the country. I think we should feel terribly afraid if we suddenly found ourselves in an ancient Babylonian palace or even an Egyptian one.

But I believe that we should feel very much happier and more at home if we could be transported suddenly into one of the old Minoan palaces. And I believe that I can make a guess why that is so.

The Babylonian and the Egyptian style of building was found in these two countries, but neither Babylonians nor Egyptians went much across the sea—the Mediterranean Sea. But these Cretans, as I have said, were great sea-goers. They were the great naval power in the Mediterranean. So they went, and carried with them their ideas and their ways of building, everywhere. The effect of that is seen most of all perhaps at the site of an old Greek city on the mainland of Greece, Mycenæ, where great excavations have been made. But the effect is found in many other places too. So it has come down through the Greeks and through the Romans, and has been in the minds {80} and in the eyes of later builders, although the builders were generally, as we may suppose, not at all aware that they owed anything to these builders of so many thousands of years ago.

It is a curious thing that in Egypt, in Babylonia, and also in Crete, some of the very oldest buildings and some of the very oldest works of art are the best. We have a comfortable idea in our minds that we—that is to say, mankind—have been making progress, have been improving, all through the story; but unfortunately there are some things in which we do not seem to have improved—some kinds of work in which the oldest is the best.

And as I have said that the ancient buildings found in Crete are of a style that does not look nearly so strange to us as the ancient buildings of the countries on the mainland, so the Minoan engravings show us the people of that very far-off time dressed in a fashion that seems almost familiar to us. They do not look nearly so strange as the people that we see pictured and graven on the walls of those other palaces and tombs and temples.

We find many evidences, and evidences of many different kinds, of the sea-faring habits of the ancient Cretans, and of their great power. We find Minoan works of art in the tombs of Egyptian kings, and Egyptian ornaments in the Minoan palaces. We find, as I have said, the Minoan bronze work as far to the west as Sicily. Athens, the great Athens of Greece, seems to have been subject to the Minoans and to have paid tribute to them. And a very cruel form some of that tribute took. According to the old historians, they had to send seven maidens and seven youths each year to Crete; and we seem to be able to guess the purpose for which they were sent.

The legend is that they had to be sent each year to be devoured by, or be sacrificed to, a Cretan monster called the Minotaur. The name Minotaur is from Minos and tauros, meaning a bull. It was figured as a half human, half bull-like monster.

One of the most famous of the buildings discovered by the diggers in Crete is the Labyrinth, a building of an immense number of passages in which you were almost certain to lose your way if you did not know it. You would be lost, and never come back, and the Minotaur was supposed to live in this Labyrinth, and you would wander about there till he came upon you and killed you.

This legend of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth is particularly worth attending to because it shows us so well how the unreal stories grew up out of the real, and how we are sometimes able to find out the real truth under the unreal story.

There was this real Labyrinth in Crete; and this tribute of seven maids and seven youths was, we may be tolerably sure, demanded of the Athenians. One or more of the drawings on the Minoan palace walls show bull-fights going on, and in the bull-ring are not only men, but also maidens, fighting the bull. One does not know whether all the Athenian maidens and youths were intended for this bull-fighting, but it is exceedingly likely that many of them were condemned to it, just as prisoners of war and others were made to fight lions in the amphitheatre at Rome. And out of this fact, of the maidens and youths in the bull-ring, might very easily grow the story of the Minotaur—the bull-monster of Minos—and his victim.

How Theseus slew the Minotaur and found his way out of the Labyrinth by a clue given him by Ariadne, the king's daughter, who had fallen in love with him, is all a further fancy that grew up out of the solid facts of the Labyrinth and the bull-fighting.

It is very wonderful that these ancient people should have been able to make their power felt so far from their home island, because of the difficulty in crossing the open seas. Their ships were propelled by the oars of rowers and by the wind in the sails when the wind was in their favour—that is to say, was blowing in the direction in which they wanted to go. The sails of modern sailing vessels are so arranged that our ships can sail up into the wind, as it is called. They can go in a direction at right angles to the direction of the wind very easily, and even when it is a little opposed to them, by means of setting the sails so as to catch the wind side-ways. But there is no evidence that the Minoans were able to do this, and we know that in far later days of our story no such device was used. They had a squarish-shaped sail attached to the mast, more like our lug-sail than any other kind of rigging that is used now. And yet, with these poor appliances, they went to Egypt, to Syria, and to Sicily, and no doubt farther west again. And they went in numbers, for otherwise they would not have been able to subjugate the native people as we know that they did at Athens.

We may suppose that they went for a double purpose—for trade and also for piracy, to take forcible possession of what they wanted wherever they found it. In those days, and for a long time afterwards, it does not seem as if they had any idea that it was contrary to what was right and just to take anything that they were able to take from another nation. Any {83} idea of what we call international justice was very little thought of, if thought of at all. They could, and they did, make laws among themselves which surprise us by their justice, but these laws were for each nation itself. We have seen the idea of a single god, supreme over a whole nation, held at times by them, but even that did not mean that they had an idea of a single god supreme over the whole of the world. He was a national god only, and if the idea of the divine law was thus national only, it was not likely that they would have the idea that any laws made by man were to be obeyed beyond the limits of the nation by which they were made.

So we may be sure that these ancient Minoans were what we should call pirates. They swept the sea in their ships attacking and capturing the ships of other peoples wherever they found them, and landing and making forays on the mainland much as the Vikings of Norway did around our own shores at a far later date. And this state of things in the Mediterranean is worth particular attention because these pirates, of one nation or another, will be found actively at work all through the pages of this great story of mankind. The Mediterranean was not freed from them until a very recent date.

Now, that piracy, together with the style of architecture and the making of smaller works of art which they practised, are the two great facts to remember about this wonderful civilisation of the ancient Minoans. For just about the year 1500 B.C., at which we left the story of Egypt, or a little later, some terrible catastrophe overtook the Minoans. What happened we do not know. It has been guessed that they suffered an invasion and a complete overthrow {84} by the Dorians, a people who had come down from the north and had taken possession of that southern part of Greece which is called the Peloponnese. But nothing is certainly known, except that the Minoans did suffer a very complete overthrow, that their power was shattered, their splendid buildings were destroyed, and they seem to vanish out of the story altogether. Their conquerors were evidently a people far less civilised and accomplished than they. Antiquaries tell us that there were at least two distinct stages in the making of buildings and works of art under the Minoans before this last catastrophe, but after that there is no building, no art work, worth accounting for. It all went.

But they had left the mark of their genius in the buildings at Mycenæ and elsewhere, and they had established the habit of piracy in the seas about their island.

So now, I think, we have the frame set in which we may place the picture. We have these ancient Egyptians leading the kind of life that I have tried to show you. We have the Babylonians and Assyrians along those other river-courses established as a great power in the east, and we have the Minoans, very shortly to be overthrown and to disappear, scouring the seas in their ships and having all the power along the coasts. And between them, in the very midst, is that country of Syria and Palestine which—especially Palestine, because it is south of Syria—lies right in the course which the great empires must traverse when they come to grips with each other. Palestine is the country through which they must pass whether for trade or for war with each other. You can imagine what a terrible position that must have been. Syria {85} and Palestine, as you know, were peopled by Semitic tribes, to which race the Babylonians also belonged originally. But the divisions and differences, both between the Babylonians and the others, and between these others, among themselves, were many and of various kinds. Some must have regarded each other as almost of the same kindred. Others must have seemed quite strange and foreign. It was a great mixture.

And for the moment, in or about 1500 B.C., the Israelites as a nation are not in Palestine at all. They are in the land of Goshen, undergoing that oppression of which you know. Within 300 years or so they will make their Exodus and begin their forty years of wandering in the wilderness, to re-appear in the story, under the leadership of Joshua; conquering the Canaanites and so establishing themselves right in the most dangerous position of all, in Palestine, on the highway between the two great empires.

CHAPTER VI

THE MEETING OF THE EMPIRES

It rather looks as if the casting out of the Hyksos, the foreign "shepherd kings," made the Egyptians realise that they must combine and unite and not go on fighting among themselves, if they meant to be strong enough to resist the attacks of their neighbours. Whether that was the reason or not, the records seem to show that just at this time there began to be far less fighting between the big landowners; and the king, Pharaoh, began to have more power in his own hands, and to be able to give effect to his will, by means of his vizier or prime minister, and the rest of his officers over all the country.

Thus more strong by being united, the Egyptians drove out the Hyksos. They also took forcible measures against the African tribes that were pressing them on the south, and established their power right up to the fourth cataract on the Nile, a long way farther south than the boundary of the more ancient empire. Against Nubia, farther south again, and against Libya, on their west, they fought effectively, and thus we may suppose that they made themselves more safe than they ever had been before from invasion by these African peoples.

There were two great kings of the name of Thothmes or Tethmosis, of this eighteenth dynasty, under whom {87} most of these big achievements were done—Thothmes I. and Thothmes III. The second Thothmes reigned for a year or two only. Thothmes I. led the Egyptian armies up through Palestine, overcame Syria, and went as a conqueror as far east as the Euphrates, where he set up a column, with an account of it all, to commemorate his victories.

But Thothmes III. was a more splendid Pharaoh still, and under him Egypt came to the height of its military power. Syria had revolted; so he marched north and utterly defeated the Syrians at Megiddo. Then he turned east and fought his way across the Euphrates, where he set up a column to his own glory beside that of Thothmes I. It is recorded of him that he had presents given him by the king of Babylon, and even by the king of the Hittites—that people from the north who had established themselves in Asia Minor and who were constantly giving trouble down in Syria.

And as for Babylon itself, there can be little doubt that at this time it was in the midst of troubles. It was pressed upon thus, as we see, by the growing power of Egypt on the west. Then on the eastern side it was continually being troubled by that powerful nation, the Elamites, whose capital was Susa. I do not want to bother you much about these Elamites, though their power was great and their civilisation an old civilisation. They were important enough to Babylon, because they were constantly giving trouble, very much as the stronger African tribes gave trouble to the Egyptians. But apart from this they do not occupy any very big part in the great story. They were not exactly what we should call world-makers, and it is only the world-makers that we are taking as the actors {88} in our story. They came rather near being world-makers in the great sense, for there was a moment when they seriously threatened to subjugate Babylonia, but the Babylonians just succeeded in defeating them.

And then, of course, there were the Assyrians in the north, already quite independent in reality, though Babylon still claimed a suzerainty over them.

So now continually, for hundreds of years, the story goes on repeating itself in the same way over and over again. The Assyrians begin to get more and more power in the east and they are constantly coming into conflict with the Egyptians who are constantly fighting to retain their hold on that Syria which the wars of the two Thothmes had made an Egyptian province. Syria lies north of Palestine: and Palestine, being nearer to Egypt, was still more insistently claimed by the Egyptians as theirs. You may realise how difficult the position was for these Semitic tribes in Syria and Palestine, between the two empires. The tribes were not united among themselves, so that we can easily imagine (and we know that it actually did so happen) that they tried to save themselves by making alliances with, or admitting themselves as subject to, now one of the big empires and now the other. That is the way the story went for hundreds of years there. The Children of Israel, as you know, were not in the Palestine story at the moment. It was about 1500 B.C. that the very great Pharaoh Thothmes III. came to the throne, at the time when the Israelites were in the land of Goshen. It was not until two or three hundred years later that Moses led them (in Exodus) into the wilderness.

Let us give the date of 1250 B.C. to the Exodus. It will then be about the year 1200, or a little before, {89} that the Israelites must have made their way, conquering, across Jordan and into the land of Canaan.

Now, how did it happen that a people thus still called the Children of Israel could have become so numerous and so powerful as to be able to win these victories?

In answer to the first question we may say that it was very many years since the coming of Abraham from Chaldæa—more than a thousand years. That gives time for a very large increase in numbers. Then those years of desert wandering might very likely have made them hardy. They had, too, as we know, deep faith in their "god of battles"—the Jehovah—and in the divine promise that they should win this land. And, finally, just at the moment when they came up out of the desert and began their campaign against the peoples of Canaan the great empires happened, as it seems, to have become rather exhausted by their continual strife together, and the tribes of Palestine themselves had been so crushed between the two that perhaps they had not much power of resistance left.

And since there was all this perpetual fighting, it is interesting to see in what manner and with what weapons the fighters fought. The inscriptions tell us a great deal about them.

The people from the east seem to have learnt the use and value of horses in battle earlier than the Egyptians, and fighting from chariots seems to have been an earlier custom than fighting on horseback. It is said that there are no pictures or carvings of an earlier date than the Hyksos showing any of the Egyptians riding on horses, but in the eighteenth dynasty they had their cavalry—that is to say, their {90} mounted soldiers on horseback—as well as their fighters in chariots. The chariots were not very elaborate. They were two-wheeled. The boarding came up fairly high in front, to the height of a man's elbows or thereabouts as he stood upright, but sloped away at the sides towards the back; and the back was often quite open. We see a pair of horses or even three abreast in some of the gravings of the chariots.

The men in them, as I say, stood upright. Often there were two, of whom one was for the driving and the other for the shooting, which was nearly always with the bow and arrow. I suppose we may say that the bow and arrow was their great weapon. Slings were used, as you will know from the story of David and Goliath, but the disadvantage of the sling, as compared with the bow and arrow, except for skirmishing troops, is quite obvious. The slinging requires the twirling of the sling, with the stone in it, round the head, before the stone can be sent frying out; it requires plenty of room, or else, in the twirling, you may easily break the next man's head! So it is only of value to troops in "open formation," that is, with spacious room between one man and the next. It does not do for close formation. The bow and arrow is a far more convenient weapon for this kind of fighting.

I have said that we often see gravings of one man driving the horses—the charioteer—and of the other using the bow. We also sometimes see that, in horseback fighting, one man, riding on one horse, would lead and control another horse, on which would be riding a man who would then have both his hands and all his attention free for shooting with his bow and arrow. That is not always, nor perhaps most often, {91} what we find. The more usual way was for the rider to control the horse with his own hand on the reins as best he could while he shot his arrows as he had opportunity and time. And they were fine riders, turning round in the saddle—if they had a saddle; but often they are shown riding bareback, and never, till much later, with stirrups—and shooting backwards, over the horse's tail, as he gallops away.

The battle-axe was a very common weapon; and a short sword and a club, sometimes with a stone fixed in its head to give weight to the blow, are also shown. The long spear appears to have come into common use only gradually, and is not seen in the earliest pictures of the fighting, though we do see short spears, for throwing.

It was not at all uncommon for the fighter on foot to have a man with him who carried a large shield, which covered them both. I imagine that an arrangement of that kind is meant when we read, as we do in the Bible, of the "shield-bearer." For a man to carry a shield of such size as this with any ease, it had to be a light shield, and we know that the shields were commonly made of osier, like our baskets, and covered with the skins of oxen or other beasts.

In the earliest times they seem to have worn very little armour, to protect them from arrow or sword strokes, on the body; but helmets, at first soft and padded, but later of metal, to defend the head, were in early use, and they were usually made with a peak at the top and sloping sides which would make a blow glance off them. Bronze, as we have seen, was the metal which they first learnt to work, but as they learnt to make weapons of iron, which was harder and could be worked to a sharper edge, bronze went out of use.

By the time of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, when the great empires began to meet in serious fighting, it is likely that both knew something about the arrangement of their armies into separate bodies of infantry and cavalry, and of the one supporting and helping the other in somewhat like the modern manner.

This, then, would have been their way of fighting when they met in the open field. It was a different matter when they came to the assault of great cities, especially such as Babylon and Nineveh, which were surrounded and protected, as we know, by walls of vast height and thickness. The walls of Nineveh, for instance, were so broad, even on the top, that three chariots could be driven along them, one beside the other, and of course the width at the bottom must have been very much larger. They had the material very ready at hand for the making of these immense walls—in Babylonia and Assyria at all events. They had abundance of clay, and for the greater part of the walls they used the sun-dried bricks. But for the lower parts, which had to bear the weight, they probably used harder bricks, burnt in the kilns, for there are engravings of soldiers with some kind of battering-ram hammering at the bricks from the lower part of the wall of a city which they are attacking. The diggers would be protected, by a shield held over their heads, from the missiles sent down from the wall above.

Then they had ladders for the scaling of these walls when they made the attack. But of course the attackers down below would be at a great disadvantage compared with the defenders on top of the wall. They would have a much better chance if by any means they could hoist themselves up to something like the same height as the defenders. And this they {93} contrived to do by making movable towers of wood, on wheels, which could be pushed along by men who were more or less protected by the towers themselves from the people shooting at them from the top of the wall. On the towers would be bowmen who would shoot at the men on the wall, the shooters in the tower being protected by the walls, except in so far as they had to show themselves in order to shoot their arrows or throw their short spears.

Another way that they had of hoisting themselves to the same height as the defenders was to build a mound outside the walls. I suppose the earth, as {94} they threw it up, would protect the builders against the arrows shot from the wall. And then, when they had raised the mound high enough, they would sometimes wheel their towers to the top of this, and so it may be that, from the towers on top of the mound, they may actually have had an advantage in height over the defenders on the walls. That would give the opportunity for their own fellow-soldiers below to set up the ladders and attempt the scaling of the walls.

In that way, or in some ways like that, they attacked the walled cities. You may have read words in the Bible that puzzled you about "bringing a tower" against a city, or "casting up a bank" against it, or some such words, and you may now know what they mean. They mean the making of these movable towers for the attack, and throwing up the mounds to bring the attackers to the same height as the defenders. It must have been a much more exciting kind of warfare than the pounding away with artillery at long range of many miles, as is done in war now. It was more like the modern trench war, with bombs and hand-grenades, when the trenches are close up to one another.

That is a kind of general picture of the way in which you may imagine these people making war on each other, constantly making war, in Mesopotamia and in Syria and in Palestine, for hundreds and hundreds of years. And I would remind you yet again that, except when the Egyptians were taking a hand in it, it was warfare among nations that were nearly all of the same original stock or race. The Hittites, from the north, were a different people; but most of them had very much the same ideas and the same ways of life; probably they could understand each other's language, so that {95} really when the war had passed over them for the time being the people who were left in the country, looking after their flocks and their herds and their crops, would not see much difference between living under one power or under another. Probably it made very little change in their lives. And that may explain, what otherwise seems almost impossible to understand, how they could survive, how they could go on living at all, in the midst of this perpetual fighting.

We know that the conquerors showed very little mercy. Women and children were massacred or carried off into captivity, to be kept as slaves. But after all that dreadful misery had passed over the land the remnant that remained would go on much as before. Nothing in the whole story is much more wonderful than the way in which the Syrians, for instance, revolted again, very soon after being conquered and subjugated by the first Thothmes; and the endurance of the Jews under the repeated conquest of their country is one of the marvels of history. It is difficult to understand how it was that they were not entirely destroyed as a nation, and that they are among us, and in every country of the world, as people of a very distinct character and nationality to-day. This tenacity and endurance of the Jews has had a very great effect in making the world such as it is now that we are living in it.

One of the reasons why the Children of Israel under Joshua were able to get a hold on the land of Canaan is that the Philistines had already made their appearance there. The country of these Philistines was a narrow stretch along the south-eastern edge of the Mediterranean, running down to the border of Egypt. It seems surprising that the Israelites should owe any {96} good thing to the Philistines, because we always find the two peoples at bitter war with each other; but it appears that just before the time of the Israelites' coming up from the southern deserts the Philistines had been making matters very difficult for the Egyptians in what the Egyptians called their province of Palestine, and that this province and the province of Syria also, a little to the north, were not really under any effective Egyptian rule at all at the moment. The tribes were not united together, and were weak in their disunion.

These Philistines were a warlike people. It is not known precisely of what race they were. Some have thought that they were settlers from Crete, which held, as we saw, rule over the sea. Other scholars suppose them to have been, like most of the peoples of that region, a branch of the great Semitic tree which we have seen spreading so widely. But wherever they came from, there they were established along this sea-coast, a people ready to fight by land or sea, ready to go trading, too, no doubt, in their ships, if they could make profit by it—a bold, enterprising people.

And there was another people, settled along another strip, farther north, of the same coast—the Phœnicians. Almost exactly the same account is to be given of them. They, too, were great sailors and navigators, great traders, great pirates. We do not hear so much about them just at this point of the great story which we have now reached: the Philistines play a bigger part in it for the moment. But the Phœnicians, you will see, are far more important really, for in a few hundred years the Philistines are little more heard of. The excellence of the Phœnicians as navigators made a big difference to the story.

When the Israelites succeeded in pushing their army thus into Palestine, westward of the Jordan river, their victory was by no means complete. It was a long while before they got the better of those Philistines near the coast, and at one time it looked very much as if the Philistines would conquer them. We may suppose that they did not come up out of the desert with much of the equipment necessary for the attack of walled cities, such as I have just described that necessary equipment to be.

The result of that was that even in the midst of the country which, for the most part, they conquered, there still remained certain strong cities in the hands of their enemies. Perhaps, as they had taken the pasture lands, and all that they most wanted, and as they saw that the capture of these strong places was almost beyond their power, they came to some kind of agreement with the citizens to leave those citizens in possession of the cities, provided they were left in peace elsewhere. However that may be, it is certain that some of those strong fortresses remained untaken by them, and it happened that they were so placed as to divide the country which the Israelites had overrun into two parts. The tribes of Judah and of Simeon settled themselves in the country southward of this line of fortresses, as we may almost call it. The rest of the tribes settled to the north.

I draw your attention to that, because it helps to explain what happened later when the division took place into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The tribes of Judah and Simeon, living in what came to be called Judæa, of which Jerusalem was the capital, were children of Israel, and of Abraham, just as much as those who belonged to the kingdom of Israel so called.

It is a little confusing; and to save further confusion it will I think be as well that I should now write of these Israelites (including the inhabitants of Judæa) as Hebrews. The exact original meaning of the name Hebrew is not very clear, but it was used at a very early date, and we may use it conveniently to designate the whole of the tribes that were led through their wanderings in the desert by Moses and Aaron, and that came up and crossed over Jordan, under Joshua, and settled in Canaan.

CHAPTER VII

THE JEWS AND THE ISRAELITES

If you will take a look on the map at all this country of Palestine and Syria you will see how it is cut up by mountains, the Lebanon range and others running down along it. One result of this must have been to make it difficult for the tribes that were settled there to unite and come together to resist the attacks of enemies from without.

In order to understand this great story properly you must bear in mind all through how much of it happened as it did because of the geographical position—that is to say, because the rivers ran just where they did run and because the deserts and the seas and the mountains lay just as they did lie round about the richer and more pleasant land. Between the mountains lay plains and valleys where the flocks might pasture. Canaan, you know, in the Bible is described as a land "flowing with milk and honey." Those are words meant to give you the idea of a rich, pleasant land, generally; but perhaps they mean a little more besides. "Flowing with milk" suggests a land where cows for milking would do well, and as for honey, we are told by people who have gone hunting there that the dogs often come out of the grass and the wild flowers quite yellow with pollen—the pollen that the bees carry home with them on their thighs. It is a great country for bees and honey.

But it was also, when the Hebrews first made their way into it, a great country for Philistines. They were not pleasant neighbours. The early chapters of the story of the Hebrews in Canaan are very much taken up with fights against the Philistines. The duel between David and Goliath is almost the best of the chapters; but the Samson story is very good reading too. At one moment the Philistines very nearly got the better of the Hebrews altogether; but then it seems as if the danger made Samuel, the greatest of the Judges, realise that if the people were to be successful against their Philistine enemies they must be united under one head. It was very largely by Samuel's act that Saul was appointed, and anointed with the sacred oil, as king—the first king of the now united tribes.

You know the rest of that story, very likely: how they gradually got the better of these strong enemies, how Saul slew his thousands and David his tens of thousands, and how, under David's son, Solomon, they came to the highest point of splendour and riches and power that they ever reached. The capital city was Jerusalem in Judæa, the more southern part of the kingdom. It is not to be supposed that in the fulness of its power this united kingdom had anything to fear from fortress cities of enemies in their midst. We may imagine all of them wiped out, because we know that Solomon's ships went freely to the coasts of Phœnicia, that cedar wood was brought from the splendid cedar forests on Mount Lebanon, that the wealth of Africa, in gold, ivory, apes and peacocks came to him by caravan through Egypt or by sea.

Nevertheless the union lasted only a very short while. Under Solomon's sons the kingdom was divided. {101} Rehoboam sitting on his father's throne in Jerusalem and Jeroboam reigning over the kingdom of Israel in the north. We begin, about this time, to be tolerably sure about the dates, and the date of this division into the two kingdoms is given as 937 B.C.

So there they were—Israel, bounded by Syria on the north, and with Assyria pressing on from the west and coming now to the height of its power; Judah nearer to Egypt and with the Assyrian power threatening it scarcely less than Israel in the west. The first trouble from the big empires between which they lay fell on Judah, from the Egyptian side. Shishak, the Pharaoh of Egypt, made Judah pay tribute to him, after coming with a conquering army, and apparently some of the Israelite tribes had to pay tribute also. But Israel as a whole did not come under his power.

As the story goes on we find the two kingdoms engaged in small wars both with each other and with the neighbouring small nations. There was continual fighting between the northern kingdom and Syria farther to the north again. The moment of Israel's greatest strength was in the reign of Omri, who founded its capital, Samaria. But Syria was a more numerous and powerful nation than Israel without the aid of Judah; and Ahab, the Israelitish king, was a vassal of Benhadad, king of Syria, whose capital city was Damascus. Ahab aided Benhadad in defending Syria from the attack of Shalmaneser II. of Assyria, but the allies were badly beaten, and Israel had to pay tribute to Assyria. She won back her independence for a short time, when Assyria had other business to attend to, but just so soon as Assyria had leisure to deal seriously with Israel and Syria again, Samaria was taken. The Assyrians left them no opportunity for further revolt. {102} As a nation, Israel disappears out of the story from the year of the fall of Samaria, 722 B.C.

Assyria was now in the full tide of her power. Once the vassal of Babylon, she had now made Babylon a vassal of hers. Judah had escaped the fate of Israel by prudently taking sides with Assyria.

Egypt was not likely to be very pleased with this interference on the part of Assyria with people whom she looked on as her tributaries. Judah and the neighbouring small states must have been terribly perplexed to know which was their wisest line to take—submission to Assyria or to Egypt. Egypt, at the moment, was under a powerful dynasty of Ethiopian, or what we should call negro, race. She began to move against the aggressive Assyrians, and under Hezekiah Judah decided to take the Egyptian side. A powerful combination was formed against Assyria, which her {103} vassal Babylon joined, as well as some of the peoples along the Mediterranean coast, the Philistines and Phœnicians. But as yet Assyria was too strong or too clever in her fighting methods for them all. The Egyptian army, with the various allied forces, was seriously beaten, and Jerusalem was saved only by the payment of a very heavy tribute to Sennacherib, the Assyrian king.

The power of Assyria was very great, and the Jews may well have thought that they would find safety under her protection. Yet within less than a hundred years, Assyria, as a great power, had ceased to exist, and Judæa had once more to suffer for her alliance with the beaten side. Sennacherib's victory over the Egyptians was in 701 B.C., and his son Ezar-haddon invaded and occupied Egypt and held it for some ten years. But Assyria soon began to be pressed by a wild and war-like people, the Scythians, coming from the north. Then the Babylonians, allying themselves with the Medes, a nation whose country lay on the north-west of Babylonia, attacked Assyria from the south, and while all this confusion and fighting was going on in the east, Pharaoh Necho of Egypt thought the moment good for trying to get back the old Egyptian provinces of Palestine and Syria.

By the year 608 B.C. the Babylonians were besieging Nineveh, the great capital city of the Assyrians, and Necho was marching up into Palestine. Syria and Palestine, still faithful to the eastern empire, opposed him, but were utterly defeated in a battle at Megiddo. Once more Judah suffered by being on the losing side. In 607, a year later, Nineveh was taken and its fortifications razed to the ground by the victorious Babylonians. The mighty Assyrian empire was no more.

The explanation of this rapid fall of a people that had been so powerful seems to be that it was a power that depended entirely on its army, that the whole nation was occupied in war, and that there were no reserves, no population from which the armies could be recruited and made strong again, when once those already in the field began to be shaken. It was, as we should say, entirely a military state. To the peoples of Syria and Palestine we may suppose that it made little difference whether Assyrians or Babylonians were the great power in the east. However that may have been, they were still, like the horseshoe that a blacksmith is making, "between the hammer and the anvil." It was now, as it had been a thousand or more years before, between the hammer of Babylon and the anvil of Egypt that they lay.

Nor, as we may suppose, did this change of power in the east appear to make the position of Egypt very different. The Egyptian king may well have thought that it gave him the better opportunity for extending his own authority eastward and northward. We have seen how, in former years, Thothmes, and again Thothmes III., advanced victoriously as far as Carchemish, on the Euphrates. Each set up a column there as a monument to his victories. But neither got much farther.

And now again, in this later time, the Egyptian king pressed up victoriously, and again the Babylonians met him and gave him battle, at the very same point—Carehemish.

If you will take a look at the map you will see, perhaps, why it was that these names of battle-places occur again and again. Twice already we have had great battles at Megiddo. Three times Carehemish {105} seems to have been the turning-point in a campaign. If we understand the geography, the way the land lies, the rivers, mountains, plains and forests, we see the reason. In the first place, an army coming up northward from Egypt would find a few strong cities perhaps, such as Gaza and Ascalon, in the south, but after these were passed it would come to a plain country which gave the inhabitants no great opportunity of making a strong defence till it came to the river Kishon, on which is the city of Megiddo. There begins a wooded and mountainous country excellent for defence by a less strong force against a stronger.

Then, if that line of defence was broken through, the natural way—for it was the way that both traders and fighters went—would be north eastward up through Damascus and so on till you came to the Euphrates, a great river, in itself a formidable defence, and there stood the city of Carehemish. That explains why these two, Megiddo and Carehemish, were the places of the great battles.

I suppose that the greatest of them all, in its effect on our story, was the third Carehemish battle which, in the year 605 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, fought against the king of Egypt. For the victory of Babylon was so decisive that from this time forward, for a long while, there seems to have been very little question about which power was the greatest in the world. It was Babylon.

While Assyria and Babylon had been fighting together, Pharaoh Necho, as we have seen, had taken advantage of their trouble and had conquered the Jews and some allied forces at Megiddo, and as a consequence of that victory Judah had once again become subject to Egypt. Yet again, then, when Nebuchadnezzar {106} won his great battle at Carchemish, the Jews were on the side of the loser. Even after Carchemish, they seem to have inclined to the Egyptian, rather than to the Babylonian alliance, perhaps because Egypt was the nearer neighbour. And they retained that characteristic, which we have seen all through the story, of being a stubborn people, with a spirit not easy to subdue. In 597 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar found them giving trouble, and punished them by taking many of the inhabitants, including the king and Ezekiel the prophet, to Babylon.

But even so, within ten years the Jews that were left in Jerusalem again tried to form alliances against Babylon, and this time the great eastern power seems to have resolved to make a final end of the business. Jerusalem was attacked by a siege, and so resolutely defended that it held out for nearly a year and a half; but in the end it had to yield. Its defending walls and many of its chief buildings were overthrown, and, most dreadful of all in the eyes of the Jews, their holy temple of Jehovah was destroyed by fire after being robbed of its valuable and sacred vessels.

The date of the Fall of Jerusalem is 586 B.C. Surely it must have seemed to the unhappy people, in spite of the hope of return which even Jeremiah, the prophet of all this terrible calamity, held out to them, that they were wiped out as a nation. The might of Babylon must have appeared too great ever to be overthrown.

I have said so much about the Jews and their misfortunes, although they were a people of so little apparent importance in comparison with the great empires on either side of them, because all that happened to them, small nation though they were, has been really of the very greatest importance in {107} making the story of the world what it is. It is through them, and by reason of these disasters, and others of the same kind of which I will tell you soon, that they were scattered all over the world. And being thus scattered, and holding to their traditions and to their religion with a tenacity which no other people in the whole story ever has shown, they took those traditions and that religion everywhere.

And here I would draw your attention to a fact about the Jews and the Jewish religion which we are rather apt to forget. We are accustomed to speak of Jews and Christians as if they were entirely opposed to each other in every possible way, as if the one was absolutely the opposite of the other. And so, in one, and perhaps the very most important, point of the Christian religion they are, because the Jews deny the divine nature of Christ which is the very chief point in the Christian religion. But, for all that, we must never forget that it was on the Jewish religion that the Christian religion was founded. It was the religion that came into the minds and hearts of men who had been trained up in the Jewish religion. The early Christians were Jews, for the most part. Christ Himself was a Jew, brought up in the Jewish religion, and we know that He said He came to "fulfil," not to destroy. He was, on His human side, the last of those Hebrew prophets of whom the first, in point of time, was Amos.

It was on the Jewish religion as its stock that the Christian religion was grafted, as a gardener grafts a new branch into an old stem and the new takes up the sap from the old. There was another branch later grafted on the Jewish religious stem, besides the Christian—a very different branch, the Mohammedan {108} religion. When we consider what an immense effect Christianity in the first place, and Mohammedanism in the second, have had in the making of this world-story, we shall see, I think, that we are right in attributing a great importance to what happened to the Jews, from whom came these other religions, as well as their own, which they still hold now. What happened to them was thus much more important in the story than what far stronger powers did, such as the Hittites, who possessed all Asia Minor and threatened Egypt, or the Elamites; who nearly overthrew the Babylonians, or the Syrians, who at one time were far stronger than either Israel or Judah, or even both of them together.

We know that the Jews won their intense faith in Jehovah, their national god, only with difficulty. They were of the same race as the tribes about them who worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth, and they were constantly inclined towards that pagan worship, as we know from the Bible. But in the end the higher religion won, and their religion was intensely real to the Jews. It was a very big thing in their lives. They believed that Jehovah punished them in this life for the wrong things that they did, such as oppression of the poor, or unjust dealing, and they believed that he punished the nation for wrong things that the nation did. They had not the belief of the Egyptians in reward and punishment in an after-life.

And they considered their god as an exacting, a "jealous" god. He would punish them if they worshipped in the so-called "groves," which were often posts or stones set up on the "high places" to the pagan gods, or if they were slack in his worship, or in making sacrifice to him.

All these peoples had, in common, a belief in winning {109} the favour of the gods by sacrifice. The more precious to them the thing sacrificed, the more value they deemed it would have in the sight of the gods; and that is how it is that we see them at one time actually sacrificing their own children, as the most valuable offering that they could make. The instance of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac will occur to your minds.

And wherever they went, into whatever land of exile they were carried by their conquerors, they would take with them those sacred writings, that record of their history, that story of the creation of the world, and that code of their laws and of their religious customs, which, with very much more that they had not got, we now mean when we speak of the Bible. Wherever they went they had this holy record assuring them that they were the chosen people of Jehovah. Among the influences which enabled them to keep so distinct from the nations into whose midst they came, we must surely place very high the influence of the Bible—that is to say, of so many of its books as had been written at that time.

The might of Babylon, as I have said, must have seemed so great to the Jews, carried away into exile, that it never could be overthrown. And yet, within less than fifty years from the siege and capture of Jerusalem, Babylon itself was taken by a power of such overmastering strength that the Babylonians only once afterwards, and to no effect, attempted to regain independence.

This extraordinary "judgment," as the Jews regarded it, was executed by the hand of the Persians under their great leader Cyrus.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PERSIANS AND THE GREEKS

The Persians are a people that up to this point come into the story hardly at all. Suddenly, out of the East, they come right into its very centre and are the principal actors in it for a century or two.

After the break-up of the Assyrian power, the strongest nation in the alliance that had done that breaking was the nation of the Medes. The Medes and Persians were of the same race, different altogether from the Semitic. They were of that great race called Aryan, or Indo-European, that came from the high lands in the centre of Asia. Probably their numbers so increased that they had to find new country. They pressed down southward and westward, towards the sun and the more fertile lands. They were hardy and accustomed to moving about. It was no hardship to them to make migrations. They moved with their wives and children, flocks and herds, and all their small household goods. A great number pressed down into India. Another big stream flowing towards the west came as far as the Babylonian eastern border.

These Aryan people from the north-west were great riders. It is thought that they introduced the horse to the Babylonians, and that from the Babylonians it came to Egypt.

The country of Elam had been invaded, and its {111} power shattered, by the Assyrians shortly before the break-up of their own empire, and this shattering, together with the fighting between the Assyrians and the alliance formed against them, gave the Persians (who inhabited a country to the east called Iran, and especially the part of that country called Persis) the chance of getting possession of Elam. This they did, and established themselves in Susa, the old capital city of the Elamites. Persia was actually the vassal of Media, until Cyrus, who was the Persian king at Susa, led a revolt against them. Within three years he had conquered and taken their capital, and Media was now a subject state to its own late subject, Persia.

Thus they were, then, established in their power along the Eastern boundary of Babylonia, which had now become the master empire by the defeat of Assyria. Nevertheless Cyrus, at the head of the Persian army, took this mighty Babylon without a battle! But he had to fight some hard battles first. It seems that the Medes had made treaties with their allies of Babylon and Egypt which the Persians did not feel disposed to pay attention to. This aroused such opposition to the Persians that an alliance of Babylonians and Egyptians with Crœsus, king of Lydia in Asia Minor, and with the Spartans, was formed against them.

Notice particularly those Spartans. Sparta was the southern state of Greece, and this is the first appearance of Greece in our story. It is very notable. These great nations of the East already thought so well of the fighting qualities of the Greek soldiers, and especially of the Spartan soldiers, that it was worth their while to bring them over and pay them to fight for them. There seems to be little doubt that they were mercenaries, that is to say, soldiers who were {112} paid to fight and who fought for pay. But the alliance was of no avail. Within the space of a few months, in the summer of 546 B.C., the whole of Asia Minor was in the Persian hands, right away to the Mediterranean shore. It was not until six years later that Cyrus had leisure to attend to Babylon itself; but when he did attend to it the resistance was not great. The Babylonian king's allies had been broken. Cyrus took Syria and Palestine also in his own reign, and after his death his son Cambyses pressed on down into Egypt and conquered that ancient land likewise. The victorious career of the Persians was only checked when they came against the Ethiopians and Nubians in farther Africa.

Even the shore of the Mediterranean did not stay their progress. They won many of the Greek islands, including Cyprus and Samos. The empires of Egypt and of Babylonia had been great, but this was greater than both of them together. And those two had been rivals. This of Persia seemed to be without a rival. It is little wonder that the Persian ruler assumed the title of King of Kings. He ruled right away into India. He ruled all that seemed to matter or to count for anything; and it had all been accomplished in not much more than twenty years from the time of the first revolt of Cyrus against the lordship of the Medes. How was it done?

That is a question which must be answered in different ways. No one answer is enough. There were several causes which worked together for this astounding success of the Persians. But one of the chief causes, if not the chief of all, was Cyrus. We cannot doubt that. Throughout the whole of this greatest of great stories which I am trying to tell you we shall {113} not meet with an actor bigger and more glorious than this Cyrus. I doubt whether we meet with another quite as big. For not only were the extent of country and the power of the nations that he conquered extraordinarily great, but he made a very extraordinary use of his conquests. He must have been a great leader of men, a man whom others were ready to obey and follow; and he must have been a great general, according to the ideas of what generalship and the manœuvring of armies meant at that time; but besides all that he must have been a very wise man and a very good man. There can be little doubt that he was far more merciful to the people that he conquered than any other conqueror that has come into our story yet. He treated them with far greater kindness. That is proof of his goodness.

Then he was very content to leave them their own institutions, including their religions, so long as they were obedient to him as their over-lord. That shows his wisdom, for it meant that the people he conquered were content to be under him. Under Cyrus, the Jews who were in exile at Babylon were allowed to go back to Jerusalem, and he gave orders which helped them to the re-building of the Temple there. It is thought that it was partly by the help of these Jews in Babylon that he was able to take that strong city, as he did, without a fight. But it is said that he had to divert part of the stream of the Euphrates in order to do so; and it is certain that he had already broken the Babylonian power before he took the capital.

He was able to show this kindness and consideration for the religion of other peoples, because his own religion and that of his Persians was a very enlightened one. I think we shall not do wrong in calling it the {114} most enlightened religion of all that we find before Christ came. It was the religion called Zoroastrianism, from the name of its founder, Zoroaster, who is also called Zarathustra. It was the religion of those Indo-European people of whom we have seen one part pressing down south into India and another part pressing westward. Zoroaster is thought to have been the author of the most ancient portions of what is called the Zend-Avesta, which means the Avesta, or Sacred Writings, written in the language of Zend. Zend belongs to the Aryan group of the Indo-European family of languages, from another branch of which our own native English language has been derived.

Zoroaster taught that there is one great and good god, Ormuzd, but that there is also another supernatural being, Ahriman, the spirit of evil. It is accordingly as men do the will of Ormuzd, that is to say, do good acts, that they will have a happy life after death. If the good acts a man has done in life here are more in number and importance than his bad acts he will go to paradise; if the bad acts are more than the good he will go to hell and suffer everlasting punishment. Justice, acting justly, was what Zoroaster recognised as the most important thing of all.

You will see at once how near this very ancient belief comes to that which we hold now, and how much more enlightened it is than other religions which we have noticed. It contains the idea of one god supreme over all the universe—not only supreme for a single nation or for one portion of the earth.

Fire, that mysterious, useful, kindly thing by which man warms himself, by which he cooks his food, and which, nevertheless, is capable of such horrible destruction, seems to have been associated closely with the {115} power of the good god, Ormuzd. Fire was therefore a sacred element.

The cow, another kindly thing, because of its use to man, was also sacred. In the religion which Zoroaster was brought up in the cow had been sacrificed to ward off evils—with the idea, already noticed, that the more precious to man the thing that he sacrificed, the more favour his sacrifice would win with the gods. Zoroaster taught that it was impious to kill the cow.

It was with this fine and enlightened religion in their hearts, then, that Cyrus and his Persians came conquering the western world. They conquered, but they treated those that they conquered with justice, according to the great teaching of Zoroaster. As they believed in one god over all the earth, they might permit the worship of that god to be carried on according to the various customs that they found where they went, so long as those customs were not altogether base and evil.

And these Persians were a kindly people. That is one of the causes of their victories. In the great story we find this often repeated—that a people living in a mountainous country, in a severe climate, and in surroundings which make their lives difficult and their food hard to get, come down on the inhabitants of a country where the soil is more fertile, the climate milder, and life altogether easier, and drive these easy-going people out before them as if they were sheep running away before wolves. It is a happening which teaches the lesson that the strongest, the most effective, kind of men are those that are accustomed to hardship.

But it is quite clear from all we have seen that those whom the Persians thus conquered were practised warriors. They were constantly fighting. The {116} Persians, however, seem to have come upon them with a kind of fighting to which they were not altogether accustomed. The difference between their methods was chiefly that the Persians were so much quicker in movement. They were fine archers, and they were very fine horsemen. It was this last, their horsemanship, which seems to have been one of the great secrets of their success. They had archers both on horse and on foot, but on horse especially. Their method was to dash down upon the enemy in a swift attack, the cavalry opening out to let the archers on foot shoot their arrows. Then, when they had harassed the enemy with this swift charge, it was not their way to come to close quarters with him, at all events at the first onset, but rather to retire as quickly as they came on, to re-form, and to come back to the attack again.

The enemy, on their retirement, if he did not know their way of fighting, was rather apt to think that they were retreating altogether and were giving up the attack. Then the enemy was inclined to start off in pursuit. That was exactly what suited the Persians, for it meant that when they returned for the next attack they found the enemy more broken up than before and less able to resist. It was by repeated onsets of this nature that they got the formation of an opposing army knocked to pieces; and then, in a final attack, this time pressed closely home, they might, and they generally did, defeat him.

But if it was thus a new style of fighting that the Persians brought with them from the east, they also found themselves encountering a mode of defence against their attack which was strange to them. And this mode of defence came from the west.

In that allied army which we saw the Persians {117} defeating in Asia Minor—the army led by Crœsus, king of Lydia—the Persians were victorious. They were so decisively victorious that Crœsus himself was taken prisoner by them, and the whole strength seems to have been knocked out of the alliance by that single blow. And in the defeated army we saw that there were soldiers from Sparta, which is, as you see on the map, in that most southern and almost detached part of Greece which is called the Peloponnese. The Spartans, therefore, were Greeks, and the Greeks were among those that had the worst of it in this great battle. But, for all that, it was a Grecian mode of fighting that made the best of all defences against the Persian way of attacking. This mode of defence is what was called the "phalanx."

You have to understand that the word Greece in those days did not mean a single nation so much as a collection of small states settled close beside one another. The peoples of the different states were for the most part of the same race, no doubt, just like the Semitic peoples in Syria and Palestine. But they differed from each other in their customs and their ways of government far more than the Semites did. They were very often fighting among themselves and, again like the Semites, found it very difficult to let their jealousy of each other die down and to unite together for defence against a foreign foe. The Spartans were the most warlike of all the Grecian states. Their government was conducted in such a way as to make all the males in the country fighters.

Their idea of fighting was as different as possible from that of the Persians. They had few horse-soldiers. They were drawn up for battle in a close deep formation, I suppose like what we should call "a solid {118} square," and it was this solid square that was called the phalanx. The troops were heavily armed, with shield, sword, and, most important of all for receiving the charge of cavalry, with long spears. You can imagine what a solid defence this would make against the lightly armed cavalry of the Persians. The arrows would not cause very serious loss to the armoured and shielded Greeks, and when the Persians did finally push their charge home the spears would so receive them that it would be like charging a gigantic porcupine.

Of course all that would depend on the phalanx keeping its solid formation. If its ranks got at all broken up in pursuit, under the mistaken idea that the Persians, after the first onslaught, were done with, and were fleeing away, then it would be a very much less formidable porcupine on which the horsemen would come when they returned to the attack. Probably the Greeks quickly learnt the Persians' methods and grew careful to keep their formation without any big breaks in it.

These heavily armed soldiers of the Greeks were called hoplites. After a while the phalanx was assisted by lighter armed and more swiftly moving troops called peltasts, but the solid phalanx was always the great strength of their armies. The peltasts were {119} never regarded as of equal importance with the hoplites, though they were very valuable assistants to the phalanx. The Greeks, living in a comparatively small country with the sea on either side of them, had not the same chance of getting horses for a numerous cavalry as the nations that had all Asia or all the north-eastern parts of Europe to draw on for their supply.

This phalanx of the Greeks is a very important feature in the great story. It was chiefly, as we may suppose, by reason of their adopting this formation and making such splendid use of it, that they were sought after, as we know that they were, by other nations to come to the assistance of their own armies. There grew up in Greece a class of what we may call professional soldiers, ready to hire themselves out for pay, to fight on any side that would make it worth their while to do so. We find them thus, as what we call "mercenaries," fighting sometimes for the Egyptians, sometimes against them. Some of them we even find fighting for the Persians. And they scarcely ceased fighting among themselves. The Persian empire extended to Egypt, and to all the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, but it was not powerful enough to prevent much fighting between the peoples subject to it. It could not, however, prevail much against Greece, in spite of the divisions between the Greek states.

Our story now, say after 500 B.C., or thereabouts, is concerned very much with the vain attempts of the Persians to subjugate the Greeks—to get them under their yoke. And again I must remind you, to get the picture at all clear and full, that the Mediterranean was continually being ravaged by the ships of pirates and traders—ready to be peaceful merchants if it paid {120} them better to be so, or to attack other shipping or coast towns if they could do so with success.

The Peoples of the Sea was the old name for these raiders and traders, who were of all nations, sometimes combining together, and making themselves into quite a powerful navy, with headquarters in Crete or another of the many islands. The most powerful, as a nation, of any of these sea-raiders were the Phœnicians. They planted many settlements along the coasts, either on islands or on easily defended projecting headlands of the main shores. Such places were of value to them for their ships to run into when beset by storms or by enemies. The most important in our story was their settlement at Carthage. This Carthage will play a very big part later on.

But now we must take a look at the very remarkable part which Greece was playing at this moment, 500 B.C. or so, and had played for some years and was to play for many to come. I expect you will have wondered that I have not spoken about Homer and the famous Siege of Troy, and other great men and great events which happened long before this time. Troy began to be besieged very shortly after 1200 B.C. Homer lived at some time between 800 and 900 B.C. We have left them far behind.

The reason why I did not pick them up and fit them into their place in the story when we came to the years of their happening is that the part played by Greece in the making of this great story—that is to say, in the making of the world—is different from the part played by any other people. It is such a different part that it is almost another story, although it does really fit into the great story and is a very important part of it.

The other great peoples that we have been talking about, the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians, conquered vast countries, founded vast empires. The Greeks did nothing of this kind. They were fine and accomplished soldiers, as we have seen, but the various states were too disunited for them to be able to bring their forces together or to keep them for any length of time together.

But for many centuries they were by far the most accomplished people in the world; their artists, both painters and sculptors, were far ahead of the rest; their thinkers went deeper and with more clear insight and wisdom than any others into the many problems and puzzles that life and the world set for us; they had finer sculptors, finer orators, finer poets, probably they had finer musicians; we have seen that they had a finer battle formation.

In fact, in cleverness and in all the arts and sciences the Greeks were not only superior to all those about them, but they were superior to all that have been since—even to ourselves, though we have had all these years in which to learn. We have learnt to make trains go, and the telephone and poison gases, and guns that will shoot twenty-five miles, and other things of that kind. But we are not the equals of the Greeks of 500 B.C. in art, oratory, poetry or philosophy. Had it not been for the Greek philosophers we cannot tell what our philosophy might have been, for it is built up on the foundations they laid; but we may doubt whether it would have been nearly as far-seeing or as interesting.

And that is really the most important part that the Greeks took in the making of the story—a part quite different from that of the great empire-makers, and yet, {122} as I think you will agree, a bigger part than any of theirs. For it made, or did a great deal to make, the thought of the world what it is to-day. It did a great deal to make the thought of the world what it was all down the pages of the story, say from 1200 B.C. onwards. I mean that it made men think about things—about art and philosophy and music, and about life in general—as they do think. Had it not been for the Greeks we should be thinking differently, and probably not nearly so wisely, about all these things. That is the greatest work that the Greeks have done in the world.

You may remember that we said the disasters which befell the Jews, and their scattering throughout the other nations, made them able to take their religious ideas with them, and to sow those ideas, as it were seeds from which plants should spring, amongst those nations into which they were driven. Something like the same kind of scattering happened to the Greeks, and so enabled them to carry their ideas over a great part of the world. Of their own accord they would, no doubt, have carried them far. If you look at the map of Greece, you will see that not only has the country the sea on three sides of it, but that it is cut up, and cut into, by a wonderful number of bays and gulfs of the sea, so that it would have a very great length of seashore if all were added together. Naturally that meant that the Greeks were great sea-goers. They were a great "maritime" people, as we should say—from mare, which is Latin for sea. A good deal of their excellence in art we may suspect that they derived from those ancient Minoans whom we saw masters of Crete very long ago. The Minoans, as the Minotaur legend showed us, were masters of Athens also. They were the great sea-power in very ancient {123} times. They left evidences of their art at Mycenæ in Greece. The Greeks, following the Minoans in art, perhaps followed them also in the skilful management of ships. We know, at all events, that they went far and wide on the Mediterranean in ships, certainly as great traders, probably often as pirates, and, whether the one or the other, taking their thoughts, their arts, their culture with them.

But besides this—beside these expeditions which they went of their own will, and beside the further spread of their culture, which their soldiers, going out to fight for hire, would carry with them—some or other of the Greeks were from time to time in the course of the story obliged to fly over-sea, obliged to save themselves from the pressure of enemies coming down on them from the north.

It is exactly what we saw happening in Babylonia that happened here too in Greece. It is exactly what happened again and again in the great story—the peoples from a wild barren country come pressing down upon peoples living in a more fertile one. Out of Thrace, which you will see on the map lying to the north of Greece, down through Macedonia and Thessaly, came wild warlike tribes pressing on the peoples of the more fertile south. Various reasons for their movements are given by the Greeks who left their native country and settled, some in the islands, some in Asia Minor. In some instances it was admitted that they went under pressure of enemies; but that is not a reason which would be very pleasant to their pride. Other reasons were recorded, but probably this was really the most common.

In their sailings to and fro, and tradings, they would learn about the countries on the Mediterranean shores. {124} Even if they had not full knowledge of it before, they would have learnt all that they needed to know about the western shore of Asia Minor in the course of the ten years which are assigned to the Siege of Troy.

Ilus was father of Tros, king of Troy, and the Greeks called Troy Ilium, after Ilus, rather than after the son Tros from whom the name Troy came. And the Iliad is therefore the story of Ilium, otherwise called Troy. This splendid poem is attributed to Homer as its author, but what Homer probably did was to recite, or to sing to the accompaniment of the lyre, these stories, which were only written down years afterwards. We may imagine him something like the bard or the troubadour. How much of his own invention he added to the story we cannot know.

The story, as we have it from him, is that Queen Helen having been taken from her home, with her own willing consent, by Paris and carried to Troy, the Greeks went after her and tried to get her back. They tried for the whole ten years which are ascribed to the Siege of Troy. Helen was the most beautiful lady in the world, and the Iliad is certainly one of the most beautiful poems.

The Greeks were a singularly intelligent people. Does it seem the act of any intelligent people to go on fighting for ten years in order to get back even the most beautiful lady in the world? And if they were at all intelligent they would certainly be apt to reflect that she would not be likely to be equally beautiful at the end of the ten years as she was at the beginning.

A very learned Grecian scholar, Dr. Walter Leaf, has written a book about the Siege of Troy which tells the story in a much less romantic and poetical but a {125} much more probable way. And I want to tell that story, as he tells it, very shortly to you, because it gives such a good idea of the way that men were living along the shore of Asia Minor at that time, say 1200 or so B.C.

Troy, you will see if you look at the map, stands, or stood, nearly in the north-western corner of Asia Minor, its territory reaching up to the shore of that narrow sea-channel which used to be called the Hellespont and is now called the Dardanelles. Any Greek ships wishing to go for trade through the Hellespont must pass close along the coast of Troy land, so close that any people who had the command of the land could sally out and interfere with their passage. The current flows out westward through the Hellespont, and the wind usually blows from north-west, against the ships going eastward.

The whole point of Dr. Leaf's argument is that at Troy there was a market, or fair, at which the produce of the countries in the east was sold to the Greeks and other people in the west, and that the Trojans derived much profit from this market. The profit from this market they would of course lose if the western people were able to sail up through the Hellespont and do their trade direct with the people along the shore of the Black Sea. The Trojans were, in fact, what we nowadays call "middle-men," and you know how we are always trying to bring the consumer, the person who wants to use the thing produced, into direct touch with the producer, and so to do away with the profit which the middle-man charges and which he again puts on to the price of the thing when he sells it to the consumer. The Greeks were the consumers. They wanted to do away with the middle-men, that is to say {126} with the Trojans, and that, far more probably than the bringing back of the beautiful lady, was why they spent so many years and so many lives in the siege of Troy.

You will remember what we said before about the kind of ships that these people had. They were propelled by rowing, or by sails which were only useful when the wind was nearly directly behind them. They had to put in to some harbourage every night, because they did not dare to go along in the dark, without charts and without compass and without knowledge of how to steer by the stars. Even in daytime they hardly dared to go out of sight of land and of the landmarks which they knew.

The islands in these seas lie so close to each other that it was possible for them to creep along in this way from one to the other and so to the coasts of Asia from Greece. And there was another reason why they could not go long voyages—they had no light cisterns in which to carry fresh water. They had to take it in heavy earthern jars.

This need for water they could supply from rivers which ran out westward through Troy land. They would lie along the coast there, as they traded with the Trojan middle-men, or, possibly, as they waited for a favouring wind to go through the Hellespont, which the Trojans might allow them to do on payment of some toll money, as we should call it, for the permission.

The reasons for thinking that the wish to do away with these Trojans and their market was the real motive of the ten years' war are strengthened when we look at the names of the peoples that came to the help of the Greeks on the one side and of the Trojans on the other. Those that came to the assistance of the Greeks {127} were the peoples along the Mediterranean shores or on the islands; those that aided the Trojans were the peoples from the east. So we have the two set in rather distinct opposition to each other; the Trojans and the eastern people who sent their things to the market at Troy and had an interest in the market being kept up, and the western peoples who wanted the market destroyed.

That is a very prosaic story, is it not, in comparison with the romance about the beautiful lady? It is not the kind of story that Homer or any other bard would care to sing or his listeners would take pleasure in hearing. But I am afraid it is more likely to be the true story of the reason why a practical and intelligent people like the Greeks fought so hard and so long to annihilate Troy. I have said so much about this famous siege because it gives such a good opportunity of setting what are probably the facts beside the fictions which have been founded on them. It teaches us how these poetic stories were made.

The other great poem attributed to Homer, the Odyssey, is only another chapter, dealing with the adventures of one of the principal Greek heroes, of the story of the siege. It is even more glorious reading than the Iliad itself.

Now, whatever the truth be about the Trojan war, one fact is quite clear and certain from its story, as well as from other evidence, that the Greeks had dealings, constant dealings, with Asia Minor. Therefore their thought, their art, their culture, and all that was most remarkable in their character as a nation, was known in Asia Minor, it was known among all these islands of the Ægean Sea and along the southern, the African, shores of the Mediterranean. Everywhere that it went {128} it was superior to the thought and the culture of the native people, and everywhere it had its effect. I want you to realise that. It was not by reason of the force of their arms, though they were such good fighters, that the Greeks count for so much in our great story, but by reason of the force of their thought, and of their accomplishments.

Some hundred or two hundred years after the siege of Troy we find certain colonies or cities of the Greeks founded along the western shore of Asia Minor. The Greeks living in these cities were called Ionians. Shortly before the coming of Cyrus, the all-conquering Persian, those Ionians had been conquered by that king Crœsus of Lydia whom we saw taking command of that ill-fated alliance formed against Persia. The Persian had now, by the time, 500 B.C., to which we have brought down the story, made himself master of all Asia Minor. The Ionian cities had come under his dominance.

CHAPTER IX

THE GLORIOUS DAYS OF GREECE

It is amusing to stop now and then in the course of a story to wonder how it would have gone if one or other of the events in it had happened rather differently. Sometimes it seems as if just one event turned the whole course of what happened afterwards.

So here in this great story of ours we may wonder what would have happened to the world if the Persians, pushing their way westward, had not come up against that strong wall of opposition which they found in the Greek phalanx. There was no other power, so far as we know, at this time, in the west, that was at all likely to be able to stop them.

If we look at what happened in the more southward direction of their advance, in Egypt, we shall perhaps be inclined to think that they would not have gone very much farther westward than they did, for the Egyptian story of that time shows that they were not able to establish their power very securely in that country. For nearly forty years after the Persian conquest of Egypt by Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, Egypt was held as a province of Persia, but in 488 B.C. the Egyptians made a successful revolt and threw off the Persian yoke for a time. Three years later they were again subdued by Xerxes, who was then king of Persia, but only fifteen years afterwards they were {130} again revolting, and through the whole of that century, 500 to 400 B.C., they were continually rising against their Persian masters, never quite succeeding in winning their freedom, but constantly giving trouble, never completely subdued. It is evident that the Persians, after their first and most effective conquest, never had a very secure hold over the people of the Nile.

Then, if we turn to look at what was going on farther north, where the Persian cavalry were coming up against that famous Greek phalanx, we shall see good reason why the Persians were not able to give a great deal of attention to making their position good in Egypt. The wonder is that they should have found any forces at all to spare for that enterprise.

The Persian monarch had assumed the title of King of Kings. He claimed dominion over the whole world, as the Persians knew it. It must have been most vexatious to him, and to that great claim and title of his, to find the claim opposed and contested. He had conquered Greeks before—those Spartans whom he had met fighting in the alliance under King Crœsus. He would conquer them again. He would crush them and take possession of their country.

After all that they had accomplished, the conquest of Greece cannot have seemed to the Persians as if it would be a hard matter. Greece, as a single nation, did not exist. There were many Grecian states, but they were always fighting among themselves, each striving for the supremacy. The chief of the fighting states were Sparta and Athens. Each of these would form alliances from time to time with other states to fight against the other. Just at this moment, that is just before 500 B.C., the contention between them was most severe. The forms of the government in the two {131} were sharply opposed. The government of Athens had lately fallen into the hands of the people. The people, the democracy (from demos, the people, and kratos, power) had deposed their king and driven him out of the country. The Spartans, who hated the idea of a democratic government, sympathised with him, and no doubt would have restored him to power had they been able to do so; but he went to Asia Minor, to the court of Darius, who was then king of Persia, and besought his help. The Persian was very willing to give it, but it was not until some years later, in 490 B.C., that the first actual invasion of Greece by the Persians took place. That invasion practically began and ended with what was one of the most famous battles in the world's history, the battle of Marathon.

It was fought on a small plain, only some three miles wide, on the seashore, where the Persians had disembarked their forces. And here I would give you a word of warning which must apply to all this story of the glorious days of Greece. The battles—Marathon, Thermopylæ, and Salamis—have become very famous, and rightly famous. They were of importance in the story because they—Marathon and Salamis, at all events, which were Grecian victories—put a stop to that westward advance of the Persians which might have extended we cannot say how far but for those victories. But they were battles in which the forces engaged on the one side or the other were almost ridiculously small in comparison with the armies which we have seen put into the field. They were fought over very small spaces of land or sea, and they were very quickly over.

But though they are rightly famous, for the reason which I have spoken of, a good deal of their fame is due to the splendid way in which their story has been told {132} to us by the great historian Herodotus, and, as you know, the best story in the world can be made to seem very poor if it is badly told; and a poor story can be made interesting by good telling. These people, these Greeks, with their extraordinary accomplishments, had the power of telling stories very well, and the stories really were good in themselves. They were good stories, and stories of important events, but the events are rather apt to appear even more important than they really were, just because their story is told so very well.

That is the word of warning which I want to give you about all these stories of the glorious days of Greece.

In giving you the outlines of the great story of the world, as I am trying to do in this book, there is no space for an account of these battles. You must read about them elsewhere, and all I can do is to tell you how they fit into the big story, where they come, and how it was that they happened. The Greeks, at this battle of Marathon, defeated the Persians and utterly demolished any chance of the success which this first invasion of Greece by the Persians could have had. The Persians returned again to the attack, but it was not until ten years later; and then it was attempted in a different manner.

There had been an effort at the invasion of Greece even before that which was defeated at Marathon. Those Ionian cities along the coast of Asia Minor had revolted against the Persian rule, and had been aided by the Athenians, who were closely related to them. A Persian expedition had set out four years before the Marathon enterprise to punish the Athenians for helping the Ionians in that revolt which the Persians {133} had easily repressed. It set out both by land and sea, with the intention that the fleet should support the land army, but the fleet was caught and shattered in a storm, and although the Persian power was supposed to be established over Thrace and even as far west as Macedonia, their land army was fallen upon and broken up by attacks of the wild tribes on the borders of Thrace without ever reaching Greek territory at all.

But though this expedition, thus planned to act together by land and sea, had been a failure, it was just the same kind of enterprise, only on a far larger scale, that was attempted by Xerxes, then King of Kings, ten years after the Persian overthrow at Marathon. King Xerxes himself was the leader.

I think we may be safe in saying that no forces as large as these, in the number of men enrolled in them, had ever before been collected for a military purpose, and also that no former expedition had ever been planned with so much care and forethought. Xerxes made two bridges for the passing of his army across the Hellespont; he cut a canal through the Isthmus at Mount Athos for the passage of his fleet. The fleet, you see, if you will look at the map, would coast round along the south of Thrace, accompanying the army, till it came to the Peninsula at the end of which is Mount Athos. Xerxes had established stations in Thrace for the supply of his army with food and all needful things as it went along. It was just off Mount Athos that the storm had scattered the fleet of the former expedition that he had sent against Greece. By making this canal, and so letting the ships go through the Isthmus, he avoided the danger of another storm off the end of the Peninsula.

But there were other dangers besides those from {134} the wind and waves, for a fleet in any part of the Mediterranean. Although the Persian monarch might style himself King of Kings, there was another power that ruled the sea at this time, the power of Carthage, that colony of the Phœnicians of which I asked you to take note the first time that it found a place in this story. The Phœnicians, as we have seen, had planted colonies of their own at all convenient places along the Mediterranean shore, and of all these Carthage had grown to be by far the strongest in its numbers. It was regarded as the capital city, the headquarters, of all that half-merchant and half-pirate host which we have seen always going to and fro on the waters of the great inland sea. For fifty years and more before the battle of Marathon was fought it had become a great power, the chief naval power of the world, and it had already come into collision with the Greeks.

For the Greeks, too, as we know, sent out their colonies. They sent them to Ionia, eastward along the coast of Asia Minor, and they also sent them westward, round the heel and toe of Italy, as far as that great island of Sicily lying nearly opposite to where you see Carthage on the African shore. Sicily and the African continent lie at no great distance from each other at the nearest points. And the Carthaginians and other Phœnicians had come into conflict with the Greek colonists in Sicily long before Greece was threatened by the Persians. Xerxes, before making his attempt on Greece, assured himself that his fleet would not be attacked by the great naval power, by making an alliance with Carthage. Phœnician ships were among the best that fought for him. His plans seem to have been laid with every possible care and completeness. The overthrow of Greece, and of {135} that liberty which all Grecian states, in spite of their jealousy of each other and of their incessant quarrels, prized so very highly, seemed certain. It looked as if the King of Kings, who would rule absolutely, according to the Eastern idea, was sure to bring them under his subjection. The danger was so great that for the moment the states of Greece were able to put their jealousies on one side. Athens and Sparta, and the less powerful states with which one or other was in alliance at the time, drew together. It was a terrible moment for them.

Command of the united land forces of Greece fell, naturally, into the hands of Sparta. The utmost that they were able to gather was but little over 5000 men, of which no more than 500 were actually Spartans. The smallness of the force may give us an idea of the small population of those city states of Greece.

With this gallant body of defenders Leonidas, the Spartan general, encountered the Persian host in the narrow mountain pass of Thermopylæ. It was a situation in which the Persian could make little or no use of his strongest arm, the cavalry, and he was held back, with heavy loss to his soldiers, so much less heavily armed than the Greeks. How that battle would have gone had it been prolonged, we cannot know, for a traitor, one of the great traitors of history, revealed to the Persians another pass across the mountains. They had partly traversed that other pass, and were already threatening the flank and rear of his army, when Leonidas was informed of their movement. He knew his position to be hopeless. He {136} bade the allied troops, who were not his countrymen, retreat and find safety if they could. As for himself and his devoted band of Spartans, they sallied out of the pass, threw themselves on the Persian masses, and went down fighting to the death, an example of gallantry to all future ages.

And Athens, Athens lying, as you see, right before the victors once they had come through the difficult pass—what hope was there for her? None. Her doom seemed certain.

The Athenians saved themselves by a sacrifice that has perhaps only been equalled by the Russians when they burnt their capital of Moscow at the approach of Napoleon's grand army. They quitted their loved city; they left it to be destroyed by the Persians, and moved themselves and their households to islands nearest the coast where they would be under the protection of their ships, which had not yet encountered the Persian fleet. Of these islands one was named Salamis, and between the island and the mainland the Greeks and Persians met in that naval battle which saved Greece. The Persian fleet was utterly defeated. The danger from the sea had vanished. The army of the Persians remained, victorious, in possession of all the territory of Athens. But it had lost the support of its ships.

It was an age of heroes. I do not suppose that any other great victory was due so largely to the genius and determination of one single man as this at Salamis to the Athenian admiral Themistocles. The King of Kings, however, did not behave in any very heroic manner. He scuttled back with the broken remnants of his fleet to his own shores.

The following year made the repulse of the Persians {137} complete. Their army was defeated in a great battle at Platæa, and on the very same day the Grecian fleet engaged and again badly beat the fleet which the Persians had managed to reform. But this time it was not the Persian fleet that was threatening the coast of Greece. This second naval fight was off the coast of Asia Minor, by a headland from which the battle had its name—Mycale.

That day made an end of the Persian threat to Greece. It did more; it gave the Greeks a sense that they were a stronger folk than the Persians, if they met in conditions and numbers at all equal. And that feeling of strength always makes a people that can feel it actually stronger. It helped to make their greatness. The result of the battle at Platæa had been very doubtful in the midst of the fight. The Greeks had been saved only by the steadfast courage of the Spartans. But its conclusion was decisive. Persia was a real danger to Greece no more. On the contrary, it is Greece that we now find carrying the war into Asia Minor and freeing those Ionian coast cities from the yoke of Persia. Perpetual jealousies between the states still prevented Greece from extending her power far. The Persian could still set one combination of states against another. The wonder only is that, in the midst of their fights with each other, they were able to engage in schemes of foreign attack at all.

We may be quite sure of one thing, that the Grecian states never could have stopped the advance of Persia if it had not been for the marvellous courage and discipline of the Spartans, and that the Spartans never could have had this marvellous courage and discipline if it had not been for the remarkable character of their institutions and their government. Their great idea {138} was that the individual man or woman did not matter at all. What mattered was the state—that the state should be powerful, should have good soldiers to defend it and to attack its enemies. It was with that purpose in view that all its laws were made. The Spartans lived not for themselves but for the state. Hardihood, therefore, and courage were what they aimed at in themselves and their children, so that the state might be well served. The Spartan punishments for offences against the laws were fearfully severe. So were the punishments of children by their parents, and for a child to cry or utter a sound under such punishment was regarded as a dreadful disgrace to it. "Spartan fortitude" is a proverbial saying even amongst us to-day. It was training of this kind which made the Spartan troops so steadfast in battle and which gave the Spartans on the whole the leadership over the other states.

It was a very noble idea, very self-sacrificing—this of each citizen living not for himself alone but for the state; but these people were not large-minded enough to carry the idea a little farther and see that it would be for the advantage of all Greece if each state could sacrifice its own interests and good for the sake of the whole. They could sacrifice themselves as individuals for Sparta, but they had no idea of sacrificing Sparta for Greece. On the contrary, they were terribly eager to build up the power of Sparta at the cost of Athens or of any other state. They would even ally themselves with the enemy of all Greece, with Persia, in order to do so.

The other states were equally selfish about their own state interests, but their individuals had not the same idea of self-sacrifice for the good of the state; {139} and therefore their states were not so powerful as Sparta, nor their soldiers so brave and well disciplined.

The Athenians, however, were far more cultivated, better artists, musicians, orators, writers and so on, than the Spartans.

The most glorious days of Greece, we may say, reached from 500 B.C. to 350 B.C. I have made it a rule in this story to bother you as little as possible with names, either of places or persons, and only now and then with dates, because too many names and figures always seem to me to confuse a story; but I am going to name now a few of the greatest persons in these glorious days of Greece because they are the persons who have been makers of the world's very best thoughts and best artistic products.

Homer, that great singer, sang—it is much to be doubted whether he ever wrote—-long before this period. There were also Sappho, the poetess, and Alcæus, who wrote in those metres from which we have named our Sapphics and Alcaics. These did not come within the most glorious days. But in that splendid time, and inspired no doubt by its splendour, came Sophocles and Æschylus, writers of the finest tragedies; there was Euripides, who was a tragic writer for the stage too, yet has imagined some of his scenes in a lighter and livelier way than those older and fearfully grim writers of the drama. Later came Aristophanes, the comic dramatist, who brings on birds and frogs as actors in his plays. There was the mighty orator, Demosthenes. Oratory and speech-making were very much studied and practised. Probably there were a large number of speakers whom even to-day we would think extraordinarily fine. There were a host of painters {140} and musicians; but we cannot hear their music and the pictures have perished.

Then there was Socrates, the great philosopher, and Plato, who wrote the dialogues in which Socrates, who was his master, was the chief speaker. Socrates was not a writer. I suppose we can never know how much in the dialogues is Plato's and how much Socrates'. We may suspect that very much is due to Plato, though he gives Socrates nearly all the credit. Later came Aristotle, who wrote about everything—about philosophy, about science, about morality, about natural history, about government. Plato, before him, or Socrates speaking to us by Plato's pen, had been very much interested in the art of government—in discussing the best form of government. But the government which they all discussed was the government of those small city states which we have seen in Greece. They did not concern themselves with government of large nations and empires.

But almost more glorious than any of these were the sculptors, of whom the greatest were Phidias and Praxiteles. The work of the sculptors was employed chiefly in connection with the work of the architects, of the builders of the temples and the public buildings. The temples were splendidly ornamented with the most perfect statues and cuttings in marble that man has ever produced. The architecture of the Greeks was more perfect than that of any nation before or since. We may suppose, as we have seen, that it owed much to the example of that very fine Minoan art which was produced in Crete very long before, and which was carried to the mainland of Greece, and is especially seen in excavations at Mycenæ.

What is most noticeable about the Egyptian, and also about the Babylonian, architecture of temples and {141} tombs is their enormous size. They seem to have tried to impress the imagination of men by buildings of such size that men going in and out of them are no bigger than ants, comparatively. And they succeed in being impressive in this way. They are terrifying. But the Greek works do not terrify. They are works of pure beauty, and it is their beauty which still charms us as no other work of its kind has ever done.

The sculptures, as I said, are seen chiefly in what remains of the temples, and most of the statues are of gods and goddesses and heroes who were supposed to be super-human; but although they took those divine and half-divine persons as the objects and models of their art, the gods and all that had to do with religion seem to have been of far less importance in the lives of these Greeks than they were in the lives of any of {142} the people whom we have met in the whole course of our story.

The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the peoples of Syria and Palestine, and the Persians all were very much occupied with doing service to their gods, and some of them regulated their lives very much by doing what they thought the gods would wish them to do. With the Greeks, religious ceremonies, or acting as the gods would have them act, hardly came into their lives at all. The persons of Homer's poems pay more attention to the gods than the Greeks of the later time to which we have now come. The former do seem to have had an idea that the chief of the gods, whom they called Zeus, living on top of Mount Olympus with inferior gods and goddesses about him, did interfere with the affairs of men and did punish men who did not do the divine will. But it was a religion that a people so intelligent as these later Greeks could hardly be expected to believe in. They seem to have kept up some pretence of belief, for it was brought as part of a charge against the great philosopher Socrates, on which he was actually condemned to death, that he had spoken impiously of the gods, but we may suspect that this was only used against him by enemies who really had as little respect as he had for such gods as these.

At all events, I do not think that we shall be wrong in saying that these Greeks had no religion at all which made really any difference in their lives until Christianity was brought to them by the Jews, and especially by St. Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles—which means to the peoples that were not of Jewish race.

But they had strong and clear ideas, for all that, of right and wrong, of justice and so on. If they believed {143} at all in a life after death it was of a life so shadowy, and their idea of it was so vague, that it certainly made no difference to their life on earth. The Egyptians were very careful in preserving their dead, in the form of mummies. The Greeks did not treat their dead with quite so much respect. They often burned the bodies, so they had no occasion for immense tombs. A small vase would contain the ashes.

It is interesting to try to imagine the way of life of these people in their city states. We may suppose them to have been a people of very busy active minds, always ready to discuss any new thing, whether it were in art, in philosophy, or science. We may imagine endless discussions going on under the porticoes which gave them shelter from the hot sun. "Stoa," these porticoes or colonnades were called in Greek, and it is from the people disputing there that we get the name of the "Stoic" philosophers. Opposed to them in dispute would be the "Epicureans," or disciples of Epicurus.

These would be disputing, and pupils listening to them, imbibing lessons in oratory and philosophy, and then out in the street might perhaps pass some important person like Pericles, the great statesman, or Alcibiades, or Nicias, the admiral. Any of these would be followed by a great retinue of friends and hangers-on and slaves.

In another part of the city there would be busy shops. Most of the Grecian cities were on the coast; and there would be the port and ships coming and going. Then there would be the gymnasia, where the athletes could be watched, doing exercises, playing games, throwing the javelin or the discus, wrestling, and so on.

Some half of the population of the city would {144} probably be slaves, slaves taken in war or by purchase from their parents in Thrace or other barbarous lands. There was a great slave market in Athens itself, and the sea-faring traders and pirates of whom we have spoken did a little slave-trading among their other business. Probably it was seldom that the slaves were badly treated, and we know that they often were set free and often had quite a good time even while they were slaves. The name "slave" really comes from Slav. It is taken from the name of the Slavonic people, because it was from them that most of the slaves were taken. It is not derived from that Latin word "servus," which is translated "slave," and from which our "serf"—the serfs of the Anglo-Saxons—is taken. A slave might rise to quite high employment, and it is curious to think that the large police force in Athens was at one time composed of more than a thousand slaves from Scythia, that land of wild tribes even farther north and east than Thrace.

It seems that the disputations and all the business were very much the affair of the men only. The women took hardly any part. We have spoken of the poetess Sappho; but this was long before. It is evident that the ladies were more important in the Greek society of Homer's day than they were later. We read of no Greek lady of the glorious days as famous in art or music or literature; and only a very few seem to have been allowed to give their opinions on philosophy or politics. It seems as if they counted for less than they ought to count.

The Greeks were great game-players, especially great at athletic games; and we must not forget that though religion appears to have made little difference in their lives, they were a people who had great respect {145} for old customs and were therefore careful to keep up and perform in proper manner religious ceremonies. In some of them the women took a part.

Even in the very midst of their struggle against the Persians, the Greek states were only with the greatest difficulty able to lay aside their jealousy of each other and to come together to fight; and after that danger from the east had been dispelled they were free to fight with each other, or to quarrel about the leadership. They did fight and quarrel unceasingly for some 150 years. After the final repulse of the Persians, Athens for a time gained the leadership, owing to the disgust of the states at the insolence of the Spartans, who had been leaders before. But Sparta was too strong to be put down easily. At last a combination of the rest of the states under the leadership of Thebes fairly conquered Sparta and took possession of the Spartan territory.

The most famous of this long succession of fights is that between Sparta on the one side and Athens, as the leader, on the other. It is usually called the Peloponnesian War, the Peloponnese being all that part of Greece below the Isthmus of Corinth, and it is chiefly famous because its story has been so wonderfully well told by Thucydides.

Thucydides was a very famous Greek historian. So, too, was Herodotus, who wrote long before him. But Herodotus was more of a story-teller. He was a traveller who wrote about what he saw; and always writes truly when he is telling us of what he himself saw. He has strange tales to tell, about one-eyed men and men who carried their heads under one arm, and so on, which were told him by people whom he met; but he tells them with a warning that he will not vouch for them, because he did not see such things himself.

But he has no idea of telling us the real reason why the stories that he tells happened as they did—the political causes, as we should say, of the events. Any trivial reason seems good enough to him to account for a great war. He would have been quite ready to accept the beautiful lady idea as the reason of the siege of Troy.

Thucydides, on the contrary, looked into the true reasons of the events. He, rather than Herodotus, was the "father of history." There were other fine Greek historians, and notably one, Xenophon, who went with an extraordinary expedition of the Greeks—-10,000 in number—who penetrated, fighting, far into Asia Minor; and then had to retreat again, still fighting, having done very little good. He went and came back with that expedition and wrote the story of it.

But he was not the equal, as historian, of Thucydides, who wrote of the Peloponnesian War, and who wrote, further, of wars which the Greeks, especially the Athenians, had now to carry yet farther afield—or oversea—and not for the first time, to Sicily.

And there, in Sicily, there met together Greeks, Carthaginians, and another people—of a new name, not altogether unimportant in the story—-Latins or Romans from the neighbourhood of that city established on the Tiber.

The story, which I am now trying to carry down to the year 330 B.C. or so, has shifted its scene westward. We have seen how near that island of Sicily lies both to Europe, by way of the toe of Italy, and to Africa, by way of Carthage. It is a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between the two. We must see how the nations met there.

CHAPTER X

THE MEETING OF THE NATIONS ROUND SICILY

Carthage was one of the colonies founded by the Phœnicians. It was not one of the earliest, but it had the advantage of a good harbour for the protection of the ships of those days. It grew in importance and in numbers of inhabitants, so that it soon became the chief of all the stations of the kind which the Phœnicians had planted, sending their colonists out from their native capital cities of Tyre and Sidon.

Now Tyre and Sidon were captured by that great king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon about a hundred years or so before the Persian attacks on Greece, and the effect of that capture of the two capital cities was to leave Carthage as the most powerful city belonging to the Phœnicians. Carthage, then, from that time, became the capital, the chief city, of this great naval power. It was the headquarters of naval power in the Mediterranean. Greek colonists from many different states of Greece had already spread themselves along the shores of Sicily, and even so far as the shores of Spain and those Balearic Islands (or islands of the slingers) where, as we are told, a boy's dinner was always set up on top of a pole and he was not allowed to eat it until he had knocked it down with a stone from his sling. Naturally, the inhabitants learned to be good slingers.

Now, the Phœnicians were evidently not people of the kind that are contented to sit still. They were energetic, pushing; and of course they came into conflict with the Greek colonies. The principal conflicts took place in, or around, Sicily, where the Phœnicians, as well as the Greeks, had long been settled. It was not until Carthage had grown to considerable power that the Phœnicians could hope to do much against the Greeks, and about that time some of the Greek cities also gained strength for military and naval enterprise by coming into rather closer union with each other.

The constitution of very many of the Greek city states went through the same succession of changes. After the rule of the aristocratic party, that is to say, of the best-born people, who were the rich landowners, there came a time of rule by the democracy, that is to say by the poorer, the common people. This democratic rule was so disorderly that a strong single ruler generally arose out of the disorder and established his power, somewhat as Napoleon I. did out of the disorder of the French Revolution. These rulers, or dictators, were called tyrants in Greece, and the changes of the constitutions in the government of their colonial cities in Sicily went on in exactly the same way as in Greece itself. A strong ruler established over one city would often be able to make good his power over another city near him. Thus began to be formed alliances of cities under the rule of one or of a few leading men; and so the Sicilian Greeks found some strength of their own to oppose to the strength of Carthage.

Historians tell us of such sweeping successes of the Phœnicians in the earliest conflicts that if we were to {149} believe them all we should have to believe that hardly a Greek was left in Sicily. But evidently that is not exactly how it did happen, for it was just while the Persians were threatening Greece that Gelo, one of the greatest of the Sicilian "tyrants," established Syracuse as the capital city of Sicily and the headquarters of his power. The Greek colonists had largely assimilated the native peoples to themselves. There had been marriages between them, and Greek thought had penetrated here as it had everywhere that the Greeks went. So the strength of the Greeks in Sicily did not depend on the colonists. Only the Greek colonists seem to have been far more successful in getting help from the native people than the Phœnician colonists were. The Phœnicians, however, had their friends in Sicily, even among the Greeks themselves, for there were jealousies between the Greek cities in Sicily as everywhere else.

I told you that Xerxes for the safety of his fleet had made an alliance with Carthage before making his great attack on Greece. It was something more than a mere arrangement that his ships should not be meddled with as they went to and fro. It was an agreement for some more active help than this. Carthage was to attack the Greek colonial power in Sicily at the same time as Xerxes fell upon the mainland of Greece from the east. The two attacks were so well timed that it is said that the battle which decided the result of the Phœnician expedition against Sicily was fought on the very same day as the battle of Salamis which decided the fate of the Persian attack on Greece. And the result of the one battle was the same as that of the other. Gelo completely vanquished the Phœnicians; so completely that Sicily had rest from their troubling nearly {150} all through what remained of that century—that is to say, for ninety years or so.

During that period the arts and civilisation made great advance in the cities of Sicily. Again, as before, it was really the jealousy and fighting of the Greek cities among themselves that brought them under fresh attack by what they called the barbarian power. Again the Carthaginians came upon them. They were disunited, fighting among themselves. The Athenian navy had come to Sicily to take its part in the fighting, as is told in the splendid history of Thucydides. It was fighting which all grew out of that Peloponnesian War which was fought between Athens, as the leading state in the main part of Greece, on the one side, and Sparta, as the great power of the Peloponnese, on the other. The Syracusans, of Sicily, were originally a Corinthian colony, from Corinth, on the Isthmus between the greater part of Greece and the Peloponnese. The Athenian navy came to Sicily in the year 415 B.C., and if it had made a vigorous attack on Syracuse at its first coming it is probable that the city would have fallen. The Athenian admiral, however, delayed; he allowed the Syracusans time to improve their defences, and he had to sit down to blockade the city both by land and sea. A small Spartan force came to the help of the besieged, they put all their own naval power into the struggle, and in the spring of 413 B.C. fought and defeated the Athenian fleet.

They were just in time, for the very next day strong reinforcements arrived from Athens. With this new force the besiegers tried to recover their lost positions, but were defeated. The Syracusans then blocked the mouth of the harbour in which the Athenian ships lay, and after a final struggle both by land and {151} sea, the Athenians were hopelessly beaten; those who survived had a wretched fate as captives.

But even after this great defence and complete victory there were many different and opposing interests in Sicily. Sometimes a city which you would expect to find helping one side, is found fighting on just the opposite side. The story of the whole would be far too long to tell here. The effect of it all was that when a new Carthaginian force attacked the Sicilian Greeks in 409 B.C. the Greeks were weakened and disunited after all these contentions among themselves.

Again, it was a tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, who drew together the Grecian strength, together with that of the native Sicilians, but it was not until half the Greek cities on the island had been lost and their civilisation destroyed. It is evident that Dionysius was a ruler of very much more than common ability. These tyrants who seized the power in so many of the Greek states, both at home and in the colonies, did not generally sit on their thrones very securely or very long, but Dionysius reigned for no less than thirty-eight years. He employed a large number of mercenary troops, both Greeks and others; he had Sparta as an ally, and he sustained four invasions of the Carthaginians. He made alliances with some of the states on the Italian mainland, and made war on others, till he became master of much of the southern region of Italy. But it was for a time only, and the power of Syracuse was never firmly established on any part of the mainland.

After the death of Dionysius there was continual fighting, for and around Sicily, between the Carthaginians on the one side and the Sicilian Greeks, with various and often-changing alliances, on the other. At one moment we see the Sicilians actually carrying {152} the war into Africa, while at the very same moment the Carthaginians are attacking the Sicilians in Sicily itself!

And so the story goes, a story of continual contests, with continually changing results, down to 300 B.C. and later, and gradually we begin to hear more and more of a certain small, and at first quite insignificant, state in Italy, namely, Rome, taking part in the contest. It is a part that becomes greater and greater as time goes on till it fills almost every chapter and page.

But now that we have traced the story of what was happening in and about Sicily, and Carthage, and Italy, down to this date of about 300 B.C., we have to turn back again, first to Greece itself and then to the eastern side of the Mediterranean, for tremendous events have been going on there during the last half-century of this period.

We left it, you will remember, with the Persians repulsed, no longer a serious danger to Greece, yet the Greeks themselves unable, because of their own jealousies and divisions, to make any large conquests in Asia Minor. A new power, of over-mastering strength, suddenly appears in that eastern portion of our picture—the power of Macedon.

CHAPTER XI

MACEDON

The country of Macedon, as you will see on the Greek map, lies northward of Greece. It was inhabited by tribes of the Slavs, or Slavonic people, who lived the agricultural and pastoral life, tilling the soil and having flocks and herds. About 100 years after the battle of Salamis, a baby was born of the royal house of Macedonia. He was given the name of Philip. His childhood was spent at Thebes, in Greece, where he had been sent, or had been taken, as a hostage. When he came to the throne of Macedon he seems at once to have begun to strengthen the army, and to improve its organisation. He had acquired his ideas of what an army should be, as we may suppose, while he was being educated at Thebes. The Macedonian army was formed much on the model of the Greek army, but there were certain differences, and every one of the differences seems to have been an improvement.

There was a phalanx, after the model of the Greek phalanx, and therein was the great strength of the infantry. But the phalanx of the Macedonians was not quite so closely packed (there was more space between one soldier and the next) as the Greek phalanx, and it was able to adopt this more open formation by means of giving to each soldier a longer spear or pike than the Greek soldier had. Thus the Macedonian phalanx was able to move more quickly than the Greek, {154} and also could cover more ground with the same number of men.

Now as to the cavalry. The Greeks, as we saw, were not nearly so well off as the Persians for horses. They had not the unlimited extent of horse-raising country that the Persians had in the lands towards the east. But the Macedonians, on the contrary, were almost as well off in this way as the Persians themselves. Away back in Thrace and Scythia they had these unlimited extents, so their cavalry became a very strong force.

And the same lands which provided them with horses provided them with soldiers also. Philip began to use his great strength of arms by making himself master of the countries on all sides of the kingdom of Macedon, to which he had succeeded. There were many Greek colonies or small cities along the coast of Macedonia itself. These he took possession of with little trouble. Certain of the Greeks at home began to be alarmed by the growth of this power in the north. You may have heard of some famous orations called "Philippics," delivered by the great orator Demosthenes, at Athens. Their name comes from this very Philip of Macedon, because it was in the hope of rousing the Athenians to take strong measures, and to unite with other states to oppose his power, that they were made.

But, as usual, there were jealousies. Athens did at length combine with Thebes to oppose Philip, but by that time he had found allies in Greece itself. He marched south, met the Thebans and Athenians at Chæronea, in 338 B.C., and won a battle which makes a very great difference in our story, for it was so decisive that it practically put an end, once for all, to the independence of Greece. Greece for many years had to {155} do what Macedonia ordered. Philip was given, or assumed, command of all the Greek armies, with a title which has been translated "Captain-General." Commander-in-Chief might describe it nearly as well, and is a title better known to us.

And now, for the first time, we have a really united Greece. But though a united Greece, it was not a free Greece. It was united because it was under the masterful rule of the Macedonians.

But, being united, and joined moreover with the forces of the Macedonians and their allies it probably was the greatest fighting force the world had yet known. There was one direction in particular in which it was likely that it would make its force felt—against Persia.

In the midst of the preparation for the invasion of the Persian empire, Philip was assassinated, after reigning for twenty-three years, and was succeeded by his son Alexander—Alexander the Great—then only twenty years old. And Alexander the Great died only twelve years later. He was therefore only thirty-two years old at his death. Yet he had time to win the name of Great; and when you hear his story you will think that it was well deserved, for the story is extraordinary.

It is extraordinary by reason of the immense extent of territory over which Alexander went victoriously and with marvellous rapidity. But the explanation is not very far to seek—it lies in that very powerful army and fighting machine which had been delivered to him by his father; in that, and in the lack of resisting power in the enemies whom it overcame, is the explanation of his success.

The fighting power of the Persian empire had spent itself; and partly it had spent itself in the destruction {156} of the fighting power of the nations with which it had come into touch. In that, as it seems, taken together with the very real strength of Alexander's army, lies the explanation. The Persian power, moreover, apart from its loss in actual fighting, had probably lost much by life in conditions more easy and pleasant than those in the more rugged and barren country from which Cyrus had led the Persians. We have noticed the same change in the character of conquering nations already, and may see it yet again in course of the great story.

As for this particular story which we are telling at the moment, about Alexander and the march of his ever-victorious army, it will be a short story although such a marvellous one. It is short, just because the march had scarcely a stopping-place, scarcely a check, all through.

This Alexander, succeeding to the throne of Macedonia and to all that his father Philip had made of that throne, and to the command-in-chief of the great army which Philip had created, had been educated by perhaps the most wonderful man of that wonderful Greek nation—the philosopher Aristotle. We call him philosopher, but there was no branch of the learning of that time, and it was a time of great learning, which he does not seem to have known perfectly. The additions that he made to every branch of that learning are most astonishing.

We have to look on this young Alexander, then, as being as perfectly trained and taught as it was possible for a young man to be, and as having come into his kingdom with this great army ready to start, with all its plans laid, for the Persian invasion. Let us see what use he made of it. We know its composition—a certain number of Macedonian native soldiers, Greek and other allies; and we know its general way of {157} fighting, with the quickly moving Macedonian phalanx, armed with the long pikes, and the hosts of cavalry on good horses. But he was a very young king. The Greeks seem to have thought they had a chance, on his accession, of freeing themselves from the Macedonian yoke. Even in his own kingdom there was trouble, and some of the tribes in the north rose in revolt. Alexander crushed all these various attempts against his power. Twice he had to march south, to Thebes, that city where he had been as a boy. Once it admitted him at the head of his army without a fight, but on the second occasion, when it had taken arms again against Macedon on hearing a false rumour that Alexander had been killed in some fighting in the north, he came down and razed the city walls and punished the inhabitants with fearful severity.

These home troubles occupied two years of his reign, and in the third year he crossed the Hellespont with his great army and had his first big meeting with the Persian forces on the river Granicus. He was completely victorious.

But Darius, the Persian monarch, still claiming the title of King of Kings, was not likely to be content with the result of a single battle. He gathered his strength anew, and again met Alexander in the following year, at Issus, in Syria. This time his defeat was even more decisive than before.

Alexander advanced southward conquering. He took all the Phœnician cities of the coast, though Tyre made an obstinate defence, and swept down into Egypt. Egypt appears to have made no attempt—perhaps it had little wish—to resist him. By this time there were many Greeks in Egypt, and it is likely that they would receive the forces of the Macedonians, {158} among which were many of their kinsmen, almost more as friends than foes. The city of Alexandria, founded by him, or in his honour, takes its name from him.

The Persians, however, were not yet done with. By 321 B.C., two years after his defeat at Issus, Darius had collected an army greater than ever before, and Alexander, coming eastward out of Egypt, met this vast host, said to have been a million strong, at Gaugemela, or Arbela, and in this third and last conflict his victory was decisive. Darius fled eastward, with Alexander constantly in pursuit of him. Alexander took the great cities of Babylon and Susa on his way. The fugitive Darius was assassinated in Parthia, and Alexander's lordship over the ancient empire was complete.

Yet that was not enough for him. He pushed forward into India, across high mountain ranges and wide rivers. What he accomplished there, in the way of conquest, was marvellous, yet it had no big effect on the great story, because his conquests beyond the mountains were not lasting. His wonderful troops, though they must have looked on him as almost supernatural in his ability to lead them on to victory, began to long for their homes, probably to wonder if they would ever see them again after coming so far. He reached the shores of the Indian Ocean, and thence set his face to return homeward.

In Babylonia he stayed awhile, arranging for the government of the immense empire of which he was the undisputed master, and there he died, of a fever which is said to have been brought on, or greatly increased, by intemperate drinking—a death unworthy of his extraordinary achievements and of a pupil of such a master as Aristotle.

And death at thirty-two! The exploits of Alexander and his army are unequalled in the whole course of the story of the world. Yet we must ever remember how much of that immense achievement was due to the genius of his father Philip, who created all the fighting force which the son led so triumphantly. The fame of the son is so glorious that the father's work is rather hidden by it. What Philip might have done, if he had lived, with the great machine of war which he devised we cannot tell, but it is sure that Alexander could not have achieved his conquests as he did but for the machinery which his father had made ready for him.

No doubt death came for the great conqueror quite unexpectedly in his thirty-third year, and he had made no arrangements as to who was to be his successor on the throne of the vast empire that he had won. There was no lack of claimants for it. Many of his victorious generals were willing enough, and there was much confused fighting among the victors and the forces under the command of each. One of the principal generals, Ptolemæus, or Ptolemy, was the commander of the armies that held Egypt. In Babylonia and Syria it appears that there was a period of rivalry and struggle between several of the leading generals, until at length one of them, Seleucus, prevailed over the rest, and he claimed to be, and in large measure really was, ruler of Syria and of the East as Ptolemy was ruler of Egypt. The proud title of King of Kings, which the Persian monarchs had assumed, now came to nothing, seeing that there were at least two kings now in this eastern part of the world. Seleucus and his successors, called the Seleucidæ, became established as Kings of Syria, in its new {160} capital city of Antioch; and Ptolemy and his successors, called the Ptolemies, became no less firmly seated on the throne of the ancient Pharaohs in Egypt.

Others of Alexander's generals who became rulers of one or other part of his empire after his death were Antigonus, Lysimachus, and Cassander. Cassander was son of Antipater, whom Alexander had left as his regent in Macedonia to govern the country for him when he went on his wars against the Persians. All these generals and their followers continued fighting, with various results, until the great and decisive battle at Ipsus (not Issus), of which the practical result was that Cassander was established as king of Macedonia and Greece. The battle of Ipsus was fought in 301 B.C., twenty-two years later than the battle of Issus. Seleucus and Lysimachus were the victorious leaders over Antigonus, who was killed during the fight in this battle of Ipsus; and to Lysimachus had already been assigned the kingdom of Thrace.

So now, in 300 B.C., we have Cassander over Macedonia and Greece, Lysimachus over Thrace, Seleucus over Syria and Babylonia, and Ptolemy over Egypt. That is the condition of affairs at that date on this eastern side of the picture. But it had not been brought about without some sharp fighting between Seleucus and Ptolemy, and here, as before, Palestine was like the horseshoe between the blacksmith's hammer and his anvil. It lay right in the path between the two great combatants.

Alexander, when he went conquering, with little or no opposition, into Egypt, had shown much favour to the Jews. We have seen that many of them had returned, under favour of Cyrus the Persian, from their Babylonian exile, to Jerusalem. The temple had been {161} rebuilt, not without a good deal of interference from their Syrian neighbours; the religious rites had been re-instituted and were strictly observed.

Alexander, it appears, showed consideration to the Jews in Jerusalem. He was, we may presume, a Greek in his religious views—that is to say, that religion made very little difference and had very little part in his life. He would not care what god a subject people liked to worship, so long as they did not oppose him. He took some of the Jews down with him, or had them brought, into Egypt, where there were already some of their nation, and they were given quarters of their own and a synagogue, or place of assembly and worship, in the new city of Alexandria. So here we have yet another step in that dispersion of the Jews which was to bring their religion, on which Christianity is founded, into all parts of the world.

I mentioned too that, rather as the Jewish religion became known throughout the world by the dispersion of those who followed it, so also did the thought and culture of the Greeks become known by the way in which that wonderful people was spread abroad. I have been writing of Macedonians hitherto as though they were a people altogether different from the Greeks, and so in truth, and in origin, they were. But I want you to realise that though they conquered Greece by their force of arms, it was (as always happened whenever Greeks met people of other nationality) the Greek thought that conquered their thought. They began more and more to think in the Greek way. Moreover, their very armies were largely Greek.

Thus it came to pass, in course of time, that the distinction between Macedonian and Greek began to be lost. After all, Macedon was a very near neighbour {162} of Greece herself. There must have been much coming and going between the two. Therefore the "Hellenising" of the world, as you may read it described—which means making the thought of the world like the thought of Hellas, which is another name for Greece—went on very fast and was spread abroad very widely. There is no part of that world which is the scene of our great story which it had not reached and in which it had not made a considerable difference in the lives of the inhabitants. Over a large part of it Greek had become the language in use among the better-educated classes. Seleucus was particularly active in introducing Greeks and Greek customs into the kingdom under his rule.

The possession of Palestine, inevitably, because of its position, had been very much disputed between Seleucus and Ptolemy after Alexander's death, but the dispute was decided by the battle of Ipsus, which seems to have cleared the air all round. Palestine then became subject to Egypt and so remained under successive Ptolemies for more than a hundred years.

The Jews in Judæa, with that love of their own customs which has always been remarkably strong in their nation, held out against the introduction of Greek thought and language, and so on, longer than any of their neighbours, but many Jews, as we have seen, had settled in Alexandria. The first three, at least, of the Ptolemies, who successively reigned in Egypt, showed favour to them; they had synagogues in other cities of Egypt besides Alexandria, and those Jews of Egypt, besides those who were in Babylonia and other parts of Asia, had the habit of coming up to Jerusalem, where was the Temple, to attend their great religious ceremonies. And these Jews brought to Jerusalem the {163} Greek language and thought, so that the Greek influence penetrated there too at last.

Alexandria became a great city for men of letters, learned men and writers, as well a great city of trade and a great seaport. The largest library of the ancient world was collected—and later was destroyed by fire—in that city. And there, probably before 250 B.C., the books of the Old Testament, originally written in Hebrew, were translated into Greek. Possibly not all were translated at that time, but it seems at least certain that the first five books, called the Pentateuch, were done into Greek about that date. Wherever they went the Jews never lost sight of their sacred books. The records of their history and their religious institutions were always with them.

Under the later kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty the government of Egypt was less strongly maintained, the power of Egypt waned, and in 198 B.C. the Egyptians were thoroughly defeated by the Syrians on the banks of the Jordan, and Judæa and Jerusalem came under the rule of the Syrian king. He did not interfere with their religion or their customs, and for a while the change of rulers appears to have made very little difference to them.

Such, then, is the outline which I would have you carry in your minds of the position of those peoples of the story on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, in Egypt southward, and in Thrace, Macedon, and Greece. And now I would ask you to come back again to look at the western side of the picture, for the time has fully come when we should bring more prominently into it a figure which will grow larger and larger until it grows to such a size as to fill in the whole frame, and more than the frame—the figure of world-conquering Rome.

CHAPTER XII

ROME AND CARTHAGE

I am afraid you will have suffered disappointment from time to time in the course of the telling of this greatest of great stories. I am afraid that I have been obliged to speak rather slightingly of that beautiful lady for whose sake you will have heard that the Trojan War was fought, the lady about whom Homer sang. I have made my excuses for that disrespectful treatment.

There is another famous lady of whom Virgil, the great Latin poet, sings—Queen Dido, of Carthage. His story goes that Æneas, the Trojan, escaping over-sea after the fall of Troy, was swept by storms into Carthage, where Dido entertained him pleasantly. From her court he went to Italy, and from him the Romans were said to be descended. The Æneid—that is, the story of Æneas—is the name of Virgil's poem in which this tale is told. You may believe as much or as little of it as you like, for there is no evidence at all that it is true; but it is a fine tale, finely told.

Then there is the story about Romulus and Remus and the good old wolf-mother, and the rest of it—all very pleasant too. But I do not think that you need believe any more of that either than you like.

They are not very ancient stories, nothing like as old as some of the stories about Egypt and Babylonia for which there is plenty of evidence. A thousand {165} years or so B.C. could cover them all. Yet for what was really going on round about what came to be called Rome we have very little evidence until a great deal later. One other pretty tale certainly has some truth in it—the story that the Gauls came down upon Rome, and that the Capitol, or strong citadel, on which the sentries must have gone to sleep, was only saved by the alarm being given by some geese. There may be some doubt as to whether the geese really were there, and were the city's saviours, for it is possible that this too, like other tales, may have seemed to the poets to be a pretty story to tell, and they may have told it to please their hearers without inquiring closely into its truth; but however it may have been about the geese, there is no doubt at all about the Gauls. They were there, and in terrible numbers, and they only consented to go away on being bribed to do so with an immense sum of money. So it is not a very dignified appearance that this great Rome makes on her first appearance in our story—saved from Gauls, in the first instance, by geese, and in the second place by bribes! This happened in 390 B.C.

By Gaul we generally understand France—the Gallic, or Gaulic nation. But Gaul at that time was the name of the country not only of what we now call France, but of a great deal of the north of what we call Italy. So the Gauls had not very far to come to reach Rome. Although the Capitol, the citadel, was saved from the Gauls at this time, the Gauls destroyed the city completely, and after their retirement the Romans set about its rebuilding.

You will see, of course, that I have only told you, so far, who the Romans were not. I have not told you who they were. But I have a very good reason for {166} that. I have not told you, and I am not going to tell you, because I do not know.

Rome has been called the City of the Seven Hills, because it is built on those seven hills which stand above the River Tiber that runs out westward into the Mediterranean Sea. What we do know is that peoples from the neighbouring country came and settled themselves on one or other of these hills. They were peoples of different origins. The most civilised, in the earliest days of this settlement, were from the district called Etruria. They were Etruscans. The Sabines were another of these peoples. And there were Latins from Latium, in which district Rome itself was situated.

These peoples became united into one state under rulers of the Latin race, and that, in very few words, appears to have been the origin of the Roman nation. The Etruscans seem at first to have been pushed off the hills into the plains by the others, and there was frequent fighting between the plain people and the hill people. For their protection from the attacks from the plains, the early kings of Rome built walls round the seven hills; but the Etruscans, though they had given way at first to the Latins and Sabines, must have come back as conquerors. They were a powerful people. They imposed their own kings upon the Romans, and Romans and Etruscans together became the strongest nation in the country.

Probably the Romans never were satisfied with their Etruscan kings, who seem to have governed with great severity. More than a hundred years before the Gauls came upon them, which was in 390 B.C., they successfully rebelled, drove out the kings and set up a republic. The Etruscans strove to restore them, and the struggle went on until a very important victory was gained by {167} the Roman republican armies at Veii. The Romans had never been so strong in Italy before, and although the attack of the Gauls threatened them with destruction only six years later, those barbarians, after a seven months' siege of the Capitol, went back and made no attempt at establishing their power permanently. The Romans rebuilt their walls and their houses. They were engaged in almost perpetual fighting with other peoples, of whom we should notice particularly the Samnites, in one or other part of Italy. Now and again they met with reverses, but on the whole they prevailed and extended their authority over the countries that they conquered. The aid of the Romans was sought by now one and now another people who found themselves pressed by hostile neighbours; and the help was given in consideration that those who were helped should regard their helper for ever after as their master.

It was a little later than 300 B.C. that the Greek city states established along the southern shores of Italy found themselves bothered by the attacks of some inland neighbours and called for the aid of Rome. There was one of these cities, however, and the most important, which repelled the assistance of the Roman Republic, jealous of her growing power. This was Tarentum. And just at the moment when the struggle between the Roman forces and this Greek city, which must inevitably have ended in the defeat of the Greeks, was about to commence, Tarentum found a new ally in Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus.

Epirus, as you may see, is the north-western region of Greece, and the nearest to Italy. Pyrrhus had allied himself by marriage with Ptolemy of Egypt and had made a great effort to gain the throne of Macedonia, {168} but was defeated in that attempt and had to content himself awhile with being king of his own little country of Epirus. It was then that there came to him, and was welcomed by him, a call to their assistance by the people of Tarentum menaced by the Roman armies.

Pyrrhus marched into Italy with a force that was strong in cavalry and also in elephants. The elephants seem to have terrified the Romans, and Pyrrhus won several victories. But though he won victories it was always at so great a cost to his own force that the phrase "a Pyrrhic victory," which you may have heard, is taken even now to mean a victory in which the victor loses more heavily than the vanquished.

We are now, I would have you see, at a point of some particular interest in the great story, for it is the first time that Greek and Roman have been facing each other and fighting each other in any large force and as nation against nation.

Pyrrhus, after his victories, called on Rome to surrender. His army was then on the Roman territory of Latium. Rome replied that she would hold no parley with a foe as long as any of his troops were on her soil. It was a proud reply, worthy of her future greatness, to a victorious enemy at her very gates; but she had formed a strong confederation of several states that acknowledged her as their sovereign and was still formidable. Pyrrhus won another victory, but again gained little by it, and finding that his project did not prosper in Italy itself he went over to Sicily.

He came to that island on the invitation of the Greek city states there, who wished his help to rid them of the Carthaginians, but here again, although he won victories, he could not establish his power. He {169} made himself thoroughly unpopular with the Greeks, who had called him in, by the despotic manner in which he tried to lord it over them, and, what was still worse for him, his attacks on the Carthaginians drove them to make an alliance with the Romans against him. A result of that alliance was that when, after three years of unproductive fighting in Sicily, he went back to the mainland of Italy, his fleet was attacked and severely handled by the Carthaginians. He fought one more battle against the Romans and their confederates, in Italy, but he did not receive much support from the Tarentines or any of the Italian-Greek cities. This time it was not even a "Pyrrhic victory" for him, but a decisive defeat, and he went back to his native Epirus after a six years' absence. He was killed some years later in a political revolution in Greece.

The total result of the enterprise of Pyrrhus was to establish Rome more firmly than ever as the mistress state of Italy, and to bring her into alliance, which was very soon to be broken, with the great sea-power of the Carthaginians.

The story of Rome herself, within the city walls, during all the years from the expulsion of the Etruscan kings down to the date, about 280 B.C., to which we have now come, was one of perpetual struggle between the patricians, the aristocratic party, and the plebs, the party of the people, the populace. The patricians had all the power after the first driving out of the Tarquins, as the Etruscan kings were called, because they had been the chief managers of the revolution against them, but all through the later years the populace grew in power, and took the power out of the hands of the patricians. The constitution of the state became, as we should say, more and more democratic. {170} The power fell more and more into the hands of the "demos," the plebeians, the common people.

The Romans, as you saw, had made an alliance with the Carthaginians at the time of the invasion of Italy and Sicily by Pyrrhus; but it was a friendship that lasted only a very short while. Our story is now coming to a point at which it will be very largely occupied by wars between these two nations who are now, for the moment, friends. The Romans continually accused the Carthaginians of treachery and of broken faith. The Roman name for the Carthaginians was "Punici," which is somehow derived from the name, Phœnicia, of the country from which, as you know, the colony of Carthage was founded. So bitterly did the Romans resent their acts of treachery that the words "Punica fides," that is to say, Punic, or Carthaginian, faith, were used as a kind of proverb to express a faith or fidelity which was no faith at all—a promise made only to be broken. Probably they were not very true to their engagements; they were a very bold, enterprising people, wonderful sailors, considering the ships that they had. They went round Africa, they planted colonies all along the shores of Spain, they went to the Cassiterides, or tin islands, which are said to have been our own British islands. It is a marvellous record of adventure.

But they do not seem to have been as highly civilised as the Romans, who had been very largely influenced by this time by that civilisation and culture of Greece which we have seen spreading itself very widely. Greece had some influence even with them, for among the temples for the worship of those gods Baal and Astaroth, which they had brought with them from Phœnicia, was a temple to the Greek god {171} Apollo. But in thinking over the whole story of the intercourse and the fighting between Rome and Carthage we ought to remember that it is almost entirely from the Roman point of view that we have the story told. We do not know much of what the Carthaginians might have had to say about the Romans. They might perhaps have said something about broken faith on the Roman side also. It is likely that neither party was very particular about keeping promises which it was more convenient not to keep.

However that may be, it was almost inevitable that trouble must break out between them before long; for here was the great and growing land power of Rome on the northern side of the Mediterranean stretching down the long leg of Italy; here was Carthage, with its powerful navy, its determined sailors, and its adventurous courage, on the southern shore; and there was Sicily, supposed to be independent of both, lying like a football just at the very toe of Italy, ready to be kicked, and reaching nearly over to the Carthaginian coast. It was an unfortunate position for that island, and may remind us of the position of Palestine as the bridge between the great ancient empires of Egypt and Babylonia. There is this difference between the positions of the two, that the fighting round about Sicily was sure to be largely naval, an affair of sea-fights. It was not so in Palestine.

Pyrrhus was driven back home to Epirus out of Italy in 275 B.C. In 268 B.C., only seven years later, began the first of those great struggles between Rome and Carthage which are known as the Punic Wars. There were three of these wars, interrupted by truces which—owing, as the Romans said, to the infamous "Punica fides"—never were lasting. The true reason {172} doubtless was that both powers were too masterful in character to endure a rival. One or other had to have the upper hand. There were times in the struggle when it looked very doubtful indeed which would have it.

Sicily was of great importance to the Romans, because they depended much on the supply of corn which it gave them. That was another reason, besides the reason of its position as a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between the two great rivals, why it became their battle-field. If the Carthaginians could get Sicily, they could cut off much of the enemy's food supply. The Romans, for their own preservation, had to make sure of Sicily. It was over the possession of Sicily that this first Punic war broke out.

The Romans had gradually made their fleet stronger and stronger until they were powerful enough to risk a sea battle with the great naval forces of Carthage, and they twice met and beat the navies of Carthage, once in 260 B.C. and again four years later. Thus, having command of the sea, they ventured to send an army into Africa, against Carthage itself, but there they suffered a very heavy defeat and their general was taken captive. The Carthaginians were much aided in this victory by Spartan mercenaries. But the fate of Sicily, where there were both Roman and Carthaginian armies, remained to be decided. The war went on, with varying results, in and around that unfortunate island, with now the one nation and now the other gaining a victory, until a decision was at length reached by a great victory of the Romans in 241 B.C. This war had lasted twenty-seven years.

And here we may note a point in which Rome seems to have been like our own country, of which {173} Napoleon I. complained that she always won "the last battle of a war." Many times we see her very hardly pressed, with the enemy at the gates of the city; but she goes on fighting and she wins the last battle, the battle which counts and which settles the result in her favour.

Carthage had very great trouble with her own mercenary troops at the end of the first war against Rome; they demanded their pay, which was long overdue. That matter was largely settled by such heavy fighting between them and the Carthaginians themselves that comparatively few of the mercenaries were left alive at the end of it to receive pay, if there had been any for them.

In the years that followed, Carthage became rich and prosperous. She had a large trade with the interior of Africa as well as with all the coast cities round the Mediterranean. She worked mines in Spain, and in order to draw more wealth from that rich and fertile country she gradually made herself mistress of a great part of it, and it was the capture by Carthage of Saguntum, a city in southern Spain, which was in the Roman alliance, that led to the outbreak in 219 B.C. of the Second Punic War.

The Carthaginian general who captured Saguntum, and thus provoked this greatest of the three Punic Wars, was Hannibal, perhaps the most famous leader of armies in all history.

In telling this story of the world in mere outline, as I am trying to tell it, it is impossible to speak of any of the details of his extraordinary campaign. He had his army there in southern Spain. He marched with it, {174} meeting no very serious opposition, through Spain into that northern part of Italy which was then part of Gaul, and he thence descended into southern Italy and into the very heart of the Roman country itself. He won three great victories over the Roman armies on the way, and finally, a fourth, at Cannæ, in the autumn of 216 B.C., three years after he set out from Spain; and after Cannæ Rome herself seemed to lie at his mercy.

Why he did not at once press on and lay siege to the city is one of the puzzles of history. His army had been continuously marching and fighting; he may have thought that it needed rest. Almost certainly he expected further forces to be sent him from Carthage. But these forces did not come.

There were several rival parties in Carthage itself, and it seems likely that there was jealousy of Hannibal's great successes. Whatever the reason, the help he expected was very long in coming. He stayed on in Italy with his army which had been so victorious. The Romans would not come to another fixed battle with him, but they hovered about his army, continually harassing it. Probably it lost much of its fighting force in this time of waiting. It was not until nine years after Cannæ that Hannibal's brother, Hasdrubal, was sent with an army to his help, and by that time the Romans had so recovered their strength that they met and defeated, on the Metaurus, this army of Hasdrubal's; and it was really this great battle that settled the war. It left Hannibal helpless for any big fighting in Italy. {175} It left the Romans free to make their power firm again in Spain. They were so little troubled by the presence of Hannibal, in his present condition, in Italy, that they again sent a force oversea into Africa. This time their arms were completely successful over the Carthaginians and their African allies. The Carthaginians, in their alarm, recalled Hannibal, to see if his genius could save them. But it was too late. He was defeated in the battle of Zama, in 202 B.C., and therewith came the end of the Second Punic War.

Really it was the end of Carthage as a formidable rival to the power of Rome. In the arrangements which followed she was compelled to give up her fleet, to give up all her claims on Spain, and on the islands in the Mediterranean, and to be content with her possessions in Africa itself.

Why she did not meet her doom after Cannæ, we can never know. Had Hannibal pressed forward after that victory the whole course of the great story would probably have been quite different. To what extent the hand of Providence interferes at such moments of the story as these we cannot tell—or to what extent man is allowed to work out his own fortunes without that correcting hand. Undoubtedly there are certain moments when it looks very much as if Providence had actively intervened; and perhaps, in our ignorance, we had better not attempt to say more than that.

For more than fifty years, Rome had no trouble from Carthage, nor can she really have been very seriously troubled when, in 149 B.C., she declared the Third Punic War. Carthage had existed during that half-century as an opulent and large city. She had made alliance with some of the African peoples. There {176} were certain of the Romans who deemed her power dangerous. A pretext for a quarrel was easily found. Rome had now become so powerful that there was no question as to where the battle-fields of this war would be. There was no prospect of a Punic force in Italy or Sicily. The war, which began in 149, lasted for three years, for the Carthaginians within their walls made a desperate resistance which was worthy of their splendid history; but at the last they had to yield. No mercy was shown; the city was destroyed. Carthage ceased to exist.

CHAPTER XIII

ROME AT HOME AND IN THE EAST

As we have seen, there was a moment in the Second Punic War, just after the Battle of Cannæ, when it seems marvellous that Rome escaped destruction. What is almost more marvellous still is that it was just during the same time that she was fighting so hard, and in the end so victoriously, against the Carthaginians that she was able to fight and to extend her power towards the East, over Macedon, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. It is an extent of conquest which must seem most marvellous of all when we consider how quickly it was all done. It is only a few pages back that we have seen her coming into the great story at all, as an actor of any importance, and now she begins to take such a masterful part in it that all the rest become of little account when compared with her.

How did that happen? We may be very sure that it could never have happened unless those Romans had been very uncommon people, unless they had possessed great courage and determination, and unless they had devised a very excellent form of government, both for themselves and also for the nations over whom their armies and their fleet got the mastery. The fighting forces had to be of splendid qualities in order to win that mastery, but the government had to be wonderfully wise in order to keep it.

It is a point that you should notice particularly, that all through the story of Rome, even from those days when the story is really so little known that you need not believe much more of it than you like—from the days of Romulus and Remus and of the mother-wolf—we are told that Romulus himself appointed a body of men called the Senate to manage the affairs of the city. What I want you to notice is that the name Senate comes from the Latin word "senex," meaning an old man. This governing assembly was an assembly of the old men, and they were thought likely to be the best rulers because they had lived long in the world and had been learning the lessons that it had to teach them longer than younger men.

All through their story, down to a later date than that to which we have followed it, they paid very much reverence to old age. The power of the father was very great over his children, and the authority of the mother was looked up to only a little less than his. The children were thus brought up in the habit of obedience to their parents, and there is not the least doubt that this habit must have helped them to be obedient to military discipline when they had to go out and fight.

Even after their fathers had died they had a great reverence for their memory, and this reverence made them try to be worthy sons of their fathers and to rival them in fine actions, in showing courage and so on. And this same feeling made them very respectful of all the customs that their fathers had followed. The custom of their ancestors was the custom that they thought they ought to follow. Religion, in the sense of expecting a reward or punishment from the gods, whether for good or for bad deeds, does not seem {179} to have counted for much in their lives, but this idea, of living in a manner of which their ancestors would have approved, to some extent took the place of religion. It made fine men and women of them, ready to fight their best for the state and to die for it.

I do not mean that the Senate was chosen by Romulus really of the hundred oldest men in his city—a hundred is said to have been its number at first, but it increased to many times a hundred as time went on—but it would have been made up of men of age and experience chosen from the most important citizens. Thus it continued right on to the time when the Tarquins, the Etruscan kings, were driven out; and after they were driven out the Senators chose, each year, two of their own number to be the rulers of the state for that year. As these rulers, called consuls, ruled for a year only, it is probable that the Senate knew pretty well what they were likely to do during that year. The Senate would not elect consuls who would go against the will of the Senate. So probably it was the Senate that really had the power.

The Senate was thus an aristocratic body, as we might call it. The men who composed it were called "patricians"; and there again you see the idea of reverence for the father's authority, because "patrician" comes from "pater," meaning a father.

But, as we have noticed already, the plebs, or common people, that is to say, all who were not patricians, began to assert themselves more and more against the government by this patrician, or aristocratic, class. After a while they gained the right of holding their own assembly, called the Comitia (from "co" or "com," meaning together, and "ire" to {180} go)—they "went together" in this assembly. And as they were, of course, far more in number than the Senate, they succeeded by degrees in getting more and more power of law-making and so on into their hands. They, according to the laws which they succeeded in passing, became the chief power in the state, and the Senate was only a bad second to them.

But though that was the condition of things according to the law, the power which the Senate retained was, in fact, very considerable, because the Senate, still only a few hundred in number, were always there, in Rome, ready to be called together and come to a decision. The Comitia, composed of members many of whom lived at a distance outside Rome, and not at hand to express their views and give their votes, could not decide matters nearly so quickly; and often, when Rome was so constantly at war, important decisions had to be taken quickly.

Chiefly for this reason, though in part for various other reasons too, the power of the Senate was still great, and far greater than it would have been if they had kept strictly to what they were allowed to do by law.

The Forum, that famous place of assembly, of which we may still see the remains in Rome, was the site where the Comitia met. It was only those who were owners of land, or who owned property of a certain value, who had the right to vote in the Comitia, and it was a right that belonged only to citizens of the Roman Republic and a few cities outside, which had won this privilege by some special services rendered to the Republic. In its beginnings the Comitia may have been open to patricians only, but by the time that Rome came to take any big part in the story of the {181} world the Comitia had become the assembly of the people, as opposed to the patrician Senate.

The ownership of land or of property sufficient to give a man a vote for the Comitia made him a citizen in another sense also, namely, that he was obliged, if summoned, to take arms for the Republic and serve in war, and these citizens, thus summoned, became the famous Roman legions which won battles all over the world. After a while, as the power of Rome extended, legions were formed in subject provinces far away from the capital city, but they were always under the command of Roman officers.

It would take far too long to tell you about all the stages by which the people, the common citizens, grew to have more and more power, and the patricians to have less. You must understand that the Senate was not in the least like our House of Lords. The eldest son of a Senator did not become a Senator when his father died, but the numbers of the Senate were kept up by elections, and some of the highest officials of the Comitia became Senators by reason of their holding these offices, so that by degrees many of the plebs, that is, of the people themselves, became Senators, and this made the citizens more content than they would otherwise have been with the Senate deciding how the wars should be carried on and when it was right to make war and peace with their enemies.

The number of soldiers in a legion was from four to six thousand. These legionaries, as they were called, all being—at first, at all events—holders of property in the Roman Republic, must have felt that it was for themselves and for their own property that they went to fight. That must have added to their courage and determination. They were heavily-armed {182} infantry soldiers, and to each legion was assigned some auxiliary lighter-armed troops and some cavalry.

The way of fighting was much the same as that of the Macedonian phalanx, and it was actually the Macedonian phalanx that the Roman legions came clashing up against when Rome began to extend herself eastward beyond Italy.

That came about in this way. Philip V., king of Macedon, had allied himself with the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War, that war in which Hannibal seemed to have Rome at his mercy. During its progress the Romans had made alliances with several powers in the East: with Egypt, where one of the Ptolemies was king; with Rhodes, the large island lying just off the coast of Asia Minor, which had a strong navy; with Pergamus, a city state on the mainland, which also had a strong fleet; and of course she was the defender, in Italy and in Sicily, of the Greek colonies there.

When she was threatened by Philip of Macedon on her north-eastern side, she put herself at the head of a confederation of Greek states against Philip.

Philip, on his part, had made an ally of Antiochus, one of the dynasty of Seleucus, who was king of Syria, and they agreed between them to take possession of Egypt, which had little power of its own at this time to withstand them.

Thus the Romans, with all the trouble with Carthage on their hands on the one side, had these enemies in Macedonia and right away to Asia Minor on the other. But the alliance with Pergamus and Rhodes gave them strength in the eastern waters of the Mediterranean.

Then, in 201 B.C., the Punic War ended, in a manner probably quite different from that which Philip and his {183} Syrian friend had expected. Rome was free to turn her full attention to the East.

The legions met the Macedonians in several battles in Greece itself; a force sent from Rhodes defeated an army that Philip had sent into Asia Minor, where his ally Antiochus, who had troubles in his own kingdom, seems to have given him very little help. Another of his armies was broken up by the Greeks themselves at Corinth. In fact he suffered disaster in all directions. Within two years the war was over. The power of Macedon was crushed. Philip was allowed, by the treaty of peace which followed, to keep his kingdom of Macedonia, but he lost all that he had claimed to hold in Asia Minor, and Greece was set free from the sovereignty of the Macedonians which had weighed over them ever since the conquests of Alexander.

At the end of the Punic War Rome had claimed, and had annexed as her own by right of conquest, both Sicily and Spain, from which she had expelled the Carthaginians, but she did not at first, after the defeat of Philip, claim any of the territory which he lost in the war. She left Greece to enjoy the freedom she had won for her. But she had, of course, increased her reputation and her power towards the east of Italy enormously. The Greeks looked on Rome as their liberator and champion. About Antiochus they perhaps would not have troubled themselves, since he had proved such a feeble ally to Philip, but Antiochus began to stir up trouble for himself by his own imprudence and ambition.

He had given such feeble help to his ally, Philip, partly because he was engaged in an attack on Egypt. Already, nearly twenty years before, he had attempted to gain possession of the Egyptian provinces Phœnicia {184} and Palestine, but had been heavily defeated near Gaza.

Now, just at the time that Philip was being finally beaten off the field in Greece, Antiochus was completely successful against Egypt. The reigning Ptolemy was a child, the government was in weak hands, Antiochus had little trouble. Amongst other consequences of his victories, one was that Palestine and Jerusalem passed from the hands of Egypt into the control of Syria, and it seems that the Jews resented the manner in which the later Ptolemies had ruled them, and welcomed the change. The Egyptian garrison was driven out.

Philip, conquered by the Romans, had lost his hold of the Greek cities in Asia Minor, and Antiochus seems to have thought it was the moment to take advantage of the misfortunes of his ally and seized those cities for his own.

Both the Egyptian enterprise and also this in Asia Minor were a direct offence to the Romans, seeing that both Egyptians and Greeks were their allies and looked to Rome for protection.

They did not look in vain. It is likely that Antiochus did not realise how great Rome had become. She was a long way off. But a few years ago she was scarcely known. We may imagine that he had very little idea of the might of the nation whose allies he had dared to attack. Perhaps the Romans themselves did not realise their own strength or the weakness of the enemy, for they tried their best to come to terms with him.

It was all to no purpose. Antiochus actually ventured into Greece itself with an army; but before he achieved anything of importance the Romans had {185} come to the help of the Greeks, and the Syrian force broke up and melted away after the very first battle.

But the Romans had not finished with them yet. They had seen, perhaps, that the Syrians were less formidable than they had thought. The Syrian navy was beaten heavily by the combined navies of Rome, Rhodes, and Pergamus. The following year, that is, 190 B.C., saw a sight new to our story—Roman legions in Asia Minor. They were under the leadership of one of the Scipios, who was consul for the year and brother of that Scipio who had led the Roman legions in Africa in the last years of the Second Punic War, and for his victories had been given the surname of Scipio "Africanus." Scipio Africanus accompanied his brother, the consul, with the legions in Asia Minor. There West met East, and there was no doubt, after the first clash of arms, with which the victory must be. The Roman legionaries under this Scipio, who assumed the title of "Asiaticus," as his brother took that of "Africanus," had a discipline and a battle formation against which the impetuous attacks of the more lightly armed Syrians broke and wasted themselves. Just so far as the Romans chose to advance must those others recede before them. They had all Asia behind them for their retreat. Rome at her strongest could not utterly destroy the power of the East as she had destroyed the power of Carthage; but she could drive it back and back at her pleasure, so long and so far as she chose to put out her power. The East would come on again after each driving back, like flies at some great creature which has whisked them away for a moment, but they could not really get through the great creature's hide; certainly they could not get to any vital part, {186} to any centre of his body where they could do him real hurt. Rome had perpetual trouble with these buzzing swarms in the East all through her days of world-power; but it was this kind of trouble—vexatious, and costing her much money and many lives of her soldiers, but never threatening her own life or power, as the Gauls from the north had threatened it once, and were to threaten it, and worse than threaten it, again.

After the first punishment had been given to Antiochus, Rome did not annex any of his dominions or form them into a province under a Roman governor. There is this remarkable difference that we may see between the Romans and other conquerors whom we have met in the course of this great story, that the Romans, before they went on farther, always consolidated, made solid and firm and almost a part of themselves, what they won.

They acted on the principle divide et impera, that is, disunite people and then you can rule them. They did not interfere much with the customs and laws of the peoples that they conquered. They let them manage their affairs in their own way. They expected them perhaps to pay tribute and to furnish soldiers for the army. So long as they did this they were not greatly troubled by their Roman governors. But—and this is the point on which the Romans insisted, and to which they owed a very great deal of their success—although these peoples were allowed to manage their own affairs, within their own borders, they were not allowed to make wars or treaties of peace and alliance or anything of that kind with their neighbours. On all such questions they had to refer back to Rome and ask her permission and advice and help.

One sees what the effect of that must have been—to {187} make these always look to Rome as their sovereign. That was one effect. Another was that they were not able to combine together and so become strong enough to be a danger to that sovereign. And Rome was wise in her dealings with them. She punished them heavily if they did not obey her, but rewarded them, by giving them rights and privileges, if they were very faithful in obeying and in helping her.

She was prudent, at this moment, in not attempting to annex any of the domain of Antiochus, because, if she had, she would have had this province lying far away out in the East, and between herself and this province would have been Greece and Macedonia, which were supposed to be free countries, though they doubtless knew that Rome could take them for her own if she chose.

Antiochus, lately the ally of Philip, had attacked and taken Philip's cities in Asia as soon as he knew that the Romans had broken Philip's power. Philip, in revenge, had helped the Romans when they attacked Antiochus, but he did not get much reward for it, in the treaty of peace. He was dissatisfied and restless; the Greek cities, as usual, quarrelled among themselves. Another page of the story was turned when Perseus, son of Philip, succeeding his father on the throne of Macedon, made an alliance of Thracians, Syrians, Greeks, and others, and declared war against Rome. What followed? The Greeks were very brave while the Roman legions were in Italy. As soon as the legions marched on Greece the fighting spirit went out of the Greek cities. Syria was too far East to help the West. Macedon and Thrace met Rome in a big battle fought at Pydna. Perseus was utterly beaten. He was taken prisoner and brought to Rome. Macedonia {188} was allowed some form of freedom, but she began intriguing and giving trouble again; Rome could suffer it no longer, and she made Macedonia into a Roman province.

The story of the Greek states after Pydna was much the same. The authority of Rome over them was really supreme if she cared to exert it, but for a while she contented herself with the punishment of those that had helped Perseus. Again, it was their own imprudence which compelled Rome to take action. They formed a confederacy and were ill-advised enough to go to war with her. It was a war that gave Rome no trouble. The Greek armies made little resistance, some of the cities had their walls razed to the ground. Even yet, Greece was not formally annexed as a Roman province, but the Roman governor of Macedonia was given some authority over Greece also, and the states were forbidden to form any more alliances with each other. Rome might do as she would with them.

This being so, you will see that Rome was now in a position to advance her power, whenever it pleased her, into Asia Minor without leaving unconquered nations between the centre of her power and those Eastern nations. But she went slowly, perhaps to make the more sure. She reduced the power of those strong naval states, Rhodes and Pergamus, although they had lately been her allies. She acted, in all her dealings, with a purely selfish regard to her own interests. Egypt acknowledged her supremacy. A new king of Syria was appointed under her direction, and as he was quite young a Roman guardian was given to guide his actions. It was said, and no doubt it was said truly, by the Greek historian Polybius, whom the Romans {189} had taken prisoner to Rome, that in all the world men knew that there was nothing else to be done, if Rome gave an order, but to obey it.

And now I want you to pause a moment in the story and see whither it has brought us. For we have now come to a condition of the world which had never been seen before.

CHAPTER XIV

ROME MISTRESS OF THE WORLD

We have never before seen the world in the condition to which we have brought it now, in the whole course of the story.

At first, you will remember, there were the two great empires warring, the Nile Valley empire and the empire of the Euphrates and Tigris. Then came the Persian. He overthrew them both. But then he came up against a wall too strong for him to break down, in the opposition of Greece; and he broke his own head against that wall. After him came Alexander, the Macedonian, going through the world, as it was then known, like a flash of lightning, getting the better of everything that stood in his way as if it was of no account at all. But like a flash of lightning his light went out again, and he left the world he had conquered to be cut up into pieces and quarrelled for by the generals that he had led to the conquest.

Then the scene of action shifted westward along the inland sea. Carthage had grown to power at the cost of Phœnicia, her mother-land, and over against Carthage had grown together, in a wonderfully short time, this new Roman power. Carthage and Rome had fought, and Rome had utterly prevailed.

Then Rome, looking eastward, and troubled by King Pyrrhus, who had helped the Carthaginians, came in touch with the Macedonians and the Greeks, {191} and after a period of trouble got the better of both, came up against the peoples of Asia Minor, and had them at her mercy whenever she chose to put out her strength. Already Egypt, though independent nominally, had acknowledged Rome as sovereign.

So you see whither we have come. Hitherto it has always been a struggling world that the story has had to tell of—one or the other master holding power a short while perhaps, but never really having a hold over the whole world and getting all his opponents under. It is quite otherwise now. Rome is mistress; and she is not going to let go her hold for a very long while. When she does lose hold it will be really because her grip has lost power owing to her own maladies, rather than that any other very formidable foe has come against her.

You will understand, of course, what I mean when I talk of "the whole world" at this point of the story, and what that Greek historian, Polybius, of whom I told you in the last chapter, meant by it. He knew, no doubt, that there was a great deal of the world, in the sense of land inhabited by human beings, beyond the wide lands over which the Roman power really did extend. But neither he nor any one else in the Greek or Roman world of that day thought that these lands and their inhabitants counted for anything. They did not matter. These peoples were called barbarians. They were considered rather as we consider the North American Indians or the negroes. They were far more formidable to the Romans than either of these are to us, because the people away to the east and north-east of Syria, to the north of Asia Minor and Thrace and of Italy itself, all these had limitless lands behind them, on the sides farthest {192} from the central power of Rome, to retreat into when she came with any power against them. For the most part they were peoples who led a wandering life. It was no trouble to them to strike their tents and go back into the wilds. But it was terrible trouble for the legions to follow them very far into those wilds; and the legions could not easily force them to a decided battle if they did follow them.

Therefore the Romans doubtless knew that however far they might push out their power in the east and north there would always be peoples on the edge of the lands which they could really make their own who would be apt to give trouble and would require small campaigns to be waged against them from time to time. Probably they made up their minds to that. But inside that wide barbarian fringe, and with the Atlantic Ocean on the west and the nearly uninhabited deserts of Africa on the south—within the wide expanse of which these form the boundary, the Roman power was such that if Rome said a thing had to be done, there was no man who questioned it. Done that thing had to be. That is what is meant by a phrase that you have most likely heard, the "Pax Romana," the Roman peace. It meant the peace which Rome could, and did, enforce within these regions under her power—a peace that could not be broken because every man knew that whatever she said was to be done, must be done. There was no help for it.

Of course the peace was not perfect, it was not untroubled. No peace ever is. But it was peace of a kind that the world had never known before. The whole world—the whole world that mattered—was for the first time under one single authority. It was also for the last time; for it is a condition that the {193} world has never been in again since the break-up of the Roman power. So I think I was justified in asking you to stop a moment in the course of the story in order to consider the position of affairs to which it has brought us. It is interesting, is it not?

Now, I do not know that there is any need to trouble you with all the smaller happenings which led to Rome's asserting herself more and more strongly in the East. Probably she would have done better if she had established her power more strongly in Syria rather earlier than she did. In the end she took it and turned it into one of her provinces as well as the other lands that she conquered; but by the time she did so a certain king called Mithridates, of a certain kingdom called Pontus, on the Black Sea, to the north of Syria, had made himself very strong, and gave the Romans a terrible deal of trouble about the year 88 B.C. and onward.

But long before that, and even while she was claiming to impose her "Pax Romana," the Roman peace, on all the world, she had very little peace within her own borders. It is all an outgrowth of the old trouble that we saw beginning as far back as the time when the Romans drove out those Etruscan kings and formed themselves into a Republic. All through their story we have seen the Senate, which was for the most part the high-born, the rich party, on the one side, and the Comitia, or assembly of the plebeians, on the other. And the last was perpetually struggling to get power and to take power away from the first. That struggle still went on until it ended in neither of them having any power at all. And that happened in this way.

As Rome grew rich, by the plunder and taxation of the provinces that she conquered and annexed, an immense number of slaves were brought into Italy. They cultivated the land for their masters a great deal more cheaply than the native small farmers could cultivate it, and at the same time a great deal of corn and other things that these farmers used to grow was brought in from the provinces at a cheap price. The small farmers, what we might call peasants, could not grow corn in Italy as cheaply as this, so the fields fell out of cultivation and the peasants flocked into the towns where they could get their share of the cheap corn.

Great discontent grew out of this. Two brothers, who were leading men of the people, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, got laws passed to give the people a chance of cultivating their land on better terms, but the selfishness of the rich party, who were opposed to them, made these laws of no use.

The people had succeeded in getting one of their own class, Marius by name, appointed as general of an army in Africa, which conquered a restless and powerful people called the Numidians, who had been giving much anxiety to the Romans and had defeated the armies under the general that the Senate had sent out in command. When Marius came back, as victor, from Africa, some of the northern barbarous tribes were harassing Italy itself. He took command of the army against them, and again was completely successful. Thus he rose to great power, and one of his acts, when at the height of his power, was to repeal the law according to which it had always been compulsory on the people to serve in certain legions, and to allow them to enlist in what legions they pleased.

Do you see what that meant? It meant that the people would go and enlist under a popular general, and, this being so, the general became the authority to whom they gave their allegiance and to whom they looked up as their head. It was no longer to Rome that the soldiers looked as the great authority. They looked to their general.

That made a very great difference in the whole state of affairs. It meant that the general who was able to rely on his army became really independent of the power of either Senate or Comitia. They might give him orders, but he had the armed force at his back and could almost please himself as to whether he should obey the orders or not.

Thus it was that the real power passed altogether out of the hands of the Senate and Comitia and fell into that of the commanders of the legions, or of whichever of the several commanders of legions might prove the strongest. The Senate or the Comitia, sometimes the one and sometimes the other, might appoint the commanders, but once the commanders were appointed, the power was with them so long as they could rely on the support of the soldiers.

The Senate succeeded in getting leaders devoted to their interests appointed to command some of the legions, and the Comitia got men of their own side appointed to others, and so it came to pass that there were these two opposing forces in the world, the legions that were under a general who was on the side of the aristocratic party and the legions that were commanded by one who favoured the popular side.

It is much more easy to see, long after it all happened, how one state of affairs grows out of what has gone before, than it is for the people who are acting in them {196} to see it. We can see how it all happened much better than they can have seen then, but I suppose that even those Romans who were in the very middle of it all and were actors in the story must have realised that something was going on which they had never known before, and which was certain to make a great difference, when they saw one of these commanders of the legions march his forces right up to Rome and take forcible possession of the city.

This commander was Sulla, and he acted as he did because Rome at the time had fallen into such a state of lawlessness, owing to the fights between the rich people and the poor, and to all the evil causes that I have mentioned, that no man's property or life was safe. Sulla came in with his soldiers and enforced what we might call Martial Law. He restored order, but he restored it only by terribly severe punishments. He was on the side of the Senate, of the rich and patrician class. This was in the year 88 B.C. But he did not stay in Rome. That war on the eastern boundary of the Empire with King Mithridates of Pontus required attention. Mithridates had been terribly successful at its commencement. He had overrun Asia Minor, and it is said that in a single day 80,000 persons who claimed to be Romans, or to be {197} under the protection of the great Roman power, were massacred.

Sulla was a great general. Mithridates had advanced into Greece, but he made no stand against the legions. His armies were defeated in Asia Minor too, and by 84 B.C. this, which was called the First Mithridatic War, was over. A treaty was made whereby the territories of the king of Pontus were strictly defined, and Sulla came back to Rome.

The popular party had been busy while he was away. Marius, their champion, was dead, but his place had been taken by another popular general, Cinna. When Sulla returned he found Rome in possession of Cinna and the populace. With his own legions Sulla overthrew Cinna and his power, and his punishment of his opponents was even more fearfully cruel than before. The story of the years that followed is a terrible one. The life of no man of any importance was safe in Rome if he was suspected of showing any favour to the popular cause.

And now another very great name comes into the story, that of Pompey—Pompey the Great as he was sometimes called. In Rome, Sulla had drowned in blood the opposition of the popular party; but there were legions outside Italy itself, and some of them, in Spain, were under popular leadership. Against these Pompey went out as commander on the patrician side. After some three years of fighting he was completely successful. Sulla, wearied of power and tyranny, had thrown up his dictatorship at Rome and had retired into the country and to private life. Pompey led back his victorious legions, and with his soldiers at the gates of the city demanded the honours which he thought due to him as victor.

The condition of affairs in Italy was bad. There had been a great uprising of the slaves who had become very numerous and had banded themselves together, to a number said to be 70,000. They traversed the country, pillaging and acting in defiance of all law.

Pompey, as Consul and with the military power at his command, showed himself a far less cruel dictator than Sulla. He revoked many of the worst laws and lawless institutions of Sulla. The slave revolt, as it was called, was put down. Something like order was restored again. And when all this had been done in Italy, Pompey was given, or maybe took for himself, command of a fleet and of armies in the East, for the special purpose of destroying the sea pirates in the eastern part of the Mediterranean and strengthening the Roman power in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. The treaty with Mithridates had not succeeded in making peace in that corner of the world for long, and, though he had been beaten in one or two battles by the legions, he was still in the field and far beyond the boundaries which that treaty had assigned to him.

Pompey carried all before him. He put down the pirates in a series of sea fights, settled affairs in Syria, which he at length made into a Roman province, and then went northward, where he met Mithridates and defeated him so decisively that he gave the Romans no further trouble, and shortly afterwards took his own life. With all these victories to his credit, Pompey returned to Italy, where by that time had come into the story one whose name, great as was that of Pompey, was to become greater even than his—Julius Cæsar.

Cæsar had gained fame both as an orator and as a {199} soldier. His sympathies were with the popular party. He had been chosen as Consul, but had not yet entered into that office when Pompey came back, triumphant, from the East. We might expect that Pompey, who was on the patrician side, would be opposed to Cæsar, but Pompey was dissatisfied with his treatment by his own party. He seems to have promised his soldiers, as a reward for their bravery and their victories, that they should be given grants of land, to live on, in Italy. The Senate were not ready to confirm this promise, and they did not approve of all that he had done in Asia Minor.

The result was that Cæsar and Pompey became friends and allies. Cæsar married Pompey's daughter. They brought into their alliance one Crassus, whose chief value to them as a friend was that he had immense wealth. This combination was known as the Triumvirate, or combination of three men (from tres, meaning three, and vir, meaning man). Acting together, the three could get any laws passed that they pleased. One of the measures which they joined in passing made an immense difference in our story. It was that measure which gave to Cæsar the command of the legions in Gaul.

The difference that it was to make was not seen just at first. Cæsar went up north to his command. His campaign against the Gauls, of which he himself has written the account in his "Commentaries," are a little out of the direct line of our great story. They had their effect on the big story, for if they had ended in any other way than the way in which they did, if Cæsar had been killed or conquered—and he was nearly killed or conquered more than once—the big story might have gone quite differently. But as it was, {200} in the end—and the end of his campaigns in Gaul did not come until nine years had passed—he was completely victorious. During those years he made an expedition to Great Britain, but did not stay there long. At the end of the nine years he came back. He was chosen as Consul for the second time. He came back to the borders of Italy at the head of his victorious legions. He was commanded by the Senate to disband his troops before coming to Rome to be made Consul. The Senate and Pompey, for Pompey still was chief man in Rome, did not want a general with soldiers devoted to him at the gates of the city.

Cæsar halted for a time, while messages about this went to and fro between him and the Senate, the Senate ordering him to disband the troops, and Cæsar refusing. He halted on the banks of a small stream, the Rubicon, which has become very famous because it was the boundary of Italy beyond which he was forbidden to go at the head of troops.

Finally, in the year 49 B.C., he determined to go against the order of the Senate and brave the consequences. Cæsar crossed the Rubicon!

The crossing of that river meant war. Cæsar knew it. The Senate knew it. Pompey knew it. The great Pompey fled before him, and took command of the Senatorial armies in Greece. Cæsar, who had no fleet, went in pursuit.

They met at Pharsalia, in Thessaly, and there was fought one of the great battles of history. Cæsar gained the day, and Pompey again fled, into Egypt. Again Cæsar pursued him, and was met on coming to Egypt by a messenger who thought to find favour with him by bringing him the head of Pompey, who had been murdered. But Cæsar was a generous enemy. {201} Pompey had been his friend, and he mourned his death with respect.

There was trouble in Egypt at this time. The rulers were supposed to be one of the Ptolemies and Cleopatra, also of the same family, the two sharing the throne. But the Ptolemy had thrust the queen out and claimed to rule alone. Cæsar, captivated by the beauty of Cleopatra, restored her to her share in the government. Then he marched up with his force into Syria. There, too, there was trouble.

The trouble was with a powerful people called the Parthians, coming from that part of Asia, east of the Euphrates, from which the Persians had come long ago. They were a warlike nation, fighting on horseback, lightly clad in mail; and their mode of fighting was like that of the Persians of old—to come galloping down upon the enemy, to shower arrows, discharged from horseback, upon him, to gallop off again, turning in the saddle and shooting as they went, and then to reform, to come back again, and repeat the same tactics until the enemy's formation was broken up.

Really it was very like the fighting of the Persians, which, as we saw, was broken by the solid Greek phalanx. But these Parthians prevailed in several battles against the Roman legions. They had defeated a Roman army under the command of that Crassus who was one of the triumvirate. Of these three, Cæsar was the only one who was alive after Pompey's murder in Egypt.

Cæsar met the Parthian forces and defeated them very heavily. He drove them back over the Euphrates; and the Euphrates we have to look on as the boundary, eastward, of the Roman power. The Romans did not try to press farther. They had enough, and more {202} than enough, work on their hands in making good the conquests they had gained.

Cæsar returned to Rome, victorious; but still he had enemies, in the shape of armies in the field, under commanders appointed by the Senate. There were some such forces in Africa. Thither Cæsar went and made an end of them. Still there were others in Spain, and there, at length, he seems to have put out the last spark of opposition by a victory in the battle of Munda in 45 B.C. He had crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. What he had accomplished in those four years is wonderful. Victorious in Greece, Egypt, Syria, Africa, Spain. All enemies had gone down before him. He was elected "dictator for life" of the Roman Commonwealth.

CHAPTER XV

TROUBLES IN THE EAST

We have seen that in the year 190 B.C. a new thing happened in Asia Minor—Roman legions appeared there for the first time in history. It was an appearance which was a sign of what was sure to come, that Rome, when it pleased her to do so, would conquer all that country. Conquer it all, and subdue it to her own power, in course of time she did. The last people that she succeeded in perfectly subduing were the Jews.

Judæa, at the date of the arrival in Asia of the legions, was held as a province of the kingdom of Syria by one of the dynasty of Seleucus.

Seleucus and his Court were, practically, Grecian. Antioch, the capital of Syria (several of the Seleucid kings were called Antiochus), was practically a Greek city. The influence of Greek thought began to flow into Judæa and Jerusalem more and more from Syria and the north, and we have seen already how it flowed in from Egypt and Alexandria. It brought in strange knowledge, strange speculations and, so far as the Greeks troubled themselves about religion, a strange religion. We have seen from of old how intensely the Jews were devoted to their own religion, and how they retained it in exile and in persecution. A very large number of them held to it fiercely now against all these new ideas that the Greeks were bringing in.

So, all through the hundred years that follow, the {204} story of the Jews is the story of a series of struggles for the mastery in Jerusalem between the party that favoured the Greek new ways and the party faithful to the old Jewish ways. The latter came to be called Pharisees and the former are represented by the Sadducees, as you read of them in the Bible.

Besides this cause of unrest, there was still constantly trouble between Syria and Egypt. The fact that both were overshadowed equally by the growing power of Rome did not prevent them quarrelling about their own claims in Palestine. And Judæa, as ever of old, lay between the two rivals. Judæa knew little peace in these days of the so-called Pax Romana.

The insults which the national religion and laws suffered from the "Gentiles," as the Jews called the Greeks and all who were not of their own race and way of thinking, roused their great resentment. The fighting between the parties was fierce. There was one moment in the story when the Jews under those great fighters, the Maccabees, became really the strongest power, so long as Rome did not care to exert her power, in all that region—stronger than Syria, of which she had lately been a mere province. She had power as extensive as Solomon had wielded when king of Israel and Judah united. But it did not endure. The rivalry between the two parties within Judæa itself weakened her. At the date of Pompey's coming to Syria, about a hundred years later than the first coming of the legions, Judæa was again in subjection to Syria, and Syria herself was made into a Roman province. Judæa, like the rest of the world, turned her eyes to Rome as mistress of them all; but, of them all, the eyes of Judæa expressed, probably, the least obedience and submission, the strongest purpose of resistance.

It is this strength of resistance that has made the Jews, in spite of all the calamities that they have continually had to endure all through the course of our story, still play such an active and large part in it. All read with reverence the same sacred Book. Even those Jews that had been scattered, and had settled far from Jerusalem, looked up to Jerusalem as their capital city. The Temple of their great God was there. They received and obeyed orders from there. They went up there to great feasts and religious ceremonies. There were very many Jews in the many Greek cities of Asia Minor, very many in Egypt, many in Cyprus and other islands, many in Greece itself. Although Judæa was a small subject state when Pompey saw it, and had an official appointed by Rome as its ruler, it was important to him to have the favour of the Jews on his side, just because they were so far and widely dispersed and could exercise influence in so many lands.

At first, in the struggle between Cæsar and Pompey, the favour of the Jews had been given to Pompey. Probably they were disposed to fight for the side that they thought most likely to win, so as to get some future favours for themselves in return. As a matter of fact, both Greeks and Romans were so little concerned with religious things that, except for insulting the Jewish customs by their indifference, they showed very little hostility to them.

When Cæsar went to Egypt he gave the Jews every opportunity of worshipping God in their own way and living their peculiar life in the manner that pleased them. The official appointed by Rome to govern Judæa at this time was Antipater, a native of the neighbouring land of Idumæa, and his son, who {206} succeeded him in the governorship, was called Herod, Herod the Great, who ruled, with the title of king (though he was only a king by leave of Rome, and king of a country paying tribute to Rome), until the year 4 B.C. We are just coming now to the Christian Era, as we call it. The years will then no longer grow fewer and fewer as they come to the year of the birth of Christ; but more and more as they mount up away from that date.

In the early days of the rule of Herod in Judæa, that is, about the year 40 B.C., there came a new danger on the land. Those Parthians, whom Julius Cæsar had defeated, swarmed back again, on their horses, across the Euphrates, and swept over a great part of the country. Herod implored the help of Rome, and not in vain; but Julius Cæsar was no longer the world's master then. He had been dead for several years.

You must, I am sure, remember that scene in the Senate-house in Rome—if you do not remember reading it in any history book you will have heard of it from Shakespeare's play of Julius Cæsar—how his best friends clustered round him, and the dearest of all gave him a fatal dagger-stroke. "Et tu, Brute!" he exclaimed, as even Brutus, his most intimate friend, dealt a death blow.

The assassins of Cæsar asserted that they did the foul deed for the good of the State, to rid Rome of the tyranny of the dictator. That may have been the real reason of some of them. Others may have been thinking of their own advantage and how they might advance if they put such a big man as Cæsar out of the way. But whatever their intentions were, the effect on the State was terrible.

The great orator, Cicero, had hopes that the {207} Republic might be restored, that the rule of one man might be ended and the good old days come back again. But the people in Rome were not such as they had been in those good old days when they followed the good old customs. It is no wonder that they had changed.

See what had happened. Rome had conquered the world. Masses of wealth from the conquered provinces had been brought to her and were constantly coming in. The rich men had their splendid houses and villas. They vied with each other in giving feasts and entertainments to the populace, in order to gain the votes of the people and to be elected to high positions, at home or abroad, in which they could make large fortunes by receiving bribes or by taxing the provinces. All their old ideas of what it was right to do had been upset by the Greek thought that prevailed through all the world that was at all educated. There was no respect for the laws, and they had no religion that made any difference to their conduct.

Therefore, when Cæsar was killed, and his power to dictate and to make the laws obeyed went, at once there was terrible lawlessness, several parties in the city trying to get the power into their hands. Cæsar had been appointed dictator for life, but no arrangement had been made about what should happen at his death. So it went for the space of two years or so, and out of all the troubles of these two years we find a state of things coming about very like that which happened before, when Pompey and Cæsar were the two most powerful men—powerful, because each had legions willing to obey him. There was a third at that time, Crassus, powerful in his wealth. Two men now again came to the front, each with military forces at his back—Octavius and Antony. There was a third, of less {208} power, Lepidus. Pompey and Cæsar had been friends at first, and were joined together to rule the affairs of Rome. Afterwards they fell fighting, with the result that you know—the complete victory of Cæsar. Crassus had been killed, fighting in the East; and that was the end of that which was called the first Triumvirate.

Antony, the nephew and the friend of Cæsar, had designs of succeeding to his power, but almost at the outset he found Octavius, who was Cæsar's grand-nephew, opposing him. Antony had been Consul, with Cæsar, in 44 B.C. Now he had command of legions in the north of Italy, and when he went to take up that command he found Brutus, Cæsar's assassin, holding possession of a town called Mutina, which he refused to give up. Antony attacked him. The Senate took the side of Brutus and sent Octavius up in command of some of the legions to oppose Antony. Antony was defeated before the town that he was besieging, and fled.

He fled, but he still had his army. He was joined by Lepidus, who brought with him a strong army from the south. Octavius may have thought this combined force too formidable for him, but whatever his reason was he made friends with Antony, whom he had lately been fighting, and with Lepidus, and the Senate seems to have approved of their combination. Perhaps they were so strong that they had no choice, but were obliged to seem to approve. And so what is called the second Triumvirate came into existence.

Brutus and Cassius, who were trying to bring back the old republican ways of Government, still held out; but they were defeated at the famous battle of Philippi, and the Triumvirate had all power in the Roman world.

They proceeded to map out that world in pieces, so that each should take his portion. To Lepidus, as perhaps the least important, was given Africa; to Antony went Egypt and the East. Octavius seems to have had the best of the bargain from the start, with the home legions and Italy, Greece and Spain, together with Gaul that Cæsar had conquered, for his own. Antony married Octavia, who was sister of Octavius; so it all looked a very good arrangement.

But just as trouble had crept in between the chief men of the first Triumvirate, so too with this second.

Antony was not a very prudent man, and Octavius was. Antony had the most troublesome frontier to defend, for to the east was that country of the Parthians who had come upon Judæa. Herod's appeal for help was heard by the Triumvirate. It was Antony's special task to deal with them; and, for the time being, he dealt with them successfully, though he did not march against them himself. But one of his generals took the field and drove them back over the Euphrates, whence they had come.

That was not by any means the end of these Parthians, however. We have seen how they fought—charging down on the legions, shooting a flight of arrows, then off again, and again coming back to perform the same manœuvres. Just as they did in each particular battle of a war, so they did in the war itself, as a whole. If the war went against them, away they went, over the Euphrates and as far east as the Romans cared to pursue. They must have known that the Romans would not go on pursuing for ever, farther and farther from their base. And the Parthians had all Asia to retreat into.

So they retreated, and left Judæa and Herod in {210} peace, but a very few years later they were making trouble again, and this time Antony himself led an army against them, into Parthia itself, and met with a disastrous defeat. And now Octavius, who had been making his own power very firm in Rome and Italy all this while, thought the time was come when he might declare war against Antony—his brother-in-law, and until lately his friend.

Antony had given him much cause. You will remember that Queen Cleopatra whom Cæsar had put on the Egyptian throne beside Ptolemy. Cæsar had fallen in love with her. Antony fell in love with her too. For her sake he divorced and sent back Octavia, his wife, to her brother, Octavius, at Rome. He assumed all the airs of an Eastern despotic ruler, with Cleopatra as his queen. A great many of his own people and friends and servants were disgusted by this. Probably the support that they had given him was not given very whole-heartedly. Certainly Octavius could easily find an excuse for making war on him, for Antony's ideas of government were not at all such as agreed with the Romans' idea of how government should be conducted by a Roman citizen.

The deciding battle between the two was a sea-fight off Actium. Cleopatra was there, but even she does not seem to have fought very bravely for Antony. She turned out of the fight before it was really decided, and fled, with her ships, to Egypt. Her flight probably did decide the result, and Antony, with such ships as could escape, went to Egypt after her. Octavius did not pursue them at once, but a year later he went to Egypt, and, rather than face his coming, Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide.

Several years before this, Octavius had dealt with {211} the other man of the Triumvirate, Lepidus. Lepidus, like Antony, seems to have acted just as if he wished Octavius to have a good excuse for getting rid of him, or of his power. He came to Sicily from Africa, apparently at Octavius' bidding; and when he tried, or was accused of trying, to gain possession of Sicily for himself, Octavius replied by defeating his forces, taking Lepidus himself to Italy, and, with more magnanimity than conquerors often show, allowing him to retain his high office of Pontifex Maximus.

He could well afford to be generous, for he was now Master of the World; master as not even his grand-uncle Cæsar, by whom he had been adopted as a son, had been world-master. Cæsar was assassinated in the very year following his election as dictator. Octavius put down his last rival, Antony, at Actium in 31 B.C., and his world-mastery endured until his death in 14 A.D.

I have said that Octavius was a very prudent man. He wished all the old forms of republican government to go on just as they had before. And so they did go on, but Octavius must have known, and everybody else must have known, that they went on just because he allowed them to do so, that he could stop them or alter them at any moment if he pleased, that the government was in form republican—government by persons elected by the people—but that it really was government by one man. And far better it should be so. The other way had been tried and had failed terribly; it had resulted in fearful lawlessness. Now the Pax Romana, that peace of the world under the controlling power of Rome, really did begin to be something like a real fact. It had been very much of a fiction up to now. Of course there were troubles on the frontier. {212} Those Parthians, who had defeated Antony, had to be dealt with; and they were dealt with, and that disgrace to the Roman arms was wiped out.

I am not sure that the most troublous spot in all the Empire of Rome was not that little kingdom of Judæa (sometimes it was a kingdom, under a petty king like Herod, but oftener it was under a Roman governor who had the title of procurator), which never seems to have been able to rest for long together.

CHAPTER XVI

THE DISPERSAL OF THE JEWS

It is rather puzzling to find, now and again, in this greatest of all stories, that several different people are called by the same name, and also that the same person is called by different names. Now, besides this Herod of whom we have been talking, there were several others. There was Herod Antipas, his son, before whom Christ was sent by Pontius Pilate, and also there was Herod Agrippa, his grandson, who was king of Judæa for a while, reigning, with such limited power as the Romans allowed him, from A.D. 37 to his death in 44. But for the most part, during all the early years of the Christian Era, Judæa was governed by one or other Roman procurator and was not even in name a kingdom.

Octavius, of whom I have been telling you how he became master of the world, lived till the year 14 A.D. (Anno Domini, or year of our Lord), that is, fourteen years from the date sometimes assigned to our Lord's birth. And now you may be puzzled, because you may remember that it is said in the Bible that a decree went out from Cæsar Augustus, about the time of Christ's birth, that all the world should be taxed. Cæsar Augustus, you see, as Master of the World! The explanation is that Cæsar Augustus and Octavius were one and the same person. He had been adopted as a {214} son by his great-uncle Julius Cæsar, and then had taken the name of Cæsar. Augustus was not a name, but a title, given by the Romans, just as one of the Pompeys, and also one of the Herods, was called Magnus, or the Great. Augustus means the August one—the Magnificent.

I have said that Octavius was a prudent man. He showed his prudence in the way that he allowed Antony, who was imprudent, to do all kinds of foolish things before he set to work to crush his power. He was equally prudent in his dealing with Lepidus, his other rival. And after he had made an end of the power of these two, and was the greatest man in the world, he showed his prudence in refusing to claim any great title which might give any enemies at Rome a chance of saying that he was grasping at power and trying to rule like a despot, as Antony had done. No doubt he remembered what had happened to his great-uncle.

So he maintained many of the forms of the republican government and many of the old titles of the officials of the government, but it was quite evident all the time that he had the real power, and it was not any less real because he did not make a big show of claiming it. No doubt the Romans were all the more ready to leave the real power in his hands on that account. When his old rival Lepidus died he took to himself the high office of Pontifex Maximus which he had allowed Lepidus to hold during his life.

Before his death, having no son of his own at that time alive, he adopted, as the Roman law permitted, his step-son Tiberius as his colleague during his life and as his successor after his death; and the Romans fully approved of his doing so. Thus, when he died in A.D. 14, Tiberius succeeded him as ruler of Rome and of {215} the world. He had not extended the limits of the Roman power, but he had made that power far more secure both in the West and in the East. The Pax Romana had become a far more real peace under him than it had been before.

But there never was any real peace in Judæa for long together. The national sentiment, as we should call it, of the old Jewish party, the Conservatives, who are called Pharisees in the Bible, was too strong for them to be at peace for any length of time under foreign rule. King Agrippa, of whom we were speaking, was a personal friend of both Caius Caligula and of Claudius, the two Roman Emperors who succeeded Tiberius. We may speak of them as Emperors (imperators) by this time, for it was a title which they took without dispute. Agrippa made himself very well liked by the Jews, and it seems to have been to please them that he had St. James beheaded and St. Peter cast into prison, as is told in the Bible. The Bible, too, in the Acts of the Apostles, tells us of his death in the year A.D. 44. He was the last king of the Jews, and at his death Judæa fell again under the government of the procurators.

The procurators all seem to have been oppressive in their government. Probably their task was a very difficult one. They had to govern a people who all through the story had shown themselves stronger in the independence of their spirit and in following their own ways of life than any other. The force of Roman soldiers of the legions and of allied troops that they had at hand to uphold their authority must have been very small in comparison with the force that the Jews and their friends could muster at short notice. They must have depended a great deal on the fame of the {216} Roman power, and on the knowledge which the Jews must have had that if Rome really cared to take serious measures against them they could have no hope of success. Rome's power, if she cared to exert it, would be overwhelming.

But Rome was far away. Perhaps she would not take the trouble to exert that power.

That is how the Jewish party probably thought about it all; and the procurators and even the kings of Judæa had to try to uphold the Roman power as best they could, and yet to do what they could not to drive the Jews into the rebellion that they were always on the point of making, and now and again actually did make.

Pontius Pilate was procurator at the time of Christ's trial. You know how he gained the execration of all the Christian world ever since by sacrificing Christ to the hate of the Jews. He had sent Christ to Herod Antipas, because Herod was ruler of Galilee, not of Judæa, at the time, and Christ was considered, from his birthplace, to be a Galilæan. Pilate no doubt would have been well pleased if Herod had taken the responsibility on himself of judging the case, but Herod sent Christ back to Pilate. The Christians were already many enough to be a formidable body, and the rulers of Judæa had now to deal with three parties bitterly opposed to each other, the Jews who held to their old traditions, the Jews who had become Christians, and the small governing class of Romans and their friends.

A good deal of what we know of the story comes from Josephus, the great Jewish historian, and an enemy of the Romans. He would be likely to say hard things of the procurators. But, even allowing {217} for that, it does seem as if the later procurators, after the death of King Herod Agrippa, were very oppressive.

It was in the time of Florus, who was procurator from A.D. 64 to 66, that the trouble which had been growing came to a head. The state of things in Jerusalem and Judæa generally was terrible. Bands of assassins called Sicarii, or daggermen (from sica, a dagger), went about almost unmolested by authority. They were supposed to be very zealous for the old faith, and no doubt it was to escape them that St. Paul was taken, as we are told in the Bible, secretly and by night, from Jerusalem to Cæsarea. He lay in prison there, awaiting trial, for two years, while the procurator Felix, who had been a very oppressive governor, was succeeded by Festus—"most noble Festus," as Paul calls him—a more just and lenient ruler. Albinus followed Festus as procurator, from A.D. 62 to 64, and then came Florus, the most exacting of them all.

What finally caused the Jews to rise up in fury against the Roman power was that Florus stripped the Temple, which was just completed in its building, of some of its sacred treasures. At first the rebellion met with a surprising success. Florus had called in the aid of the governor of Syria, with a force of 20,000 regular troops and 13,000 auxiliaries, but this was defeated and broken up by the Jews in a battle at Beth-horon. Probably the fate of Jerusalem was hastened by this victory, for its effect was that Rome took so serious a view of the revolt that she sent her ablest general, Vespasian, with ample forces to subdue it. The result was certain; yet again the Jews showed their extraordinary toughness in resisting so long as they did. The other cities soon fell to the Roman arms, but Jerusalem itself held out for three {218} years after the beginning of Vespasian's campaign. It fell in the year A.D. 70, and the fate that had befallen Carthage was now suffered by Jerusalem. The newly built Temple was destroyed—"not one stone left upon another," as had been foretold; the walls of the city were thrown down; the houses were burnt to the ground; most of the inhabitants were killed, and the rest taken away into slavery or otherwise dispersed over the earth. Jerusalem ceased to exist. The Jewish nation no longer had a capital city or a home.

CHAPTER XVII

HOW THE THREADS DRAW TOGETHER

That is the point to which we have now brought the story, and that is the point at which I mean to leave it. It is a point at which most of the threads of the story come together. It might almost seem to us, looking back over it, as if it were the point to which it had been designed, by some great designer, that the story of man should work itself out.

There is this great and wonderful machine of world government, the Roman power, in full operation. The power could reach to any part of the wide empire; the legions would march along those Roman roads, made, as you probably know, with a wonderful straightness, up hill and down dale, never turning aside from the direction at which they aimed unless it were for a very steep mountain. They went, as the Romans themselves went, direct to their ends, straight, with no faltering.

Posts, or stations for communication, were established along those roads, after the manner of a relay race. A messenger would come galloping along from Rome to the first post out, and there he would hand his message, his letter, to another man who would go galloping with it to the next post along the road, which led perhaps to the north of Gaul, perhaps to the east of Thrace, perhaps {220} to the west of Spain, direct to the provincial governor or the commander of the legions to whom the letter was addressed; and so on, stage by stage, till it came to its destination.

It is wonderful, is it not? Have you not wondered, when you read of St. Paul's trial, at its being said, "This man might have been set at liberty if he had not appealed to Cæsar"?

It is wonderful, surely, that all that distance away, in Palestine, a man, a Jew, just because he was a Roman citizen (probably Paul's parents had acquired the right of citizenship by buying it—as could legally be done) could appeal from the decision of his judges there and claim to be taken all the way to Rome. And this at a time when he could only go by horseback overland or by sail oversea!

You know how St. Paul did go in a ship from Alexandria. That would have been a corn ship; for Rome was getting most of her corn from Egypt at this time. And you know what adventures and calamities he had by the way. He was acquitted finally, on that charge, but he had spent two years in prison at Cæsarea, and two more in Rome. And after this acquittal, he was re-arrested, re-tried and executed—a terrible story!

But for the moment the point I want you to see is how far and how certainly Rome could reach out her arm and do justice, or what was called justice. It was a very wonderful machine.

So there was this machine, which had all the material power and was wonderful for purposes of government—for organisation, as we say. But, then, look at the world, the cities, the civilisations in which it was operating. Their thought, their art, their literature, {221} was not Roman; it was Greek. Of all the Eastern part of the world, of Greece itself and all to the east of Greece, right away to the Euphrates and south of Egypt, we may say that it had learned to think in the Greek way before it had ever heard of the Romans at all. Indeed, we may talk, if we please, of Roman art, Roman literature and so on; but if we do we have to remember all the time that there is very little in it that was original. It was nearly all copied from the Greek. The Romans had great men. They had their great orator, Cicero; but he was less great than his Greek predecessor, Demosthenes. They had Livy and Tacitus, the historians. Tacitus had a style of his own. Perhaps he is the most original writer in prose that Rome produced. But Livy compares more with Thucydides, and the comparison is hardly to the advantage of the Roman historian. Besides, we may ask, "How would Livy have written if he had not had Thucydides and other Greeks to be his guides?"

We may ask, but we can have no certain answer. The answer that we are obliged to make is that it is scarcely to be believed that these Romans would have done as well, or nearly as well, as they did, if the Greeks had not set them such a good example.

Then we may look at the poets. The Æneid of Virgil is certainly modelled on the Iliad of Homer, and, fine though it is, it is far less admirable than the work of the far older Greek poet. Horace stands more by himself, but he uses metres which we know that he borrowed from the Greek, and it is quite possible that he stands rather alone because Greek originals on which he may have modelled his own verse have been lost.

Of writers for the theatre, there is no Roman to {222} put "in the same street," as we say, with Æschylus, Sophocles, or Aristophanes. In science and philosophy none to compare with Aristotle and Plato.

And in the arts, all the finest sculpture and architecture in Rome is known to have been copied from the Greeks. Where are the Roman names to put with those of Phidias and Praxiteles?

Everywhere, throughout the world, if a great literary work or a great artistic work was done, it was done either by a Greek or by some one of another race who had learnt from the Greeks. If Rome had conquered and possessed the world by her arms, Greece had conquered and possessed it by her thought. Already, before the Roman conquest of the world, she had achieved this conquest to the east of Italy. By means of the Roman machinery of government, and those straight roads of the Romans, Greek thought was distributed all through the Western world too.

So get that picture clear in your minds, of the Roman Empire as a means of sending out the Greek culture everywhere.

There is something else that you have to see coming in on top of the Greek thought, distributed along with that thought, through all the world. That something else is Christianity.

You have seen this—if you will remember—that in the course of our story we found that the Greeks, the Greeks at the time when the Persian conquerors from the east came up against them and could make their way no farther west, were the first people whom we met in the whole course of the story to whom religion did not mean a great deal in their lives. To the ancient Egyptians it had meant very much. To the {223} ancient Babylonians it was the same. The Persians came with the wonderful religion of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, which influenced their lives enormously. The Greeks were the first of the peoples to whom religion meant very little. There were a few ceremonies, annually performed, and so on; but nothing that affected their character.

With the Romans it was the same. The early Roman had reverence for the "mos majorum"—the custom of their fathers. They had high ideas of justice and of such virtues as courage and of their duties as citizens. But no religion affected their lives or their thoughts.

Now, you saw how the Jews from time to time were dispersed—to Egypt, to Babylonia, to various parts of Asia Minor, to the islands and to the Greek cities. The Greeks, not caring deeply for religious things, although greatly interested in philosophy and speculations about the mysteries of life, allowed the Jews to follow their own religion and customs wherever they settled. And the Jews adhered to their own religion and customs very strictly and tenaciously. They did not lose them in the countries in which they were dispersed. But they did not bring the people among whom they settled to their own way of thinking. They did not try to do so. Their idea of their religion was that it was for them only, for the Jews, for "the seed of Abraham"—that is, the descendants of Abraham.

When Christianity came, founded on the Jewish religion, this was all altered. Yet it was not altered just at first. You will remember that it was said that the Gospel, the good message, of Christianity was "for the Jew first, and also for the Gentile." By "Gentile" was meant any man or woman who was not a Jew. {224} But you will also remember that this idea, the idea that Christianity—the religion which branched out from the old Jewish religion—could be for any others than the Jews came as quite a new idea—almost as a shock, as we might say. You will remember perhaps how St. Peter dreamed that dream about the meats that were "common or unclean," as he considered them. In his dream he declined to eat those meats. Then he was rebuked for calling these things, which had been divinely created, common and unclean.

When he awoke, he accepted that dream as a warning to him that he was not to look on the Gentile as a man so "common and defiled" in comparison with the Jew as not to be able to receive the message of Christianity.

But in order to spread Christianity from its source and around Jerusalem, it was not necessary in the first instance to go actually to the Gentiles. You have seen how the Jews were dispersed throughout the cities of the world. The gospel could be carried to these first, to these Jews of the various dispersals which had taken place in course of their terribly troubled story. They were everywhere, all over the known world; and to these the Christian message could, and did, go; and many of them received it and became Christians. From them, no doubt, as well as from St. Paul, "the apostle to the Gentiles," and other special messengers and missionaries, Christianity spread to those among whom these dispersed and exiled Jews were living, but it was only gradually that the idea grew that it was a world religion, and not for the Jews only.

To one other point I would draw your attention. Most of Christ's followers were very humble men, of {225} little or no education. They heard the words and carried His message among their own people. But the cities of the world, as we have seen, were inhabited by men whose minds were filled with Greek thought, Greek philosophy. They had no religion that made a real difference in their lives, although they speculated eagerly about "the unknown god," and paid reverence to such deities as "Diana of the Ephesians"; but they were highly educated.

If these fishermen of the Sea of Galilee, who were Christ's first disciples, these humble men of whom I wrote just now, had gone about from city to city and spoken of Christ and of Christianity in the very simple language in which they must have spoken of these things, what effect could they have had on the people whose minds were full of philosophical speculations? Very little. To accept the gospel of Christ "like a little child" would have been quite impossible for these men whose minds were formed by the Greek thought.

But after those first humble fishermen and the like came others, men of learning: St. Luke, who was a doctor, a medical man, a scientific man; St. John and St. Paul. All these, and many more, no doubt, who became fervent Christians, had been educated in the Greek philosophy. The writings of St. John and of St. Paul show beyond possibility of mistake that this philosophy was familiar to them and that their minds and thoughts worked in the ways that it had taught them.

Directly they began to feel the reality of Christ's message, and that He really was a divine Person, then they, naturally, were able to see in His message and teaching a great deal that the fishermen had not understood. They saw that it was a message which could be {226} interpreted in such a way as to fit in with all that philosophical speculation with which the minds of all educated men in the world were full. It not only fitted in with that speculation, but it seemed to come as the crown and the completion of it all. It gave it just what it had been very badly wanting. It brought God into a world that had been seeking, seeking very hard, to find God, but a world, as we have seen, that, in spite of all the seeking, was practically Godless.

Now, that is the conclusion of this Greatest Story in the World, or, at least, it is the point at which it seems best to me to leave it. The threads of the story have come together now. They have come together in this sense, that we have the great machine formed by the Roman government ready to convey any message throughout the length and breadth of the world (or of what was then counted as making up the world). That is the first thing. Then we have the Greek thought distributed all along the world roads which this machine had made, and along which it keeps up the communications. And finally we have the Jews, that people of such extraordinary toughness, so marvellously determined to hold on to their own ways of life and of serving God, thoroughly dispersed all the world over, and so carrying their religion and their religious books, which are the base of the Christian religion, with them everywhere.

These are the three great facts which have come together at this point at which we are leaving this great story—the Roman world-power, the Greek world-thought, the Christian world-religion. That the last had to go through dreadful trials and suffer terrible persecution before it could become world-wide (even as the world was understood then) makes no {227} difference. The foundations had been laid on which it was to be built.

I do not know how it may seem to you, but to me it rather looks as if the whole story, all through the ages, even from the first page where we began to trace it, say some five thousand years before Christ, had been working up to just this point—as if it all had been designed to this end.

Understand me—I do not say that it is so. None of us is able to tell how far man has been allowed to act of his own free will in forming his story on the earth, and in what chapters and pages of the story his acts have been determined by a Higher Power. We know that he is allowed much freedom. We are sure, too, that the freedom is not unlimited. Therefore it is impossible for us to tell, of any particular action or series of actions, whether they are all man's own or whether they have been arranged for him. I will only say this, that it looks to me very much as if it had been arranged that the Roman power, the Greek thought, and the Christian religion should come together just at this moment in our story and complete each other for the service of man. I say that it looks to me as if it were so. Do each of you think it out for yourself and see how it appears to you.

INDEX

CÆSAR, JULIUS, 198
  assassination of, 206
  commands in Gaul, 199
  crosses Rubicon, 200
  defeats Pompey, 200
  Dictator for life, 202
  in Britain, 199
  subdues Parthians, 201

Greek learning, philosophy, art, etc., 121 et seq.
  states, jealousy between, 145 et passim
  states, downfall of Sparta, 145
  warrior, 118

Jews, Greek influence among, 204
  Pharisees and Sadducees, 204
  revolt against Rome, 205
  Herod, the great, king of, 206, 217
  under Roman procurators, 215

Rome, conquers Macedon, 187
  Egypt, 188
  Mistress of the World, 190 et seq.
  slaves in, 194, 198

Troy, the siege of, etc., 124
Homer's account of the siege of, 124
more probable story of the siege of, 125 et seq.

XERXES, king of Persia, his attempt on Greece, 133
his alliance with Carthage, 134

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The greatest story in the world, Period I (of 3)

THE GREATEST STORY
IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER I

BEFORE HISTORY WAS WRITTEN

CHAPTER II

EGYPT DOWN TO 1500 B.C.

CHAPTER III

EGYPTIAN RELIGIONS, SACRED WRITINGS, ETC.

CHAPTER IV

BABYLONIA.

CHAPTER V

THE MINOANS IN CRETE

CHAPTER VI

THE MEETING OF THE EMPIRES

CHAPTER VII

THE JEWS AND THE ISRAELITES

CHAPTER VIII

THE PERSIANS AND THE GREEKS

CHAPTER IX

THE GLORIOUS DAYS OF GREECE

CHAPTER X

THE MEETING OF THE NATIONS ROUND SICILY

CHAPTER XI

MACEDON

CHAPTER XII

ROME AND CARTHAGE

CHAPTER XIII

ROME AT HOME AND IN THE EAST

CHAPTER XIV

ROME MISTRESS OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER XV

TROUBLES IN THE EAST

CHAPTER XVI

THE DISPERSAL OF THE JEWS

CHAPTER XVII

HOW THE THREADS DRAW TOGETHER

INDEX

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The greatest story in the world, Period I (of 3)

THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER I BEFORE HISTORY WAS WRITTEN

CHAPTER II EGYPT DOWN TO 1500 B.C.

CHAPTER III EGYPTIAN RELIGIONS, SACRED WRITINGS, ETC.

CHAPTER IV BABYLONIA.

CHAPTER V THE MINOANS IN CRETE

CHAPTER VI THE MEETING OF THE EMPIRES

CHAPTER VII THE JEWS AND THE ISRAELITES

CHAPTER VIII THE PERSIANS AND THE GREEKS

CHAPTER IX THE GLORIOUS DAYS OF GREECE

CHAPTER X THE MEETING OF THE NATIONS ROUND SICILY

CHAPTER XI MACEDON

CHAPTER XII ROME AND CARTHAGE

CHAPTER XIII ROME AT HOME AND IN THE EAST

CHAPTER XIV ROME MISTRESS OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER XV TROUBLES IN THE EAST

CHAPTER XVI THE DISPERSAL OF THE JEWS

CHAPTER XVII HOW THE THREADS DRAW TOGETHER

INDEX

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

THE GREATEST STORY
IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER I

BEFORE HISTORY WAS WRITTEN

CHAPTER II

EGYPT DOWN TO 1500 B.C.

CHAPTER III

EGYPTIAN RELIGIONS, SACRED WRITINGS, ETC.

CHAPTER IV

BABYLONIA.

CHAPTER V

THE MINOANS IN CRETE

CHAPTER VI

THE MEETING OF THE EMPIRES

CHAPTER VII

THE JEWS AND THE ISRAELITES

CHAPTER VIII

THE PERSIANS AND THE GREEKS

CHAPTER IX

THE GLORIOUS DAYS OF GREECE

CHAPTER X

THE MEETING OF THE NATIONS ROUND SICILY

CHAPTER XI

MACEDON

CHAPTER XII

ROME AND CARTHAGE

CHAPTER XIII

ROME AT HOME AND IN THE EAST

CHAPTER XIV

ROME MISTRESS OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER XV

TROUBLES IN THE EAST

CHAPTER XVI

THE DISPERSAL OF THE JEWS

CHAPTER XVII

HOW THE THREADS DRAW TOGETHER