The progress of Hellenism in Alexander's empire

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THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM IN
ALEXANDER'S EMPIRE

The Progress of Hellenism
in Alexander's Empire

By

John Pentland MahafFy, C.V.O., D.D., D.C.L.

Sometime Professor of Ancient History
in the University of Dublin

CHICAGO: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1905

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A- -!.o<iU!ru

copykight 1905
The University of Chicago

3

February, 1905

PREFACE

The following Lectures, delivered in the Univer-
sity of Chicago, represent the compendium of a
long and brilliant development of human culture.
To obtain a brief and yet accurate survey of it is
certainly a desideratum to various classes of readers,
and will, I trust, satisfy a real want. The general
reader, who desires to learn something of the ex-
pansion of Greek ideas toward the East, will here
find enough for a working knowledge of a very com-
plicated epoch. The specialist, who has devoted
himself to some department of this field, will find
here those general views of the whole which are
necessary to every inteUigent research into the parts.
More especially, the student or teacher of Christi-
anity will find here the human side of its origin
treated in a strictly historical spirit. To all such
this little volume may be as welcome as were the
lectures which compose it to the large and very sym-
pathetic class who heard them in the summer of
1904.

Compendiums have so often been written by mere
literary hacks that the public has been misled to
believe it an easy task, which can be accomplished
at second hand. But no collection of extracts from
larger books ever made a sound hand-book. It

vi PREFACE

must be produced fresh from the sources by one
who has made himself perfectly at home in the sub-
ject. It is, in fact, rather the work suited to the
close than to the beginning of a literary life. So far
at least these lectures satisfy the proper conditions.
This epoch has occupied me for more than twenty
years.

The appearance of Xenophon in this company
will seem novel to many; and it is so in truth. But
this new view of a familiar figure is amply justified
by the works which any sceptic may consult for
himself. This first lecture is, therefore, that which
will chiefly attract classical scholars, to whom Xeno-
phon is a household word in the class-room. If it
encourages them to read him through, instead of
confining themselves to his popular works, I shall
have attained what I most desire. To my American
readers, who have hitherto been very sympathetic
friends, I offer my respectful greeting on the appear-
ance of this my first American book.

J. P. M.

Dublin, January, 1905.

CONTENTS

LECTUEE I pj^OE

Xenophon the Precursor of Hellenism .... i

LECTURE n

Macedonia and Greece 29

LECTURE m
Egypt 63

lecture iv
Syria 91

lecture v
General Reflections on Hellenism 107

lecture vi
Hellenistic Influences on Christianity . . . . 125

Index 151

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR OF
HELLENISM

LECTURE I
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR OF HELLENISM

You have done me a high honour in asking me
to speak in this great university. I shall best express
my deep gratitude by economising your time and
by setting to work at once to teach what I can with-
out further excuse or preamble.

The first thing essential is that you and I should
understand one another, especially regarding the
topic of my discourse. I am not sure that all of you
agree with me in the meaning you attach to the
word "Hellenism." And no wonder; for if you read
the immortal Grote, you will find it used by him for
the high culture of Athens, and as the substantive
corresponding to the adjective "Hellenic." If, on
the other hand, you open the great work of Droysen,
the History of Hellenism, you will find that it excludes
the purest Greek culture, and corresponds to the
adjective "Hellenistic." As you may see from
the program of my lectures, I intend to use the word
in the latter sense, and to speak of that diffusion
of Greek speech and culture through Macedonia
and the nearer East which, while it extended the
influence, could not but dilute the purity, of Hellenic
civiUsation. I wish Grote had adopted from the
Germans the word "Hellenedom," to correspond

3

4 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

with "Hellenic." Then all would have been clear.
Or perhaps I should have coined "Hellenicism,"
to correspond to "Hellenistic." But what chance
had I of accompHshing what the Roman emperor
despaired of-^adding a new word to one's mother-
tongue ? I must therefore be content with repeating
that by "Hellenism" I mean that so-caUed "silver
age" of Greek art and Hterature, when they became
cosmopoHtan, and not parochial; and by "Hellen-
istic," not only what was Greek, but what desired
and assumed to be Greek, from the highest and
noblest imitation down to the poorest travesty.'
The pigeon EngHsh of the Solomon islander is as
far removed from the prose of Ruskin or of Froude
as is the rudest Hellenistic epitaph or letter from
the music of Plato's diction, but both are clear
evidence of the imperial quality in that language
which sways the life of miUions of men far beyond
the limits of its original domain. Yet it must needs
be that as the matchless idiom of Aristophanes
passed out to Macedonian noble, to Persian grandee,
to Syrian trader, to Egyptian priest, each and all of
these added somewhat of their national flavour, and
so produced an idiom and a culture uniform indeed
in apphcation, though by no means uniform in
construction.

' I notice with surprise that Mr. Bevan, in his recent mas-
terly book on The House oj Seleucus, uses the word "Hellenism"
indifferently in both senses, without apparent knowledge of the
ambiguity.

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 5

It is customary to date the origin of this Hellen-
ism from the reign of Alexander, whose house had
adopted Greek culture, and whose arms carried it
into the far East; but this is to my mind a superficial
view, and it is the object of my first lecture to show
you that Hellenism was a thing of older growth,
and that it began from the moment that Athens
ceased to be the dominant centre of Greece in pohtics
as well as in letters.

The end of the long Peloponnesian war threw
out of Greece a crowd of active and ambitious men
— some exiled from their homes, some voluntary
absentees — in search of employment. Neighbouring
nationaUties — Macedonians, Persians, Egyptians —
were coming into nearer view, and becoming the
possible homes of expatriated Greeks. All these
countries had long since sought and found merce-
naries, not only among the poor mountaineers of
Achffia and Arcadia, but among the aristocrats of
Lesbos and Rhodes, nay even of Athens and Sparta.
And now mercenary service not only became more
frequent and more respectable, but the relations
between the employers and the employed began to
change. Earlier Persian kings and satraps had
regarded their Greek mercenaries as they regarded
their Indian elephants — mere tools to win victories.
The relations of the younger Cyrus with the Greeks
were of a wholly different kind. He endeavoured to
make them friends, and to reconcile them to Persian

6 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

ideas of state and of sovereignty. How well he
succeeded I will proceed to show in the case of
Xenophon.

But not only in the case of active men and travellers
but among the stay-at-home and purely literary,
there grew up in this generation a feeling that culture
was more than race, and wealth better than nobility.
We have Isocrates, the rhetorician and schoolmaster,
saying in a passage of which he probably did not
himself apprehend the deep meaning, that to be an
Athenian meant, not to be born in Attica, but to
have attained to Attic culture. Socrates, the most
undeniable of Athenians, had already by his teaching
loosened the bonds of city patriotism. He had taught
wider views, and laid larger issues before men; and
so we have a typical pupil, Xenophon, using the
Delphic oracle, not for Hellenic, but Hellenistic
purposes, compeUing its assent to his schemes of
ambition, and looking forward to eastern war and
travel as the obvious resource for a man without a
fixed position at home.

It is an exceptional good fortune for the modern
historian that this figure of Xenophon, furnished
with all the books he ever wrote (and some which he
never wrote), stands out so clearly at this momentous
epoch, when constant petty wars and rumours of wars
at home were preparing Greece for the coming
change. He begins his hfe a pure Athenian, and
to the end remained entitled by his style to the name

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 7

of the Attic bee. But where did that bee not gather
honey ? Not merely from the thyme of Attica and
the cistus of the Peloponnese, but from the rose
gardens of Persia and the sunflowers of Babylonia.
And so in every successive work there is some new
flavour in the diction and the tone of thought, till
we come in the Cyropcedia to that extraordinary
panegyric on the methods of the Persian monarchy,
even including the employment of eunuchs to take
charge of the king's household.

But generalities or metaphors are not sufficient
to prove my case. Let us descend into details. I
say that in the main features of his life and teaching
Xenophon represents the first step in the transition
from Hellenedom to Hellenism. It is apparent,
first, in his language; for though he writes excellent
Attic Greek, he discards the niceties of style which
were then invading Attic prose,' and which made
the essays of his contemporary Isocrates, and the
orations of Demosthenes, the most artificial of all
the great prose writing the world has seen. Still
more he allows himself the use of stray and strange
words provincial in the sense of not being Attic,
picked up in his travels at Sinope or Samos or
Byzantium, and often appearing but once in his
works. Thus his language distinctly approximates

' In particular the avoidance of hiatus, e. g., ending and
beginning two consecutive words with vowels, so that the voice
must stop between them to make the words clear.

8 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

to that common dialect which was the lingua franca
of all the Hellenistic world. Hence he remained
always popular, while the writers in dialect — Sappho,
Theocritus, nay even Herodotus — were well-nigh
unintelligible to the Hellenistic child. There is,
moreover, a great diminution in his use of particles,
as compared, e. g., with the prose of Plato. These
delicate spices, which gave flavour to every page of
Plato, very soon lost their perfume; they became as
unintelligible to the later Greeks as they are to our
scholars; that is to say, grammarians could still talk
about them, but no man knew how to use them.
And so the simpler prose of Xenophon became the
highest ideal of their aspirations.

But if in this respect his life became simpler and
plainer, in others it followed a contrary course. In
his Socratic dialogues he had given a very complete
analysis of all that could be attained in Attic life.
His Socrates is not only a perfect man of high intel-
lectual endowments, who discusses all the problems
of life, but the pupils he has trained, men of high
birth and independent fortune, are represented as
putting his theory into practice. Ischomachus, in
the dialogue or tract On Household Economy, not
only gives us a famous picture of the educating
of his own wife, after her marriage, but tells of the
whole course of the work and the amusements of an
Attic country gentleman. None of us questions
that it was in this Socratic education that Xenophon

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 9

laid the foundation of his all-around capacities both
for intellectual and for practical life. He was not
a deep philosopher, and he cared not to be; but, as
Tacitus says of Agricola, another practical man,
retinuit, quod est difficillimum, in philosophia modum.
He had not the tastes or the ambitions of a college
Don. When he had graduated, so to speak, under
Socrates, he went out into the world. And there
he found other nations which could do some things
better than the Greeks, and could attain great hap-
piness denied to them.

There are several blind spots in the ideal prospects
of Ischomachus — the Attic gentleman. In the first
place, field sports were impossible in Attica. In a
land so thickly populated, and so carefully cultivated,
large properties were scarce, and preservation
impossible. So game was long since extirpated
from Attica. But no sooner did Xenophon go to
visit the younger Cyrus in Asia Minor than he woke
up to the dignities and dehghts of hunting. This
taste he kept up all his hfe. After his return with
the Ten Thousand, he was attached to the Spartans
in their campaigns against the Persian satraps, and
so he had frequently the chance of poaching their
splendid preserves. In later life, when Sparta
desired to reward him, he obtained a sporting estate
on the Arcadian side of Olympia, which he turns
aside to describe (in his Anabasis V, 3) with evident
delight. He writes tracts on hunting, and says that

10 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

the pursuit of the hare is so fascinating as to make a
man forget that he ever was in love with anything
else. Now, all this side of his life he learned not
from Socrates or at Athens, but from his intercourse
with Persian grandees.

In another place, when speaking of order in the
keeping of a household, he quotes no Greek example,
but rather the great Phoenician merchantman he had
seen at Corinth, where all the tackle and the freight
were packed away with such neatness and economy
as to make it a sight for the Greeks to visit. And
so he adds that the planting of a paradise belonging
to his patron Cyrus was not only far superior to any-
thing in Greece, but, what was more astonishing,
that great prince had deigned to occupy his own
hands with this planting. In the laying out, there-
fore, of orchards and parks he found that the Greeks
had everything to learn from a race of men whom
they had been brought up to hate and despise. I
notice, by the way, that in one point both the Attic
and the Persian gardens were still undeveloped.
In all his descriptions of them Xenophon is silent on
the culture of flowers. Nor does he ever speak of
the beauty of his fruit trees in flower. When we
hear of Alexandria, in the next century, that it pro-
duced beautiful flowers at every season in its green-
houses, we see that the Hellenism of Xenophon was
only incipient. Queen Cleopatra had been taught
many luxuries unknown even to the younger Cyrus.

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR ii

Still the very changes of residence in Xenophon's
life could not but broaden his views and enlarge
his tastes beyond those of the cultivated Athenian.
Consider for a moment how much of the world he
had seen. Starting from Sardis with the army of
Cyrus, and being free from discipline as a volunteer,
he travelled all through southern Asia Minor into
Babylonia, where he tells us of the strange and new
aspect of the country, with its wide rivers, its great
deserts, its dense cultivation, and its fauna and
flora so much more tropical than anything known
in Greece. Then comes the battle of Kunaxa and
the disastrous death of his great patron, Cyrus.
The famous retreat of the Ten Thousand is what has
made Xenophon's name immortal, and though, as
I gravely suspect, he has much exaggerated his own
importance in that arduous affair, he must certainly
have had the experience of a journey over the high
passes of Armenia in deep snow and arctic tempera-
ture, to contrast with the burning plains of Babylonia.
He returns along the north coast of Asia Minor,
encountering many strange savage tribes, whose man-
ners and customs he notes with curious interest. Then
from Byzantium he makes a tour among the bar-
barians of European Thrace, and thence returns to
Greece, only to revert again to Asia Minor, and
this time to campaign in' its central provinces. He
next comes home with his second patron. King
Agesilaus of Sparta, through Boeotia, where the

12 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

famous battle of Koronea gives him a foretaste of
Boeotian supremacy. Yet of all the Greeks none
were so distasteful to him as these hardy vulgarians.
Not even the great and refined Epaminondas earns
from him more than rare and unwiUing praise, and
presently our travelled Athenian departs in exile
to the Pelopormese, where he seems to have spent
the rest of his long life.

Thus Xenophon had studied not only all Greece,
but all the borders of the Greek, world in Asia
Minor and Thrace; he had penetrated the great
Persian empire and learned its splendour and its
weakness. In fact, the whole sphere of early Hel-
lenism was under his ken. The West only — Sicily
and southern Italy — he neglects, and this is quite
characteristic of the rise of Hellenism in the next
generation. All the desires, the ambitions, the
prospects of the Greeks of the fourth and third
centuries before Christ lay eastward, not westward.
To them the Romans were yet unknown and unnoticed
barbarians, and the Greek West no land of large
promise like the East; for apart from the tough
mountaineers of Calabria and Sicily, dangerous
neighbours on land, there was the Carthaginian
sea-power which took care to close the avenues of
trade to the fabulous isles and coasts, that loomed
against the setting sun. But in the armies he com-
manded there were not wanting many mercenaries
haiUng from the far West; there must also have been

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 13

many who had served in Egypt; and it was from
these that he derived his great respect and admira-
tion for that ancient civiHsation. The Egyptians
who fight against the great Cyrus in Xenophon's
romance, who are uUimately settled by him as a
colony in Asia Minor, are the bravest and best of
oriental nations. Such, then, being this man's wide
experience, it is well worth seeking from his writings
his general views regarding the Greek world, his
estimate of its strength and of its weakness, and above
all, what he has said — or would have said, had we
asked him — of the future prospects of the complex
of states around him.

The first and most important point I notice is
his firm belief in the expansion of the Hellenic race.
He has before him constantly the feasibility of set-
tling colonies of Greeks anywhere through Asia.
When the Ten Thousand reach the Black Sea, and
the next problem is how to occupy or provide for
them, one of the ideas always recurring, and one
which makes Xenophon suspected by all those who
are longing for their homes in Greece, is his supposed
ambition to be the founder of a new Greek city on
the Euxine, where by trade, and by intermarriage
with the natives, his companions might acquire a new
and a wealthy home. Had not Olbia and ApoUonia
and Trapezus and many other Greek colonies of
earlier days fared splendidly in these remote but
most profitable regions, where sea and land, river

14 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

and plain, combined to produce their natural
wealth for the enterprising stranger ? The Thracian
king, who calls in his services, quite naturally makes
similar offers. Xenophon is to possess a castle,
marry a Thracian princess, and settle down as a
magnate who brings about him Greeks for the
purposes of trade and of mercenary service. Every
ambitious Greek had therefore this prospect dang-
ling before his eyes. And this gave him a new, a
practical, interest in learning to appreciate the
qualities of the neighbour races, hitherto set down
in the lump as barbarians. The Persian grandees on
their side must have found both pleasure and profit
in bringing Greeks about their courts. If so far
back as the days of Sappho we hear that one of the '
girls she had educated in charms went to exercise
them in Lydian Sardis,^ is it not to be assumed that
also this Greek influence upon the East was stiU
waxing? The profession of Greek mercenary was
not confined to men-at-arms, and among the booty
brought home by the Ten Thousand there were so
many women that their outcry was quite a feature in
the camp in moments of excitement. It is highly
improbable that many of these had followed the army
from Hellenic lands in their upward march, and
if not, here was an eastern element affecting the next
generation of the profession of arms. The fusion of

> This appears from the new fragment published by WiLA-
MOWITZ-MOELLENDORFF in the Proceedings of the Berlin Academy
io-T 1903.

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 15

races, therefore, though slow and sporadic, was
distinctly on its increase. The campaigns of the
Spartan king Agesilaus in Asia Minor, where he was
attended, and no doubt advised, by Xenophon,
pointed to a large invasion of the East; and had he
not been recalled by the miserable dissensions and
quarrels of Greece, the conquest, partial if not
total, of the Persian empire was in near prospect.
Isocrates in more than one public letter implores the
leaders of his nationahty to compose their parochial
disputes, and unite for the great object of becoming
lords of the East.

The result he regarded as certain; but who was to
accomplish this great Hellenic league for the sub-
jugation of the East ? On this question Xenophon's
opinions and his forecast are not the less clear because
we have to gather them indirectly from many stray
indications in his works. He had had large practical
experiences, besides the theoretical opinions of his
master Socrates, to afford him materials for a sound
judgment. In the first place, he had made essay of
democracy, both the best and the worst that Greece
could afford. He had lived an Athenian during the
latter half of the great war which deprived his city
of her supremacy, and he had' seen his great mas-
ter gradually alienating the majority by his trench-
ant criticism, tiU that master's Ufe was sacrificed to
the vulgar prejudices of a democratic jury: Yet
Athens was the most refined and cultivated democracy

i6 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

that ever existed. The bitter and satirical tract On
the Polity of the Athenians, still printed among the
works of Xenophon, is now generally recognised
as the work of an older writer, living at Athens when
Xenophon was a child. But it would not have
attained its place, or kept it so long, had not the
readers of Xenophon felt that it expressed the opin-
ions he was likely to hold. It is certain that the
school of Socrates, even before his shameful prosecu-
tion and condemnation, were no friends of democracy.
They all regarded the opinion of the majority, as
such, worth nothing, and thought that the masses
should be guided by the enlightened judgment
of the select one or the select few. What they would
have said or thought, had they made experience of
the democracies of our day, is another question.
They had before them a sovereign assembly which
by a bare majority at a single meeting might abrogate
a law or take away a human life without further
penalty than the contrition and the shame which some-
times followed upon calmer reflection.' There were
no higher courts of appeal from the sovereign assem-
bly, no rehearing by a second and smaller House;

' This contrition had only one practical expression, which not
infrequently followed the reaction. The spokesman who had
given voice to the folly and the passion of the majority and had
framed or supported the resolution, was prosecuted and con-
demned for having "deceived the sovereign demos" by having
proposed things contrary to the laws — truly a monstrous cure
for a monstrous evil.

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 17

the Athenian demos was recognised as a tyrant, above
the laws which itself had sanctioned. That such a
state should carry out a large policy of conquest, based
upon a confederation of friendly states, was clearly
impossible. Apart from other difficulties, the con-
duct of military affairs by a political assembly was
absurd. When a general could be appointed or dis-
missed by a mere civihan vote of ordinary citizens,
was any prompt or elaborate campaign possible?
The generals were all playing a political as well as a
strategic game, and looking to their supporters at
home more than to their troops abroad for support.
There are not wanting parallels for all this in modern
times. Great foreign conquests both then and now
require something very dififerent from the leading of
a democratic assembly.

But Xenophon had other and far worse experiences
of Greek democracy. As a leader of importance,
selected by the majority to command an army of
Greek mercenaries, he found himself in an impromptu
military republic, whose city was its camp, and
whose laws the resolutions of armed men swayed by
the momentary gusts of passion, of panic, or of pride.
At the same time, they were no mere random
adventurers, who regarded the camp as their only
home, but men of whom the majority had not gone
out from poverty, but because they had heard so
high a character of Cyrus. Some brought men,
some money, with them; some had run away from

i8 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

home, or left wife and children behind them, with
the hope and intention of coming back rich men.'
Yet such men, though obedient enough to discipline
on the march or in action, were constantly breaking
out into riots in camp; officers were deposed, inno-
cent men hunted to death in the fury of the moment.^
To Uve among such people, still more to be respon- '
sible for the leading of them, was a life of imminent
daily risk. Such was the wilder democracy which
Xenophon experienced, and here he had not the
resource, which he strongly recommends to the cav-
alry general in his tract, that above all things he
must "square" the governing council of his city,
and have on his side a leading politician to defend
him. Xenophon therefore saw very plainly what
hampered and weakened the Athens of Demosthenes
in the next generation, and handed over Greece to
Philip of Macedon — that a democracy which exposes)
its executive government to constant criticism, and!
which constantly discusses and changes its mihtar^J
plans, is wholly unfit to make foreign conquests and '
to rule an extended empire.

There was evidently far more hope from the side
of Sparta, which at this very moment — I mean dur-
ing Xenophon's youth and his campaigning days —
held supremacy in Greece, commanded considerable
armies, and was under monarchical goverrunent.
More especially under an able king like Agesilaus,

' Anabasis vi, 4. ' Cf. Anabasis vi, 6 ; v, 7, § 21-24.

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 19

Xenophon must have felt his hopes of invading the
East within reach of their fulfilment. But a closer
survey of the far-famed Spartan constitution showed
him that here, too, there were flaws and faults which
made Sparta unfit to hold empire. He has left us a
tract On the Lacedamonian Polity, in which he details
to us with admiration the strict discipline of that
state and especially the thorough organisation of its
education of boys and men for war. The order,
the respect for authority, the simpHcity of life, the
subordination of even the most sacred family rights
to the service of the state — all these aristocratic
features fascinated every cultivated Greek who
lived under the sway of that most capricious tyrant,
a popular assembly. But they did not appreciate
the compensating advantages which democracy,
however dangerous and turbulent, afforded them.

As Grote has expounded to us with complacent
insistence, no Spartan would have been so fitted to
take a lead suddenly in public affairs, civil or mili-
tary, as the cultivated pupil of Socrates from Athens,
who Jumps in a moment from an amateur into a
general. When Sparta obtained her empire, she
had no competent civil service to manage her
dependencies. Her harmosts, as they were called,
were but rude and overbearing soldiers, not above
venaUty and other corruption, but wholly unable to
maintain the imperial dignity which is the only
justification of a ruler from without, the only coun-

20 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

terpoising boon for those who find their liberties
impaired. And even if there had been competent
rulers among the Spartan aristocracy, the method
of appointment was radically vicious. For though
Sparta was in name a dual monarchy, the real
power lay with the five ephors — so far as we know
them, narrow and bigoted men — who were more
anxious to keep the kings in subjection than to
appoint fit men as governors in the subject cities.
Xenophon's experiences when the Ten Thousand
returned to Byzantium show us how arbitrary and
cruel was the rule of these governors, how absurd
their mutual jealousies, how incompetent their
handling of great public interests. Yet there was
no remedy while the ephors appointed their personal
friends, against whose crimes it was well nigh im-
possible to obtain redress.

With all these various experiences before him,
Xenophon wrote his largest and most elaborate
treatise, doubtless that on which he staked his
reputation — the book On the Education of Cyrus.
The fate that mocks so many human efforts has
not spared the Attic bee. This voluminous book,
in which the many speeches and curious digressions
seem to suggest the garrulity of advancing age, has
been neglected from the author's own day till now,
while the Anabasis has been inflicted on every school-
boy for two millenniums. The wonder is that so
little-heeded a treatise ever survived the neglect of

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 21

ages. Yet no Greek book should have excited
greater likes and dislikes than this. Its theme is
the vindication, both theoretically and practically,
of absolute monarchy, as shown in the organisation
of the Persian empire. In many other of his writ-
ings — as, for example, in the (Economicus, he sets
forth the Socratic idea that if you can find the man
with a ruling soul, the archie man, you had better
put him in control, and trust to his wisdom rather
than to the counsels of many. But now he takes as
his ideal the far-off figure of the first Cyrus, whose
gigantic deeds impress aUke the Hebrew prophet
and the Greek philosopher, and, amplifying his
picture with many romantic details, gives us in the
form of a historical novel a monarch's handbook
for the gaining and the administration of a great
empire. We never hear that Alexander the Great
read this treatise. Most probably his tutor Aristotle
hid it from him with jealous care. For what teaching
could be more odious. to the Hellenic mind ? Never-
theless, in all Greek literature there was hardly a
book which would prove more interesting to Alex-
ander, or more useful to him in justifying his adop-
tion of oriental ideas.

What is even more striking is this, that after
Alexander's magnificent display of what the "archie
man" could do if he possessed an acknowledged
monarchy, the whole Hellenistic world acquiesced
in monarchy as the best and most practical form of

22 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

government. The seventh and eighth books of the
Cyrofadia were in spirit but the earliest of the many
tracts composed by Stoic and Peripatetic philoso-
phers about monarchy {-rrepl ^acn\eCa<;), and it was
marvellous how even the democrats of Athens outbid
their neighbours in their servile adulation of such a
king as Demetrius, whose father had founded a
new dynasty. Before a century had elapsed since
Xenophon's treatise appeared, hardly a Greek city
existed which was not directly or indirectly under
the control of a king. Even the Rhodian confederacy
lasted only because the surrounding kings found their
finances more manageable in a neutral banking cen-
tre with vast credit, and therefore with vast capital
secured in a place of safety. And so when a great
earthquake ruined the city, it was all the kings of
the Hellenistic world who sent contributions to re-
store it — kings at war or at variance one with the
other, but all bound to support the financial credit
of Rhodes and avert a commercial crash.

I will but notice one more feature in this monarchy
which overspread the Hellenistic world, which
Xenophon saw in his day and admired, though he
did not fully comprehend its strange nature. It is
this, that hereditary monarchy develops in its sub-
jects a loyalty to the sovereign almost unintelligible
to the modem republican. The notion that it was
the highest honour not only to die for the king, but
to live in his personal service, was as foreign to the

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 23

old Hellenic societies as it is to the modem American.
And yet among the great and proud nobility of
Persia, as among that of the French monarchy, and
even now in England, men and women of the greatest
pride and the largest wealth are "lords-in- waiting,"
"women of the bed chamber," "mistresses of the
robes," "chamberlains," and "maids of honour."
Xenophon saw this kind of devotion at the very
outset of the Anabasis (I, 5). If Clearchus, the
Lacedaemonian general, saw anyone slothful or
lagging behind, he struck him with his stick, but set
to the work himself, in order that he might turn
pubHc opinion to his side. How different the posi-
tion of Cyrus ! He sees a lot of carts stuck in the deep
mud of a pass, and the men set to extricate them
shirking the work. Whereupon he calls upon his
retinue of lords to show them an example. These,
without a word, throwing off their purple headdress,
dash into the mud with their costly tunics, their
coloured trousers, with tores of gold around their
necks, and bracelets on their wrists, and, setting to
work with a will drag out the carts forthwith. Xeno-
phon wonders at this instance of discipline {eiiTa^Ca)
in these young nobles. It was nothing of the kind.
It was that loyalty that holds the personal service of
the prince by divine right to be the noblest self-sac-
rifice. These Persians were proud to do the work of
asses and of mules when called upon by their prince,
and yet they were far greater gentlemen than the

24 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

Greeks who would have been highly offended at such
an order.

Starting, then, with Macedon and Persia, whose
kings, like the Spartan kings, professed a descent
from the gods, the whole Hellenistic world learned
to regard a Ptolemy, a Seleucus, even an Attalus,
as something superhuman in authority. This was
the change which Xenophon foresaw as highly
expedient, if not necessary to the management of a
great empire.

It is, I think, well worth observing that this prob-
lem of monarchy did not occupy Xenophon merely
in his old age. If the Cyropcedia shows in its style,
as I am convinced, something of the proUxity of age,
the Hiero, or dialogue between that tyrant and
Simonides, shows much of the exuberance of youth,
and accordingly it has by general consent been
classed among Xenophon's earliest works. In the
former part of this most interesting tract Hiero sets
forth the dangers and miseries of the Greek tyrant's
life, surrounded as he was by flattery concealing
hatred and mistrust, regarded as he was by all a
public enemy, whose murder would be regarded an
act of patriotism. Hiero details the circumstances
which he regards essential to a tyrant's safety, and
therefore certain to entail his unpopularity and its
consequent miseries. A tyrant must keep up a
mercenary force; he must therefore levy taxes for its
support; he cannot possibly travel or see the world.

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 25

for fear of a revolution in his absence, and so on,
through the catalogue of difficulties, which were a
commonplace of Greek literature. But when all is
said on that side, Simonides reposts that it is not by
reason of their external circumstances, but of their
own characters, that Greek tyrants have earned the
mistrust and hatred of men. He goes on to show
how even a monarch not hereditary, who has risen
from a private station, could earn the esteem and
gratitude of his subjects, and, by identifying his own
interests with those of his city, make himself the
acknowledged benefactor of all around him. Even
the keeping of a mercenary force is justified by good
practical reasons, as the protection of frontiers was
always a great burden to a citizen population, and
as the readiness and discipline of professional soldiers
must be superior to a sudden levy of amateurs in
war, if such unwiUing recruits can indeed be called
amateurs. With such arguments Xenophon justifies
the fact that most ambitious Greeks regarded the
attaining to a tyranny as the very acme of their desires.
However, if this fact was known to the Ten Thous-
and, it justifies not a little of their suspicions that
Xenophon dreamt of being not only the founder but
the autocrat of a new city on the Euxine. The
picture of the benevolent tyrant, shown in the Hiero,
would hardly be a sufficient guarantee to them that
Xenophon, as a monarch, would indeed depart so
widely from the ordinary and hateful traditions of a

26 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

Greek tyranny. We need only here insist that the
idea of monarchy had already occupied the early
attention of the author of the Cyropadia, and that
he had probably found the arguments in its favour
an ordinary topic among the young aristocrats in the
school of Socrates.

I confess that the extremes to which he carries
his defence of the imperii instrumenta employed by
the kings of Persia must be distasteful to any rea-
sonable critic, most of all to any democrat, ancient
or modern. The way in which he describes the
great king absorbing all the interests and ambitions
of his subjects, and making every man in the state
look to the sovran as the fountain of honour and
of promotion — all this savours of a Napoleonic cen-
tralisation and a Napoleonic tyranny, which, as it
saps all individual independence, so it kills the
growth and nurture of the highest qualities in human
nature. This unpleasant side of the book may afford
one reason for its systematic neglect. It is so far
like one of those artificial school-exercises, so com-
mon in the next generation, where the speaker made
it his glory to vindicate some villain or justify some
crime. And perhaps Xenophon was infected with
this "sophistic" more than his readers imagine.
Nevertheless, I for one have no doubt that real con-
victions in favour of monarchy underhe all his semi-
sophistical arguments.

Grote, the great historian of Greece, who was the

XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 27

first to inspire me, and perhaps many of you, with
the love of Greek history and Greek literature, looks
upon this momentous change as the death-knell of
his favourite country. " 'Tis Greece, but living
Greece no more." And yet at no time did the Greeks
do more for the letters, the commerce, the civility of
all the ancient world. And hence it is that I have
chosen this somewhat neglected period as the topic
of my discourses.

MACEDONIA AND GREECE

THE ANTIGONID DYNASTY

[We need not consider the stormy and broken rule of Deme-
trius I (the Besieger).]

1. Antigonus Gonatas (bom at Gonoe in Thessaly) 278- 39

2. Demetrius the iEtolian 239- 29

3. Antigonus Doson 229- 21

4. Philip V 221-178

5. Perseus 178- 68

LECTURE II
MACEDONIA AND GREECE

In my last address I showed you how Xenophon
— a thorough and cultivated Hellene, and yet a
travelled man, and acquainted with the East — fore-
shadowed the spread of Hellenic influence and cul-
ture beyond its early and restricted home. He is
not, like Isocrates, a poHtical theorist, nor does he
formally, in any of his works, hold out the conquest
of the East by the Greeks as the great national
object of the future. He probably thought the
practical difi&culties to be insurmountable, for till
an absolute ruler should arise able to coerce Greece
into unity, at least for military purposes, all theories
and exhortations were useless. But Isocrates, living
a few years longer, saw clearly enough that such a
solution was within sight, and in his open letter to
Philip of Macedon exhorts him to lead the Greeks
away from internal disputes and wars into the new
r61e of a conquering race. But no Phihp, nay even
no Alexander, could have done this work with Greek
armies, either citizen or mercenary. He must have
the backbone of quite another force — bound to
him not only by discipline, but by loyalty, and ready
to protect him against Greek intrigue and Greek
insurrection. All these conditions were satisfied

31

32 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

by Macedonia, with Philip as its monarch. But it
required nearly twenty years of organisation, of
civilisation, and of subjugation to prepare the com-
bined forces of Greece, Macedon, Illyria, and
Thrace for its great work; and when all was ready
Philip was struck down by the hand of an assassin.
Providentially, a great successor was ready to carry
out the matured plan. But had Alexander been
killed in his first melee at the Granikos, when the
Persian nobles fought so gallantly with him hand
to hand, the whole history of Hellenism would have
been changed, and its progress delayed till some
other organising and conquering genius had arisen.
It was therefore to the king of Macedon, leading his
own people, that the first great spread of Hellenism
is directly due.'

Macedonia had long been known to the Greeks,
especially through the cities they had founded on the
coast, which carried on some trade with the semi-
civihsed interior; but, except for the court, neither
Greek language nor Greek culture had penetrated
into the wild country. The kings had, indeed, long
since made out for themselves a Greek pedigree,

' At no moment, by the way, does the now somewhat fash-
ionable theory, that national movements are everything, and
individuals nothing, in history, appear to me more absurd. To
tell me that the conquest of the East was in the air, and that
some other Alexander would have carried out the national desire,
had the son of Philip been killed at the outset of his career, is
to tell me what no man could possibly prove, and what runs
counter to all the experience we possess.

MACEDONIA AND GREECE ^^

and had courted Greek literary men. If Simonides
had basked in the courts of Thessaly, Euripides had
produced plays for the Macedonian, though it is
very likely that the Macedonian nobles who came to
hear the Bacchce at court understood it no better
than did the Parthian lords who saw the head of
Crassus brought in to play its ghastly part in the same
immortal drama. But how little hold Greek ever
took upon the people is manifest from the fact
that we know not of a single Macedonian author,
unless we count the royal Ptolemies, some of whom
dabbled in literature.

The materials which the genius of Alexander
found to his hand were quite distinct — the mihtary
quaUties of the Macedonians and the culture of the
Greeks; and both were absolutely necessary for his
purpose. Moreover, both remained clear and dis-
tinct elements in every kingdom which was formed
out of his vast empire. If it were only for this reason,
it is desirable to lay firm hold of the general features
of both these nations before we consider the Egypt
and the Syria which they transformed, or failed to
transform, from oriental into Hellenistic states.
Remember I must take broad views in this sketch,
and must speak of Greece as one conglomerate,
though as you all know, it was made up of little
separate cities, each with its own small territory and
its independence, like the little states which crowded
the map of Germany when we were young, and still

34 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

more like the little city-republics which crowded the
map of Italy in mediaeval times. And so I must talk
of Macedonia as one thing, though it never was a
stricter unity in its older history than the unity
of Germany now is, and though it doubtless con-
tained with its Agrianes, Paeonians, Epirots, etc., a
greater variance than there is between Bavarians
and Saxons in the German empire. But, as I may
presume that you know all this about Greece, I
will confine myself chiefly to Macedonia.

When Macedonia emerged from its obscurity
owing to the genius of the famous Philip,' it had
long been known and despised by the Greeks,' as
the home of people who did not inhabit cities. If
you go now and visit Macedonia, you will see at once
the force of this contrast. The Greek loved the
sea-side, the neighbourhood of many men, the lounge
and the talk in the market-place. His amusements
were processions, feasts, ceremonies, athletics, plays.
He was essentially no sportsman, and he was only a
soldier from the compulsion of defending his home,
or of making money abroad. There is little of what
we call chivalry among the Greeks, if we except
the earlier, or rather the ideal, Spartans.

' He was really Philip II.

' Demosthenes says with very ill-advised contempt that no
decent slave could be procured from that country. He thought
this a scathing remark ; we might interpret it as a compliment.
The retort is obvious that very fine masters came from it, as the
Greeks learned to their cost.

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 35

Now, in contrast, the Macedonians were rude
and hardy, mountaineers in the strict sense of the
word, living among forests and glens, loving to
pursue the bear and the wolf through pathless
wilds, or to spear the boar in hand-to-hand conflict.
And, as you might expect in such a country, there
were feudal lords, who held a sort of hereditary
sovereignty over certain districts, and who had the
traditions and the dignity of royal pretensions,
though these were all swallowed up in the splendour
of their suzerain, the king of Macedonia.

Yet the fact is not without its importance. These
nobles — Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Craterus —
took service under Alexander just as the German
hereditary princes now serve under the Prussian
headship. In both cases we find that this kind of
officer gives a pecuhar character to the army, and that
such leaders are obeyed far better and are more
efficient, than men promoted from^p ranks. Sec-
ondly, when Alexander died, and these men set up
as independent sovereigns, they did so with the
habits of ruhng, and with the dignity only attained
by generations of nobiUty.

Thus there is a marked contrast between Alex-
ander and his generals with what appears at first
sight a close parallel. Napoleon was an upstart, and
his generals were upstarts who failed as kings.
Alexander was a hereditary king, and his generals
hereditary princes and nobles, who consequently

36 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

succeeded in founding new royal houses. The
ablest of the staff, Eumenes, of Kardia, who was
Alexander's intimate secretary, failed in establish-
ing a kingdom for himself, not for want of bravery,
not for want of abiUty as a general, but because the
Macedonians would not be led by an upstart Greek —
so completely had the tables turned upon the intellec-
tual leaders of the world. This peculiar character
of the Macedonian aristocracy is, I think, of the
last importance in understanding the career of the
Macedonians as a conquering race.

I shall not go into the politics of Philip, which
you can all study in any ordinary Greek history,
but will say a word about his mihtary idea, the
famous phalanx. The intention of it is evident.
He wished to make an inferior infantry — that is,
one of less training and of inferior arms — equal to
the full-armed Xireeks by massing it into a column,
a moving square, in which five rows of lance-points
formed an impenetrable barrier to assailants, and
which, if it advanced, must walk through any oppo-
sition made in loose order. This object was really
effected, and so thoroughly that even the Roman
infantry could not resist its advance, and Paullus
.(Emilius, the conqueror of Macedonia at the battle
of Pydna, told his friend Polybius he had never seen
anything so terrible. But, of course, the advancing
of the vast and solid column was attended with
great difficulties. Any interruption in the ground

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 37

made an obstacle not to be overcome without break-
ing the formation, and so an advance on broken
ground was fatal to the phalanx. It seems also to
have been so constructed that facing about to meet
an attack from the flank or rear was never practi-
cally possible. Let me also remind you that the
modem square with which we fight large bodies of
savages has that terrible offensive weapon, the rifle,
while the Macedonian phalanx could not use even
the sUngs and darts of ancient warfare.

The fact therefore remains that in its early days
the phalanx was not of much real importance.
Philip may have won one great battle with it; Alex-
ander never did; it was only in the great wars of his
successors, when both sides used the phalanx, that
the direct shock of the opposing infantry was decided
by the steadier troops holding together, while the
weaker melted away before the actual conflict, as
is now usually the case if two hostile Hues charge
with the bayonet.

I revert now to the statement, which may have
surprised some of you, that Alexander never won a
battle with the Macedonian phalanx. This is quite
certain. While a mere boy, he had decided his
father's great battle of Chasronea against the Thebans
and Athenians by a charge of cavalry; and all through
his hfe he pursued the same tactics. He (like Crom-
well) won his battles by charges of cavalry, using the
phalanx merely as his defensive arm, which occupied

38 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

and threatened the enemy while the decisive work was
done on his right wing. It appears to me that he
even regarded the phalanx as a clumsy and unman-
ageable arm, for at the moment of his death he was
breaking it up into smaller and lighter formations.
That wonderful general, whose great secret lay in
the promptness and decision of his operations,
naturally chose the handiest order for rapid advance,
and the most inteUigent co-operation, and as he
found the phalanx unsuitable, so he despised the
use of both elephants and scythed chariots, which
his oriental enemies employed, as weapons not
trustworthy and likely to confuse a sound and
rational plan of battle. On the other hand, he per-
fected his heavy cavalry and his footguards in every
practical way. The footguards were very lightly
armed, and intended to support the cavalry as
promptly as possible. The cavalry was made the
special service for his friends and his nobles, essen-
tially the household cavalry, and specially trained
to riding and to the use of the spear. For as the
use of stirrups was still unknown, fighting on horse-
back was a very different thing from what it is nowa-
days, and the use of the sword must have been
comparatively small, when rising in the saddle, nay
the saddle itself, was unknown.

The other point in which Alexander made ini:-
provements in the art of war, which have not
been appreciated, was that of artillery. Phihp had

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 39

already used all the newer mechanical discoveries
for siege trains and battering purposes, but Alexan-
der appHed them to field artillery, which he brought
to such perfection that his army could carry with it
engines which threw stones and darts three hundred
yards. Imagine what an advantage this gave him.
He frequently cleared a narrow pass or the opposite
side of a river of the enemy by the mere fire of his
catapults, and then crossed at leisure.

I think it worth giving you these details, because
it is a vague thing, though a perfectly true thing, to
say that it was by his genius that Alexander con-
quered the eastern world. Genius always works
with the means at its disposal, or rather disposes of
the ordinary means in such a way as to produce
exceptional results. Thus Alexander found ready
the phalanx, the siege trains, and the military aris-
tocracy which his father had employed in an active
and successful reign. He enlarged their use, or
modified them to suit greater and nobler plans.

His army, as you know, was a small one. To
carry a vast number of men into Asia in a rapid
campaign, through hostile country, would be im-
possible; so that he probably never had an effective
force of more than thirty thousand under his com-
mand. I except of course sieges, hke that of Tyre,
when he formed a settled camp and delayed for
months, and his progress in ships down the Indus.
But even with thirty thousand men you will wonder

40 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

how he could undertake to attack a new and strange
country, and penetrate far beyond the knowledge
of any Macedonians and Greeks, among nations of
strange languages and customs, unless he were a
wandering knight-errant in search of romantic ad-
ventures. This, indeed, is the very view of him
taken by the romances on his life composed at
Alexandria, which are not unlike the Arabian Nights
composed at Cairo, the mediaeval successor to Alex-
andria, in their imagination. But the real Alexander
was no such person, and the key to his action is given
in a curious passage of Josephus.' I need hardly tell
you that when his great expedition was successful,
he rapidly established Greek as the lingua jranca of
the whole empire, and this it was which gave the
chief bond of union to the many countries of old
civilisation, which had hitherto been isolated.

This unity of culture is the remarkable thing in
the history of the world. Before Alexander, Persia,
India, Egypt, and Italy were all separately following
out their own ideas. After Alexander, all conform
to a common standard, and desire to be regarded
as members of a common civilisation. St. Paul re-

'The reference is JOSEPHtrs, Antiquities, xi, 8, §§4, S- I"
the embellished story note that Alexander says the high-priest
whom he saw in his dream promised that he would conduct the
king's army; and after the Jews had obtained local liberties and
a remission of taxes in the sabbatical year, the king invites them
to serve with him, on condition of living as Jews, and "many
were ready to accompany him in his wars."

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 41

quired no gift of tongues to preach to the civihsed
world. He wrote in Greek to Jews, Galatians, Mace-
donians, and Romans; and far beyond their Hmits
Greek would carry the traveller from Gades to Ceylon.
This was the direct result of Alexander's conquests.
It will be our duty in the next two lectures to follow
out the effects of this Hellenizing of the world in its
two most striking examples — the kingdoms of Alex-
andria and of Antioch, which better describe them
than Egypt and Syria.

But what was the result upon Macedonia and
Greece, the original nucleus of all this vast domin-
ion? It is remarkable that neither ever lost its
importance in the great new complex of nations.
However splendid and important Babylon or Alex-
andria might be, Macedonia was the true home of
the kings, it gave its title to the military nobility of
Syria and Egypt, and none of the early Successors
thought he had succeeded to the empire, if he had
not recovered the ancient seat of the monarchy and
laid his bones in the royal sepulchre at ^gae. The
Regent for the heirs of Alexander was naturally sup-
posed to live there; the great majority of Alexan-
der's house, his mother, his wife and child, resided
there. There, too, they were all successively mur-
dered, to make way for the house of Antipater, whom
the great king himself had intrusted with Macedonia,
and whose son Casander estabUshed himself over the
murdered remains of all his master's house. After

42 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

Casander's death his contemptible sons either died
or were murdered to make way for Demetrius the
Besieger, of whom Plutarch has left so interesting a
life, the son of Antigonus, who was the fellow-
commander and rival of Antipater. This Demetrius
was married to Casander's sister, so that their son
Antigonus Gonatas, who may be regarded as the real
founder of the new and famous Une of Macedonian
kings which ended with the Roman conquest, was
the offspring of two of Alexander's most eminent
generals — both of them great Macedonian nobles,
with hereditary rights, and thus commanding the
respect of the warlike mountaineers not only by their
prowess, but by their social position. This is the
real secret of the attachment and devotion of the
Macedonians to their kings. I will consider as briefly
as possible the general characteristics of this famous
line, and point out to you their real importance in
modifying the world's history.

The first king, Antigonus of Macedon, grandson
of Alexander's general of the same name, had a
long and checkered struggle for his kingdom. He
was at first foiled by the famous Pyrrhus, his superior
in arms; by old Lysimachus, another companion of
Alexander; lastly by the terrible fury of the Celts
or Galatians, whose invasion swept all Macedonia,
got rid of his rivals for him, and allowed him to begin
again the task of making for himself a kingdom.

This invasion of the Celts is one of the turning-

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 43

points in Greek history. It took place in 278 B. C,
when the original companions of Alexander were all
gone from the scene through age if not through vio-
lence, and when the world was longing for rest after
forty years of confusion. All the knight-errants of
the world were now passing away, and six years more
saw the end of Pyrrhus, who was in Italy when this
great barbarian invasion took place. Macedonia
and Greece were weary of wars and rumours of wars,
and were glad to acquiesce in the claims of the
prudent, philosophical, high-principled Antigonus.
From this time to the year 168 B. C, when the battle
of Pydna and the capture of Kling Perseus made an
end of the kingdom of Macedonia, the Antigonids,
as they were called, were the ruling house, and suc-
ceeded one another on strictly hereditary principles.
In round numbers, the first king reigned forty years;
his son, ten; his cousin, Antigonus Doson, nearly ten
as guardian to the infant heir; then this new Phihp,
the opponent of the Romans, for over forty years;
and his son Perseus, for about ten; that is to say,
two long reigns of about forty years, and three short
ones of about ten, made up the whole period of the
Antigonids during which they remained great figures
in the Hellenistic world. Of course, I cannot go
into the details of these reigns, but there are certain
general features which you can easily carry away,
and which will give you an interest in learning more
about them.

44 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

In the first place, it was not only the first An-
tigonus (Gonatas) who was obliged to conquer his
kingdom. His son, Demetrius II, had to do so;
and again his nephew, Antigonus Doson, so cele-
brated for his victory at Sellasia, and his conquest
of Sparta with the help of the Achsean League. It
was not till Philip V that these kings succeeded
peaceably, and with a general consent on the part
of Greece and their northern dependents. And
strange to say, it was not until the last two kings,
who succeeded peaceably, that we perceive a degra-
dation in their character. The first three, who came
to a stormy heritage, like Philip and Alexander
before them, and fought their way to recognition,
were all strong, able, and righteous men; the last two,
Philip and Perseus, who had their kingdom ready
for them, were very inferior — the former cruel, sen-
sual, and treacherous; the latter mean and stingy to
an extent which caused his ruin.

But what, you will ask, were the conflicts which
the three kings had to fight for their kingdom ? For
the Macedonians were loyal to the house, and were
wont to be governed by kings. Well, Macedonia
proper was so; the nation owed the first Antigonus
a great debt for his struggles against the Gauls,
and there is no doubt that it accepted him as
the lawful sovran. But the kingdom included far
more than''thaiEr" It included a number of semi-
barbarous tribes reaching into the modern Dalmatia

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 45

and Montenegro, as well as into Bulgaria, in an ill-
_ defined way; and these tribes were easily excited to
follow some pretender, as soon as the death of the
king left the throne vacant and the control was for
a moment relaxed. Moreover, there was a constant
tendency in the northern barbarians about the
Danube to invade the Hellenic peninsula, and it was
the greatest service done by Macedonia to the world,
after Alexander, that it formed a strong barrier
against these invasions, and protected the culture and
refinement of Greece from perishing at the hand of
savages.

There are periods in the world's history when a
single man has done this service. The great Cyrus
spent most of his life, and died at last, in defending
his northern frontier against the Turanian hordes
which would have inundated civilised Asia centuries
sooner but for the strong barrier made by the Persian
king and his organisation. The same kind of service
was done by the Antigonids. There were Illyrians
and Dardanians, and many other less-known tribes,
which at this time seem to have increased in numbers
and in restlessness, and were ready to migrate in
thousands, Hke the Celts, and seek new homes in
the warmer and more fruitful south. But they were
barbarians, pure and simple, who would not have
understood or respected the laws, the religion, the
art, or the poHteness of the Greeks. Had these
latter been destroyed, all the finer elements of Roman

46 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

culture must have been lost, for these came from
Greece during and after this very period; and so
the world would have been permanently poorer and
worse, but for the efficient frontier duty done by
the Antigonids in Macedonia.

But if you imagine that they received thanks or
gratitude from the Greeks, you are greatly mistaken.
For the Greeks of that day were in the peculiar posi-
tion of being sentimentally and artistically superior,
while they were materially — and, I will add, politi-
cally — inferior to their neighbours. The Greeks had
done wonderful things as a complex of small
states, either republican or aristocratic, but their
mutual jealousies and wars had worn them out,
and the young and vigorous power of Macedonia
under its brilliant kings had completely overshadowed
them. Their military power was quite fallen into
the second rank, and was a mere appendage to the
phalanx and heavy cavalry of Alexander and his
successors. Nevertheless, neither the second Philip
nor Alexander had ever ventured to treat them as
mere ordinary subjects. They had been left their
constitutions and their liberties. All that was
required of them was to acknowledge the headship
of Macedon, and to furnish men and money when
war was declared at a formal congress of which the
king was the president. This sort of imperfect
conquest, and the permission of separate assem-
blies or pariiaments with the traditions of former

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 47

liberty and of long-past importance, often falsified by
exaggeration, were to Macedon, as it has been to every
power that ever essayed it since, a constant source of
weakness. These little states were either, Hke Sparta
and Athens, coerced into obedience, and always
ready to assert their old imperial position ; or else they
were Httle democracies, where the needy and the
turbulent had the voting power, and were ready to
confiscate the property of the rich, or to join any
power hostile to Macedon for the sake of plunder or
from the love of change. In many industry was
decaying, and the population emigrating to new
settlements in the East ; and there was that silly feeling
which has not yet died out of the world, that the
existing government is to blame for all misfortunes,
and that any change of government or of laws may
bring with it new times and a recovery of prosperity.
Above all, where there were Macedonian garrisons
which occasionally interfered with the license of the
democracies, and would not allow lawlessness and
plunder, there was a bitter feeling that all Hberty
was gone, and that the Greeks, once free, were now
the slaves of Macedonian masters. And in many
senses this was really true.) The question, however,
remains: Would the Greeks have been as happy,
and in a deeper sense as free, if they had been allowed
to pass every mad resolution which assemblies of
needy and reckless persons chose to adopt ?

As soon as any popular assembly loses its dignity.

48 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

and votes either from fear of threats or from hope
of bribes, its real life is gone, and the sooner it is
abolished the better. Now, this was the case even
with the assembly of Athens, which, we may assume,
was the most respectable in Greece. The lives of
Phocion and of Demetrius by Plutarch prove it plainly
enough. Flattery of foreign tyrants, supplications
for foreign subsidies, unjust condemnations of their
own citizens, confiscations of property — these are the
leading features of the later assemblies of Greece,
with very few exceptions. And the main exception—
that of the Achsean League in its good days — was
distinctly that of a constitution where the propertied
classes had all the power. They met in various cities,
but the league voted by cities, and so a few men
of wealth and pubHc spirit coming from remote
towns could counterbalance the whole populace of
the town where the meeting was held. This league
and other inferior leagues or confederations through
Greece, were, however, always a thorn in the side of
Macedon, and were dealt with by diplomacy rather
than by force.

As regards the isolated states, there were two
ways of controlUng them possible, and each was
adopted in various cases. If the democracy lasted, it
must be kept in control by a Macedonian garrison,
which interfered when the peace of the citizens or
the property of the rich was in danger, and which
also prevented the populace from caUing in some ,

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 49

foreign potentate, and making their city a starting-
point for a foreign war against Macedon. It is
as if nowadays home-rule were granted to Ireland,
and the English found it necessary to keep a garrison
in Dublin, both to overawe the violence of the popu-
lace, and to prevent the Irish ParHament making
a treaty with some hostile power, and inviting it to
occupy Irish harbours. The other expedient was to
encourage some ambitious man to seize the supreme
power in his city, and make himself what the Greeks
called a "tyrant," that is, an irresponsible or absolute
ruler, but trusting to Macedon for support, and
hence governing his city in that interest.

You must not be misled by the violent effusions
of many eminent historians, from Herodotus to Free-
man, to imagine that all these tyrants were tyrants
in the modem sense — villains who violated every right
and every sacred feeling to gratify their passions; liv-
ing, moreover, in constant terror and suspicion, which
vented itself in murders and banishments. Such
tyrants there were at all times, and not infrequently
at this time also. But the majority, I firmly be-
lieve, were able and sincere men, persuaded not
only by the world's history, as they saw it, but by
the arguments of all the Greek philosophers, that
the masses were unfit to rule, and that enlightened
monarchy was the proper and reasonable form of
government. These men did a great deal for art
and culture at all periods of Greek history; they

50 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

insisted upon internal peace, and if they purchased
this at the cost of forbidding public discussions or
the right of public meetings to protest against their
government, they certainly got some return for their
bargain. It was the habit of the Macedonian kings
to encourage these ambitious men, and yet so thor-
oughly was the taste for talking and voting engrained
in the people, that, however virtuous or just such men
mights be, it was thought an act of religious patriot-
ism to^iurder them — nay, if possible, to torture
them ^ as a punishment for their usurpation.

You can feel, then, the great difSculties connected
with the government of Greece by Macedonia, seeing
that it was an imperfect conquest, and that the ideas
of the world were strongly in favour of preserving, in
appearance at least, the Uberties of Greece. It was
bad enough to be obliged to reconquer again and
again the northern barbarians; it was far worse
to have to deal with a number of small, jealous,
turbulent states, which were always passing resolu-
tions against Macedon, always calUng in her great
rival Egypt, always bringing to mind the old days,
when Macedonia was obscure and despised, while
Greece played the leading part in the world. It was
this social and intellectual inferiority which made
Philip and Alexander rather affect to be Greeks them-
selves, and assume a Greek genealogy, education,
and manners, than subdue Greece as they were able
to do, and reduce it to a dependent province.

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 51

And this weakness proved the ultimate ruin of the
kingdom.

The day came when Rome began to meddle with
the affairs of the East; or rather when first the out-
rages of Illyrian pirates upon Roman ships, and
then the interference of Philip V of Macedon in the
second Punic war, made some such policy necessary.
No sooner did the Greeks perceive this than they
saw a splendid opportunity of working Rome
against Macedon.

By a curious coincidence, this new and still more
powerful neighbour had the same kind of position in
civiUsation as the kingdom pf Philip and Alexander
— a great miUtary power with a culture quite inferior
to the Greeks, and most anxious to adopt it. Hence
the petty Greek states were at first treated by Rome
with extravagant courtesy. To be allowed to com-
pete at the public Greek games, or to be initiated in
Greek mysteries, was thought a high honour, and to
write or speak in Greek a distinction, at Rome.
'AH the tall talk about ancient liberties, about the
virtue of slaying tyrants, about the equality of all free
citizens, was paraded for the Romans and they
undertook the task, which every Successor of Alex-
ander had put forward in turn as a poHtical watch-
word, of liberating Greece.

And unfortunately this coincided with the reign in
Macedon of PhiKp V — a man in whom military
talents and agreeable manners were combined
with unbridled passions and political incapacity.

52 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

Wliile he, who had succeeded to his kingdom
as the darling of all Greece, was alienating his friends
by private outrages and public deceit, the Romans
were making capital out of their unselfish policy of
hberating without annexing, and of respecting the
ancient dignity of the Greeks. The people of
Pergamum even invented for the Romans a Greek
genealogy, and the story of ^neas starting from the
ruins of Troy for Italy became an article of
history at Rome, owing to which the Romans began
to write letters in Greek from their senate; they
began to shower benefits upon their ancestral home,
Ilion; it was a claim to support from Rome to state
that your ancestors were among those who had not
taken part with the Greeks in the Trojan war, or had
even joined the Trojans. So we too have seen ancient
history paraded, or rather dressed up, by way of
showing that present legislation should direct itself
to the atonement of hypothetical crimes committed
against the mythical ancestors of imaginary descen-
dants; in fact, the substitution of maudhn and false
sentimentality for justice and common-sense.

The conflict ended, as you know, in two great
wars — the first against Philip V, closing with the
battle of Cynoscephalae (198), the second with the war
against Perseus, and with Pydna (168). The first was
hailed by the Greeks as a great victory, and the
proclamation of Flamininus at Corinth that all the
Greeks under Macedon should now be free and

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 53

independent caused transports of delight. Home-
rule was established in every little Greek city, and
a reign of peace and prosperity was confidently
expected.

How is it, then, that within thirty years the defeat
of Perseus at Pydna and the final conquest of
Macedon were regarded by these same Greeks not
as a more complete victory, but as a crushing defeat
and a terrible calamity?

The history of this change is one of the most
instructive in ancient history, especially as we are
face to face with similar problems all over Europe
in our own day. What the Greeks were always
longing for, ever since they fell under Macedonian
sway, was home-rule, and not merely home-rule for
all Greece, but separate home-rule for each little
subdivision of it. This is what the Romans gave
them; and what resulted was that the populace in
each tovra, where there was poverty, began to plunder
the property of the rich; or else the leagues of cities,
such as the Achaean and ^tolian, began to make
conquests and oppress their neighbours; and finally
the disorders of this home-rule became such that
every person of property, and almost every person
of sense, went to Rome to entreat the great repubUc
to interfere. It was represented to the Romans that,
if they had already interfered with Macedonia and
given the Greeks their hberty, they were bound at
the same time not to permit civil war or confiscation.

54 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

The Romans did what they could by way of
peaceful intervention. They sent constant commis-
sions and gave decisions in these quarrels; they
advised, they warned, they threatened; last of all
they actually threatened that they would refrain
from all control, which was felt to be the worst
danger of all.

But during these weary negotiations the party
at Rome which had posed as Philhellenes, and
carried out the sentimental civilities to the Greeks,
like Flamininus, began to lose ground, and a very
different party arose who were for no more nonsense,
who thought all this talk of liberty mere fooling, and
who were determined on stopping these interminable
negotiations with a strong hand. They intended
to abolish all this local and separate home-rule, and
establish a strict union of Greece with Rome, or
rather under Rome. They found strong allies in
the scanty richer classes throughout Greece, many
of whom were dissolute and idle, seeking to ingratiate
themselves at Rome by flattery and complaisance,
and by vilifying their own people with the grossest
want of patriotism. But there were also the serious
people who wanted peace and security, and they,
much as they regretted the loss of old traditions,
were determined that there was no safety possible
except in close union with Rome.

The lower classes, on the other hand, the rabble,
the poor, the socialists, began to look on Rome as

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 55

the chief danger to their independence and the chief
obstacle in letting them carry out their views. They
found that if Macedon had chastised them with
whips, Rome was Ukely to chastise them with
scorpions. So when they saw a new straining of
the relations between Rome and Macedon, and knew
that the latter had long been preparing for a new
conflict, all their hopes turned to King Perseus,
whom they encouraged with their sympathy, while
they were flattering and paying court in words
to the Romans. These latter were not blind to the
real sentiments of Greece, and during the long course
and doubtful issue of the last Macedonian war must
have seen plainly in the conduct of their Greek
auxiliaries that they had to deal with faithless alUes.
All they had done in the way of hberation, of senti-
mental politeness, of remission of taxes, had fallen
upon ungrateful soil. And this ingratitude was so
far justified in that there was a party at Rome which
fomented Greek quarrels, and triumphed in the tur-
moil and confusion of Greek poHtics. Still more,
it lay in the sentimental complaint that the Romans
were a cold, unsympathetic, stupid race, vastly
inferior, socially, to the Greeks, who were ever being
insulted, misunderstood, despised, and patronised
by them. If you knew how powerful a factor this
social question has been in the modem difficulties
of Ireland with England, you would attach great
weight to this remark. The result was that after

56 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

the battle of Pydna, when endless compromising
correspondence were seized among King Perseus'
papers, the Romans made a searching and remorse-
less inquisition into the Macedonian sympathies
of each city, and deported to Italy as captives all the
so-called patriot party from many cities. The case
of the one thousand Achaeans is the best known, and
perhaps the least excusable, as we hear that there was
no definite evidence against them;' but in spite
of all that Polybius, who was one of them, can say,
there can be no doubt that it was the only way of
pacifying and quieting Greece. But it was done at
a terrible expense, with a great deal of hardship and
injustice, and to the profit of many worthless Roman-
izers who now got the reward of their infamous and
treacherous truckling to their masters. It is, of
course, these wretched creatures who are pilloried
for us by the deported home-rule party, and we are
told to beUeve that was the sort of person who sold
for money and for blood the liberties of his country.
Fortunately we have the evidence of Polybius him-
self, a leading member of the home-rule party, who
struggled as long as he could for the independence
of Achaea. But after his long captivity, and a great
intimacy with the Romans and the politics of the
world outside the petty cantons of Greece, he gives it

' And yet was there no evidence ? Who knows how many
autographs were denied, how much testimony suppressed or
falsified ?

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 57

as his deliberate opinion that home-rule was imprac-
ticable, and that the union with Rome was the only
reasonable solution for the difficulties of civil war,
anarchy, confusion, and confiscation which were the
miserable heritage left to decaying Greece by her
past history.

The drama ended by a hopeless and bloody
insurrection, conducted with despair and cruelty,
in which the so-called patriots behaved much as the
Irish patriots did in 1798, and made their war with
Rome the excuse for executing, torturing, and
plundering their political opponents. The victory
at Corinth settled forever the question of home-rule,
and put the country under the control of the Roman
governor and of the propertied classes, who thus
won their fatal victory in this melancholy struggle.
From this time the political history of Greece closes
for many centuries.'

' I have been obliged to omit in this lecture all mention of
the Greek cities of Asia Minor and the islands, which played a
very important part in the history of the day. But these com-
munities are rather associated with the kingdoms of Syria and
Egypt, which exercised or claimed sovereignty over them, than
with Macedon, and their fortunes were not settled in connection
with Greece so much as in connection with Asia Minor, if we except
Rhodes, which was ruined commercially for its sympathy with
Macedon in the final great war. The great difference between
Asiatic and European Greek cities was this, that the former had
long learned to be content with local self-government and had
given up all claim to poUtical independence or to imperial rights.
Hence they long retained the substance, which their European
brethren lost by grasping at the shadow, of independence.

S8 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

But what was the final settlement of Macedon?
The conflict was here not one of politics, but of
military powers, one of which had ruled, and the
other was going to rule, the world. The triumph
of Rome was no half-victory, and the conquered
power was indeed, to use a notorious modem expres-
sion, saignee d. hlanc. Every person of importance,
all the richer classes, all the officials, the whole court
— all were carried captives to Italy with their king.
Nothing was left in the country but what some
extreme patriots would like to see left in Ireland —
the poor and the ignorant. But by way of parody
on this wholesale slavery the country was broken
up into four sections, and in each of them was estab-
lished what was called in the shibboleth of that day
a free constitution, a republic, where each man could
talk and vote in a parliament, and pass resolutions
binding the minority. Polybius, a sensible man,
wonders that the people were not content with this
precious boon, more especially as they now paid
only one-half the taxes they had formerly paid to
their kings. The fact is that they were put under
the most intolerable restrictions. The four sections
were forbidden all intercourse, connubial, commer-
cial, or otherwise, while Roman traders passed freely
all through the land. Old connections and friend-
ships were dislocated, things were made criminal
which had once been lawful, the development of
industry was rendered impossible, and the march of

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 59

civilisation in the country rudely checked. All the
men of family and culture had been removed; and
what did the wretched Macedonians get in return for
all this? A so-called free constitution; that is, the
substitution of little parochial parliaments for the
rule of the royal house which had brought Macedon
all its splendour and to which the nation were loyally
and deeply attached! Need we wonder that they
broke out time after time into bloody insurrections,
that every impostor who claimed royal blood became
a popular pretender, and that after several serious
struggles the Romans found their experiment in
constitution-making so egregious a failure that they
were obliged to reduce the whole country to a prov-
ince ruled directly by a military governor? The
comedy of it is that they blamed the wretched Mace-
donians for not appreciating liberty, instead of
themselves for such folly as to imagine that the name
of a repubhc can outweigh the effect of massacres
and deportations, and the violation of every noble
tradition.

Thus the history of that great and dominant
people ends in tears and in blood, and ends forever.
While Greece never lost the intellectual superiority
which made the very slaves of her race the teachers
and advisers of the world, and while her traditions
have been great enough to cause a national reju-
venescence, Macedonia as a nation disappears from
history. It was the battlefield for the Romans,

6o THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

when in their great civil war they met at Philippi;
it was the home of a Christian church of St. Paul's
foundation, in whose time PhiUppi and Thessalonica
appear as flourishing Greek towns; but Macedonia
as such was blotted out from the catalogue of nations.
It seems to me also that with Macedonian rule
there disappeared from Hellenism a valuable type,
which has figured largely in modem civilisation— I
mean the type of the sporting country gentleman,
who despises the restraints of city Ufe and lives a
life of physical energy in the pure air of untutored
nature. How deeply this feeling was engrained in
Macedonian life appears from the curious absence of
any important capital of the Antigonid dynasty.
While Egypt and Syria were all centred in the great
cities of Alexandria and Antioch, we never hear of
any Macedonian city important enough to exercise
any influence. Pella and JEgie were always, so far
as we know, insignificant. The reason for this pe-
culiarity I consider to be the habits of the Mace-
donian nobility and gentry, who would not settle in
a city, and who would not take to commerce or town
amusements like the Greeks. But these latter made
town life the almost universal type of Hellenism,
much to its ultimate loss and decay. The famous
seventh oration of Dion Chrysostom, which I have
treated very fully in another work, shows how an
acute and sympathetic observer regretted this nar-
rowing of later Greek life.

MACEDONIA AND GREECE 6i

There have been cases where a great body of
exiles have produced an effect in their new home.
Such, for example, was the powerful influence on
civilisation exercised by the French Huguenot
refugees upon England and Ireland, when they left
their homes upon the revocation of the edict of
Nantes. The whole of the nobility — that great
dominant nobiUty — of Macedon was deported and
settled in Roman or Italian towns or villages. We
should have expected that some distinguished
Italian would have sprung from this new noble
blood introduced into the country. And yet the
whole Macedonian importation disappears abso-
lutely, unless you recall the fact that the son of the
captive king earned a poor livelihood as a petty
clerk in a country town. Truly Rome was a great
boa-constrictor, which not only enveloped, but
crushed a large part of the culture of the world. ,

EGYPT

THE PTOLEMAIC DYNASTY

1. Ptolemy Soter - - - - 321 (king 3o6)-28s

2. Ptolemy Philadelphus 285-246

3. Ptolemy Euergetes I 246-221

4. Ptolemy Philopator 221-204

5. Ptolemy Epiphanes 204-181

7. Ptolemy Philometor 181-146

9. Ptolemy Euergetes II (Physcon) - - - 146-117

10. Ptolemy Soter II, 1

1 1 . Ptolemy Alexander J

12. Ptolemy Auletes ------ 80-51

13. Cleopatra (and her brother) - - - 5 1-30

[Ptolemies VI and VIII were children, who were only
nominal kings for a few weeks, but whose names occur in the
Egyptian royal lists. Ptolemies X and XI went on and off
the throne alternately, so their whole joint period only is given
in this skeleton chronology.]

117-80

LECTURE III
EGYPT

We approach today a subject not less in magnitude
and importance than the last, but certainly less compH-
cated. The history of Egypt as a Hellenistic kingdom
is a very consistent and uniform history, for though
the Ptolemies were engaged in many foreign wars
and in all the complicated diplomacies of the world,
the internal development and the problems of gov-
ernment in Egypt were very clear and definite.
But as I was obhged in the last lecture to deal chiefly
with poUtics, so I will endeavour to bring out social
and intellectual life in the present discourse.

Egypt, as you know, was seized as his lawful
conquest by Ptolemy, son of Lagus, a native Mace-
donian prince and personal intimate of Alexander,
who had fought all through the great campaigns,
and in later years wrote the best account of Alex-
ander's life, known to us unfortunately only through
the citations of Arrian. This Ptolemy was a very
clear-headed man, who saw from the beginning,
what most of the other generals did not see, that to
keep together Alexander's whole empire was im-
possible, and that, when it was broken up into sepa-
rate kingdoms, Egypt was the richest province and
the most easily defended.

6s

66 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

I need hardly remind you that it is compassed
with deserts, and that it cannot be attacked except
through these deserts, or with great difficulty by
sea, for the constant north wind and the shallows
around the Delta made ancient navigation there a
thing of the utmost peril. Accordingly a good river
fleet and good defences upon the outer mouths of the
Nile, the Canopic and Pelusiac, make it impregnable.
As you also know, the fertihty of Egypt is enormous;
though its area is only about two-thirds that of
Ireland, it was able to support perhaps seven mil-
lions of people, and, moreover, to produce com
enough for great exports. It was said that to bring
up a child to maturity in Egypt cost about three and
one-half dollars of your money — a state of things
which I remember in Ireland, when it cost no more
to bring up a child to full size on potatoes.

The further source of wealth which Egypt then
commanded was the sea route from India by the
Red Sea, which was the highway for all the rarities
and wonders of the East lately revealed to European
ambition and European luxury.'

The mart for all these things was Alexandria, the

I How wide was this connection appears from the fragments of
a farce found by Grenfell and Hunt, in which a barbarian king
is introduced talking a strange jargon. (Cf. Oxyrhynchus
Papyri, III, pap. 413.) The last discovery concerning this jar-
gon is that it has been read as Canarese ! (Cf. E. Hultzsch in
Hermes for 1904, pp. 307 ff.) This is justly compared by Blass
to the Punic passage in Plautus' Mercator.

EGYPT 67

foundation of Alexander which has perhaps brought
him the greatest fame, though it consisted in httle
more than bringing the old Greek mart of Naucratis
down its arm of the river to the sea. The same king
founded seventeen Alexandrias, from Asia Minor as
far as the Punjaub. The present Candahar (Isken-
der, Al-Iskender, etc.) is another still remaining.
But however good the insight of Alexander in the
foundation, it was the opening up of eastern traffic
and the enhghtened rule of Ptolemy which made it
the principal city of the world. The population
consisted from the beginning of (i) Egyptians, the
old inhabitants of the village Rakotis, embraced in
the new site. These were the lowest and poorest
parts of the population. (2) Jews, whose sudden and
hitherto mysterious alliance with Alexander I have
explained to you already (p. 3^, and who followed
his invitation in crowds to the new foundation, where
he settled them under their own magistrates, and
with certain rights and privileges which were after-
ward supposed to amount to full civic rights, though
they did not imply so much.' The other races
were the really dominant, viz., (3) the Macedonians,
who continued at this new centre to form a military

' This statement of Josephus was disputed by various critics,
till I found that there was a village called Samaria in the Fayyum
under the second Ptolemy, and also other allusions to them,
which I have published in my edition of the Petrie Papyri. Since
that discovery more evidence from the second century before
Christ has come in.

68 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

aristocracy about the court which proclaimed form-
ally any new king as the approved choice of the
citizen-soldiers of Macedonia. In the case of weak
or infant kings, they assumed the power for which we
can show parallels in those miUtary bodies called
prastoriaji guards, or mamelukes, or janissaries, at
courts otherwise despotic, over all the other subjects.
(4) Lastly come the Greeks, in many respects the
most important, for they held high posts in the army,
where they were well-tried and hereditary mercena-
ries; about the court, where they often displaced in
the civil service the prouder Macedonians; in trade,
where they contended with the Jews; and lastly, in
the museum and university, where they had it all
their own way.

This conglomerate of nations, gathered into a
great capital — full of refinement and luxury, of splen-
dour in shows and military pageants, of great disso-
luteness side by side with the most serious scientific
study — soon became a sort of world of its own, and
the Alexandrians were known through Hellenistic
history as "a pecuHar people, zealous of bad works."
Yet, in spite of its cruel mob, in spite of its wild
insurrections and massacres, which often remind one
of the Paris mob of the revolutions, think what we
owe to Alexandria! First of all, the Greek version
of the Old Testament. Secondly, the development
of pure mathematics and of mechanics, which led
the way for the great men of Europe, Descartes,

EGYPT 69

Pascal, and Leibnitz, when they set out upon that
great voyage of discovery in science which has revo-
lutionised modem life, and of which the immortal
Euchd is still the first great name/ Thirdly, that
first great essay in really religious philosophy which,
under the name of Neo-Platonism, passed to the
Mystics of the Middle Ages and has been the parent
of the deepest and purest elements in all our modem
rehgions, humanly considered.

You will wonder that I have not yet mentioned
literature. The fact is that the influence of Alexan-
dria was here of a very peculiar kind: indirectly,
enormous and permanent; directly, you might think
it an epoch of decadence, but for the idylls of
Theocritus.

It is curious, but not strange, that from a city fife,
in the middle of sand hills, between a great lagoon
and a tideless sea, should spring the only poetry in
all Greek literature which makes the delights of
rural Hf e — the bleating of lambs, the whispering of the
stream, " the moan of doves in immemorial elms, and
murmuring of innumerable bees"^a blessed recrea-
tion for the cultivated and weary townsman. This
reaction from a highly artificial city Hfe is noticeable
in other societies, and there was no extravagance of
the Itahan Renaissance, when pedants posed as
shepherds and imitated the supposed innocence of
the artless swain, which had not its prototype in the

1 1 shall return to this subject in Lecture V.

70 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

University of Alexandria. You have the Arcadia
of Sannazaro, concerning which I have spoken at
large in my Rambles and Studies; you have such
poems as Milton's Lycidas, where his college tutor
appears as old Damcetas, a rustic; in fact, you have
all the pastoral poetry of France and Germany, all
the art of Watteau and his school down to the Trianon
of Marie Antoinette — a thousand other develop-
ments of artificial innocence are derived from
Alexandria.

The second great inheritance left by Alexandria
(to which I shall return) was the love-story — I
mean that kind which forms the backbone of all
our modem novels. The notion came in from the
East, and is first mentioned in the fragments of
Chares of Mytilene, a companion of Alexander in
the East.

So you see the world is richer by this now gigantic
branch of Hterature on account of Alexandria, and
though it is more than probable that some other
society, some modern society, would have thought
of it, I beg to remind you that the Greeks — a great
literary nation, who were just as famiHar with fall-
ing in love as we are — never thought of it in any of
their tragedies or histories, till it was produced by
CalHmachus.'

1 1 need not tell you, what you will find in my Greek Lije and
Thought, that the love affairs in the Comedy of Menander were
of a wholly different kind, and on a far lower level.

EGYPT 71

I will not detain you here with the indirect effects
of Alexandria's work on the Roman poets.'

These great Uterary and scientific results were
achieved by the first and second Ptolemies in found-
ing what may fairly be called the University of
Alexandria, with its college of fellows (the Museum),
its botanical and zoological gardens, and its great
library. The Museum gave it that precious charac-
ter as a home for leisure and research, as well as
ultimately a teaching power, which we possess in
Oxford and Cambridge, and which has been lost
or forgotten in those new foundations of mere
examining bodies falsely called universities. But
unfortunately the Museum was far too strictly under
royal patronage, and suffered by it. The repubUcan
character of the private corporations called the
schools, or academies, at Athens was far more
stable and independent. The Mus.eum and Hbrary
were part of the royal quarter of the city, close to
the palaces built by successive Ptolemies — for they
were in this like modem kings, who will not be con-
tent with the palaces of predecessors — and so active
was the trade in books copied by slaves from the
originals in the Museum, and sold over the world,
that a conflagration among the ships in the har-
bour during JuHus Caesar's campaign spread to the

I All of them (save Horace) — Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, even
Virgil— owe the Alexandrians far more than they do the older and
greater Greek masters. Cf. below. Lecture V.

72 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

Stores on the shore and destroyed so many books that
the accident was by and by magnified into the
destruction of the great Hbrary itself.

The rest of the city was designed in a style rather
handsome than picturesque, its figure being deter-
mined by two great thoroughfares at right angles,
whose intersection was the acknowledged centre,
and at whose extremities were the four principal
gates. The other new features in the city, which
was a model to a hundred others, were its system-
atic Ughting of the streets, and its colonnades.

But you will be impatient to know what I have
to say about the rest of Egypt and the Ptolemaic
rule there, and how, the old culture of Egypt har-
monised with all this mushroom splendour of Alex-
andria. The fact is that the first and second
Ptolemies thought very httle about Egypt, except
as a source of revenue, and as a nation to be kept
quiet while it fed the glory of the Grasco-Macedonian
rule. Though the first Ptolemy did found Ptole-
mais in upper Egypt (the modern Meushieh), some
eighty miles below Thebes, and though we hear
of Greek festivals held there, it is most noteworthy
that he did not give the city of Alexandria a Greek
constitution, with a senate and an assembly. He
knew Hellenic assemblies too well. StiU, all the
care of these two men was directed, not merely to
making their military position secure, but also to
making Alexandria the rival of Athens. Now, for

EGYPT 73

miKtary purposes the Egyptians were accounted
nearly useless. For several generations back, Greek
mercenaries had supplanted the old miHtary caste
in Egypt, and all kings of Egypt — indigenous, Per-
sian, Macedonian — trusted to a supply of paid for-
eign soldiers, who were as veterans settled with
property and privileges, and became a sort of new
military caste, hereditary in character/ The native
Egyptians were mostly disarmed, and were not used
as soldiers till a great crisis under the fourth Ptolemy
in the year 217 B. C.

As regards literature or science, the Greeks had
long laid aside the habit of consulting the wis-
dom of Egypt and of the East, from which their
civiHsation had once sprung, and no attempt was
made, beyond bringing out the armals of the old king-
dom in Greek (by Maijetho), to examine and utihse
all the deep and occult lore of the priests. We may
depend upon it that these priests were not wilUng to
impart it to the upstart Greeks, and the hieroglyphic
writing and strange language were almost impene-
trable barriers to the few Greeks who attempted to
learn them. So the wisdom and the art of Memphis,
Thebes, HeliopoHs, and all the other splendid old
Egyptian cities remained a thing apart and foreign
to the Alexandrians; the Egyptians were regarded

I The Petrie Papyri, which it was my highest good fortune to
decipher and publish, give us a quantity of information about
one of these settlements (probably the most important) in the
Fayyum.

74 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

as a foreign and subject population, only fit to labour
and pay taxes, and no systematic attempt was made
to Hellenize them.

Such has always been the fate of unhappy Egypt.
From the earUest days her kings and governors have
been strangers, and her people — a beautiful, gentle,
laborious people — have been so engrained with the
instinct of submission that it will require long efforts
to reverse this ancient and lamentable education in
slavery.

But in the days of the Ptolemies Egypt still pos-
sessed her powerful and native priestly caste, and
with it a fund of resistance to the Macedonian kings
with which they were soon obliged to reckon.
Neither the first nor the second Ptolemy has left
us many monuments of note; the second, indeed, one
which already shows the beginning of the Egyptian
reaction — a ruined temple, made wholly of red gran-
ite blocks brought seven hundred miles from the
first cataract to the Delta, adorned with his name
and attributes in thoroughly Egyptian fashion.

But with the reign of the third Ptolemy, a great
conqueror, who overran all Asia, begins the long
series of Ptolemaic temples, still extant in Egypt,
which are distinctly not Greek, but Egyptian.

It is usual to speak of the marriage of Greek and
Egyptian civilisation, and of the genius of the
Ptolemies in producing this fusion. I confess I can see
little of the kind. As to Alexandria, very few things

EGYPT 75

have been done in the way of excavation, and not
a single old secular building of the early Ptolemaic age
survives; but we may be certain that everything they
were proud of in the royal quarter of Alexandria was
as purely Greek as they knew how to build it. No
statues of Egyptian gods and hieroglyphic ornaments
could find a place in these buildings. On the other
hand, go into the country, and examine the great
temples which the later Ptolemies (from the third on)
built at Esneh, Edfu, Denderah, and Thebes,' and
you will find them so thoroughly Egyptian that until
the hieroglyphics were deciphered, only one man,
Letronne, ever suspected that they could be the
work of Greek-speaking kings. The figures of the
kings, the ornaments, the gods worshipped — all is
purely Egyptian. The same may be said of the
smaller specimens of art gathered from various
places into the Cairene Museum. I went to Egypt
to satisfy myself upon this point, and to study for
myself what the marriage or combination of Greek
and Egyptian art might be. It was surprising how
scarce such combinations were, though they do exist,
especially in grotesque figurines, and probably did
exist in furniture and household decorations.

You need not tell me that two separate schools of
art can not or will not combine. It may be wrong or

I There seems to be a solitary exception of a portal at Luxor,
on which the third Ptolemy is represented in something like a
Greek costume. I have looked at it carefully, and can see but
faint traces of anything not Egyptian in the dress. We have also
found Egyptian work in the Egyptian Alexandria, viz., in Rakotis.

76 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

ugly to do it, but it can be done and has been
done, as, for example, when our seventeenth-century
people combined Gothic and classical features in
architecture, and made ugly buildings; or when
the SiciUans about Palermo combined Gothic build-
ing with Saracen ornament, and produced very
beautiful results. This kind of thing did not take
place in Egypt. The Greek towns were distinct,
the Greeks lived with the Egyptians under separate
laws, and so their pubUc buildings and their art were
distinct. The whole of Egyptian society was settled
upon principles totally different from those of Mace-
donia and Greece, and it was only gradually that
even the strange features of Egyptian life were inter-
fered with by the kings' decrees. The great manu-
script even of the ninth Ptolemy, published by Gren-
f ell and Hunt, ' gives special direction for suits between
natives, between Greeks, and between Greeks and
natives. There were native courts and judges, with
Egyptian as their language, but the natives were
encouraged to come into the Greek courts. What
was really fused was Macedonian and Greek, nay
even Persian and Greek, among the soldiers'
settlements.

And not only did the Macedonians and Greeks
not amalgamate with the natives, but gradually the
patient fellahs of that day, led by their priests —
an old and wealthy organisation as strong as the

' Tebtunis Papyri, pp. 17 £f.

EGYPT 77

Catholic church in Spain or in Ireland — began to
resist the oppression exercised upon them by the
fourth and fifth Ptolemies, and presently there rose
up Mahdis, who promised them deliverance from
the strangers and a restoration of their old national
monarchy. We know that there were several insur-
rections,' put down with trouble and difficulty, and
that the kings were obliged to bribe the national
priesthood with presents and privileges to declare
pubhcly that the Ptolemy was the real god and king.
For if all the Hellenistic monarchs were incHned to
assume the attributes and dignities of divinities, the
Ptolemies, above all, ruled in a country where for
centuries the kings had been systematically deified.
The declarations of the priests, therefore, were really
a declaration of pohcy, though they seemed to be
mere politenesses and flatteries.

We have now two famous texts of these decrees,
the Stone of San and the Rosetta stone, of which
you will find the full texts and translations in my
Empire oj the Ptolemies.

In the end the monarchy became so completely
Egyptian, especially after the ninth Ptolemy
(Physcon) had let loose the soldiery upon the insur-
gent Greeks of Alexandria, that when the Romans
came to deal with Egypt they found a strong and
stubborn national resistance, based on loyalty to the

' They are spoken of in the papyri as rapaxal, and were
always onsets of natives against the settlers.

78 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

Ptolemaic dynasty. But it was the Ptolemies who
became Egyptian, not the Egyptians who became
Hellenistic. Such, then, was the internal policy of
this remarkable kingdom.

What, you will desire to know, was the foreign
policy which marked the course of this Egyptian
history? It is an equally interesting, but a more
complicated, subject.

The kingdom of Egypt was one of the three great
divisions of Alexander's empire, Macedonia and
Syria being the other two. Each of the three was
perpetually striving to obtain preponderance partly
by aggrandisement or conquest, partly by weakening
its opponents through insurrections fomented among
those opponents' subjects, and partly by securing
the influence of a number of Greek city-states estab-
lished around the Levant. For these had extended
their local independence into something like a little
kingdom by confederations, and by their naval and
commercial resources. Of these Rhodes and Byzan-
tium were the chief. The position of Egypt between
Syria and Macedonia was that of a smaller kingdom,
relatively richer, and with a safe and central position,
opposed to neighbours who were on land decidedly its
mihtary superiors, but were checked by its naval
resources and its unUmited power of hiring merce-
naries. Thus Egypt always kept the ambition of
Macedon in check by sending money, and some-
times ships, to the Peloponnesus and to Athens, and

EGYPT 79

so threatening the coasts. Nay, for a time Egypt
held coast cities even in Thrace.

The conflict with Syria was longer and more
serious, and was the continuation of a duel which
is perhaps the most protracted known in history.
Since the dawn of civihsation, when the two great
alluvial river basins of the Tigris- Euphrates and Nile
rose into wealth and then into culture, the conquest
of each was always the great ambition of the other.
It is for this reason that the history of Palestine is a
world-history. That country was the highroad
from one to the other, and whether it was Shishak
or Necho who came up from Egypt, or Assurbanipal
or Nebuchadnezzar who came from Mesopotamia,
the inhabitants of Palestine suffered the fate of
being on the great thoroughfare.

In the days of Hellenism, when every king desired
to be regarded a member of the civilisation which
lay around the ^gean, the Mesopotamian power
moved its capital to Antioch, and so the great old
struggle is now called the struggle of Syria and Egypt.
In the days of the first Ptolemy the conflict was
doubtful. He made conquests in Palestine, and
lost them again, and it has been observed that it
was as easy to hold Egypt by way of defence, as it
was diflicult to enlarge it by conquest.

The second Ptolemy was a man of peace and of
policy, who did perhaps m.ore than his successors
in conciliatmg the Jews and making them friends of

8o THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

Egypt rather than of Syria. There is little doubt
in my mind that it was he who first promoted the
translation of the Hebrew and of other Scriptures
into Greek, though I do not subscribe to all the fables
with which the so-called letter of Aristeas adorns
this momentous pohcy. I will add, by way of
digression, that by far the greatest contribution of
Alexandrian prose to the great literature of the
world is this very translation of the Old Testament,
entitled the Septuagint, which has preserved for us
a text centuries older than any of the Hebrew copies
known to exist. We have, of course, in our recent
discoveries found endless documents written in the
Greek current in Egypt. The earliest, which I had
the good fortune to publish, are in very sound and
grammatical Greek. The rest show a somewhat
rapid degeneration, according as the Greek idiom of
Plato fell into the hands of uneducated people of
hybrid descent.

The third Ptolemy was a great conqueror, who
dismembered for a moment the whole empire of
Syria, conquered Antioch, held its seaport Seleucia
with an Egyptian garrison, and then made a prog-
ress into the East second only to that of Alexander.
This great triumph of Egyptian arms is not only cele-
brated in the Canopus inscription (San) already men-
tioned, but was commemorated on a marble throne
at Adule far down on the Red Sea which the monk
Cosmas luckily copied, and so the text has reached us.

EGYPT 8i

I found, moreover, in the Petrie papyri fragments of
the despatch sent by the king, announcing the sur-
render of Seleucia and Antioch without a struggle.'
The king had also built a small temple — a purely
Egyptian temple — at Esneh, on which he had told all
his history, and this temple was standing up to the
time when ChampolUon and Roselhni were just deci-
phering the inscriptions. But they had such infinite
materials before them that they did not copy these
texts, and since then the whole building was destroyed
to make a sugar factory, which now exhales its hid-
eous black smoke from a gaunt chimney into the
pure and pellucid atmosphere of the Nile. Such are
the accidents by which precious history is lost.

The fourth and fifth Ptolemies were a lamentable
instance of decay in a great family. The former,
said by our historians to be a mere debauchee, cer-
tainly maintained himself after the great victory of
Raphia over Syria, and died without seeing his con-
trol of the ^gean islands diminished. But the consist-
ent evidence against him is too strong to be set aside.
The gradual discontent of the Egyptians broke into
insurrection, which endangered the first years of
his successor, who was yet a child; and there is no
doubt that the energetic Syrian (Antiochus III) would
now have captured Egypt, just as his son Antiochus
Epiphanes would have done, but for the interference
of the Romans. So the tables were turned, and in

■ Pet. Pap., II, xlix.

82 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

the latter days Syria, with its active and mature
rulers, was more than a match for the infants who
succeeded to the Egyptian throne. However, these
royal houses were also connected by marriage. It
was an able and worthy princess of the Syrian house,
married to the youthful fifth Ptolemy, and mother
of his two successors, who brought the famous name
of Cleopatra into Egyptian history. Till that time
(about 200 B. C.) they had all been Arsinoe or
Berenice.

These later kings, though living at Alexandria
as their capital, though patronising Greek letters,
and posing as Hellenistic kings, had fallen under the
influence of the national reaction, and all built great
temples wherein they appeared as the darlings of
the Egyptian gods, as themselves Egyptian gods,
with Pshent and Uroeus, with the emblems of life,
and surrounded by hawk-headed, dog-headed,
eagle-headed monsters, such as were commonly
portrayed in Egyptian theology.

With the seventh and ninth Ptolemies the reaction
goes even farther. It is with Philometor that we
find Jews coming to high official positions and
beginning to make themselves felt as politicians;,
and presently the strong Egyptian policy of Physcon,
and consequent flight of the learned men from the
Museum, gave Greek influence a shock from which it
never recovered. The ninth Ptolemy even employed
an Egyptian to govern Cyprus — an unheard-of thing

EGYPT 83

in earlier days. When the Romans came to deal
with the people of Egypt, they found it a strange
and essentially oriental country, which they never
could understand or control after the manner of the
really Hellenistic kingdoms.

In the first place, they did not conquer Egypt
in a campaign as they did Syria and Macedonia,
but it fell gradually, and partly by the soUcitation
or bequest of its own princes, under their sway.
There had been old commercial relations of a friendly
kind between Rome and Egypt. As far back as
the second Ptolemy, and in the first Punic war,
there had been embassies from Alexandria to Rome,
and vice versa, and important trade relations had
been established. It was owing to these that
Puteoli (Pozzuoli) was made a free port for Egyptian
ships, and it was , for centuries the great mart for
foreign trade, just as Genoa now is for all Italy.
Thus, the .elegancies of Alexandrian household
furniture and decoration spread, not only to Pompeii
and Herculaneum, but even to Roman palaces, and
the worship of Isis, long since adopted from Egypt
by the Greeks, became naturahsed in Italian cities.
Such was the fusion of creeds and customs produced
by the spirit of Hellenism. In the succeeding great
wars — the second Punic war with Hannibal, the
Macedonian wars, and the conquest of Syria —
Egypt had been prudently neutral. Hence on two
occasions, when the Egyptians appealed to Rome

84 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

to save them from the attacks of the Seleucids, first
of Antiochus the Great, and then of Antiochus IV,
the great republic intervened and saved the royal
house. It was on the second of these occasions
that Popilius Laenas drew the famous circle with
his vine stick around the Syrian king, and com-
pelled him to decide on the spot for peace or war
with Rome.

In spite of all these friendly relations, and the
gradual subjection of Egypt to Rome, the land was
always, as I have said, strange, and the emperors
made special arrangements for its government.
Into these I cannot possibly here enter, but I merely
wish to point out how different were the relations
between Rome and Egypt and the relations of Rome
and Syria, of which I shall speak in my next discourse.
While you still find splendid Hellenistic temples
and colonnades built at Baalbec, Palmyra, Gerasa,
and other sites in the old kingdom of Syria, even the
latest temples built or restored in Egypt by Roman
emperors down to Decius are strictly Egyptian, with
their lotus-flower capitals, their hieroglyphic inscrip-
tions, and with that pecuUar colouring so distinctive
in Egyptian art.

It is perhaps idle to consider whether a different
pohcy on the part of the Ptolemies would have
produced a different result. Certain it is that they
failed to Hellenize the country, at least the inner
country, and that every succeeding generation saw

EGYPT 8s

a sharper return to the old ways and habits of the
original race. I repeat this, though recent years
have shown us not only that they founded one
Greek city, Ptolemais in upper Egypt, but that
they settled in the Fayyum a large number of their
Hellenic soldiers, so as to have there a colony speak-
ing and writing good Greek, and reading good
Greek literature. But there is ample evidence
in the papyri to show that, though intermarriage with
the natives frequently occurred, these people were
never amalgamated with them, but lived under laws
differing from the old code of the country, which
was accepted by the Ptolemies in the native courts.
The contrast of this province of Alexander's
empire to his Macedonian home is very striking.
While Macedonia was raised by a few great kings
from obscurity to splendour, and with the Roman
conquest sank again into deeper obscurity forever,
the Macedonian d)masty founded in Egypt was a
mere episode in the immense history of that country,
and only meant that that wonderful, patient, eternal
race had for three centuries submitted to new masters.
They had done so many times before, and nearly
all their great kings had been foreigners ; they were to
do so many times again. And so the importance
of Egypt did not disappear at the fall of its royal
house with the famous Cleopatra. We can see that
not only the ideas of the great Alexander, but the
administration of the Ptolemaic court of Alexandria,

86 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

were constantly before the mind of Augustus when
he framed the constitution of the Roman empire.
We have Egypt prominent again in early Christian
times for its monks and its controversies, and remem-
ber, monks were known in Egypt centuries before
Christianity. Then it becomes brilliant under the
Saracens, when they founded Cairo with the ruins
of Memphis. And so on to our own day, when
the "Egyptian question" is ever before us, and
admits of no final solution; or, rather, it is a
question eternally being solved by the conquerors
of the world, from Nebuchadnezzar to Napoleon;
and still it remains a great highway for commerce
and for conquest, from the dawn of history to the
present day, from King Menes to Lord Kitchener.

I should perhaps add something upon the relations
of Egypt with Greece proper and with Rhodes
during the period with which I am particularly
concerned. You must remember that the enormous
wealth of Egypt, and the fact that the native popula-
tion there was disarmed, made it the favourite field
for mercenary soldiers. Mercenary service was as
fashionable then among Greeks as it was in the
seventeenth century throughout Europe; even Spar-
tan kings thought it not beneath their dignity to take
service of this kind, and there were always many
thousand Greeks pursuing this very mischievous
and deteriorating profession in Egypt. These
armies were usually commanded by ^Etolians or Ar-

EGYPT 87

cadians, and we know that these captains amassed
great fortunes, and at times even endangered the
monarchy by the insolence of their power, and by
their waste of public money.

There was another class of Greeks who also
looked to Egypt as their paymaster — the artist class.
Pictures and statues were constantly being bought
and sent there. Aratus of Sicyon was a sort of agent
for the king of Egypt, and used his dealing in art as
a pretext for dealing in politics. The famous tomb
of Sidon,' which commemorates the victories of
Alexander, is almost certainly the work of Greek
artists in the pay of the Ptolemies; for the king of
Sidon was high admiral under the first Ptolemy.
It was for him or some of his companions who had
fought imder the conqueror, that this splendid
monument was prepared.

It was this superiority in money over Macedon
which made Egypt always so popular in Greece,
so that Aratus and his league regarded the Ptolemy
as their support and protector against the Antigonid.
It was with subsidies of money that Egypt kept up the
agitation against Macedonia.

There was only one class whom the Ptolemies
were most anxious to settle in Alexandria, in order
to increase the glory of their university, and in this
they failed. The philosophers always regarded
Athens as their proper home, and no offers of money

' Now in the museum of Constantinople.

88 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

would induce such men as Zeno, the great founder
of the Stoics, to settle in Egypt. Other celebrated
men, who were invited and entertained there,
returned as soon as they could, and left the wealth,
luxury, and turbulence of Alexandria for the "Aca-
demic shades" of Attica. It was not till centuries
had elapsed that the mystic visions of the East were
reconciled to the dialectics of Plato in Alexandria,
and produced the latest bloom of Greek philosophy
in the hybrid system of Plotinus.

It is most melancholy, and very curious, that we
have not a single picture of social and literary life at
Alexandria all through its great period. What would
we not now give for a letter from Cicero on such a
topic ? But such men either did not visit Egypt, or if
they did, like Strabo, they tell us nothing that we want
to know. Dion Chrysostom, in his oration to the Al-
exandrians, rather attacks their vices than describes
their ordinary life. The great scene in Polybius of
the accession of Ptolemy V, and the murder of the
favourites of his father, is indeed a vivid picture, but
it is a picture of Alexandria mad, not of Alexandria
sane. There are a few stray anecdotes of the jeal-
ousies and squabbles of the learned at the Museum;
there is the famous scene of Theocritus' Adoniazusa,
in which two women go to the feast of Adonis, but
this latter, if I mistake not, was copied from Sophron,
and may possibly be really Syracusan, not Alexan-
drian, in colour. There are many bald statements

EGYPT 89

that the town was splendid; there is the wonder of
the hero in a Greek novel, who finds at night the
sun "distributed in small change" by the lamps in
the streets. But all these things touch only the out-
side, and only touch it. We must wait for some new
papyrus to reveal to us what many men praise or
blame, but nobody describes with intelligent insight.

SYRIA

THE SELEUCID DYNASTY

1. Seleucus I 312-281

2. Antiochus I (Soter) 281-262

3. Antiochus II (Theos) 260-246

4. Seleucus II (Kallinikos) - . - - 246-227

5. Seleucus III (Soter) 227-223

6. Antiochus III (the Great) - - - - 222-187

7. Seleucus IV (Philopator) .... 187-176

8. Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) .... 175-165

9. Demetrius (Soter) 165-150

10. Alexander Balas 150-145

Interregnum

Antiochus Sidetes 138-129

The rest is confusion.

LECTURE IV
SYRIA

In treating so large a subject in a single lecture I
must avoid all small details, and above all perplex-
ing you with the various Antiochuses and Seleucuses
who make up the pedigree of the Syrian royal house
— a pedigree by no means so interesting as those of
the other two kingdoms, for history has preserved
to us nothing worth mention save of two, Antiochus
III and IV; the former the king who warred with the
Romans and was defeated at Magnesia (190 B. C),
the latter (Epiphanes) his elder son, who succeeded
his younger brother, and who is famous not only
for the circle of Popilius Laenas, but for his perse-
cution of the Jews, and the prominent place he thus
occupies in the book of Daniel. But if the kings of
Syria are obscure, their kingdom is by far the most
important and interesting in the Hellenistic world
from many points of view.

I have already told you that the two great strug-
gles in which Macedon was now engaged were that
with the northern barbarians and that with the over-
cultivated Greeks. Egypt had only internal enemies
to fear, and, though often struggling for the pos-
session of Cyprus and Cyrene, was secure from
invasion or dismemberment. It was the deep sever-

93

94 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

ance of the native population from all that was Greek
which ultimately drew away that kingdom from the
rest of Alexander's empire, and so demoralised the
ruUng class that Ptolemaic Egypt succumbed to
Rome from the mere internal decay of its rulers.

All the conflicts which Syria had to endure were
at the same time Hke and unlike those of her rivals.
The very name Syria is a sort of absurdity, seeing
that the empire founded by Seleucus had Babylon
for its natural centre, and included the "upper
provinces," Parthia, Bactria, Ariana, and indeed
part of India, till the first great war of Seleucus with
Sandracottus determined that Hellenism was not
to include the valley of the Indus. But quite apart
from these remote Asiatic provinces or kingdoms,
the so-called kingdom of Syria included or claimed
Mesopotamia, Persia, Media, most of Asia Minor,
Coele-Syria, and Palestine, so that we have here,
not a definite conquering race like the Macedonians
in their own land, or a still more definite conquered
race Hke the Egyptians in their own land, but a
heterogeneous conglomerate of peoples, held together
by a Macedonian satrap and his small garrison.

It is true that most of these regions had long been
accustomed to obeying, more or less loyally, a
sovereign residing at Babylon or Susa or Persepolis,
so that they were not shocked at a king of a strange
race whom they seldom saw. Indeed, it shows how
secure the Seleucids felt on this point that they

SYRIA 95

settled themselves, not in the midst of their vast king-
dom, but at Antioch. This poUcy was adopted,
even before the first Seleucus, by Antigonus, the
first of Alexander's generals who held this group of
provinces till Babylon was seized by Seleucus in
312 B. C.

Why was this particular situation chosen first by
Antigonus for his capital Antigoneia, then by Se-
leucus for his capital Antiocheia, only a few miles
farther down the O routes ?

In the first place, Antioch was in the very thor-
oughfare from the old and well-known crossing of
the Euphrates to reach the Mediterranean. There
are deserts separating all Palestine and Syria from
Mesopotamia, and only in this particular place is
the transit both short and easily practicable. Hence
from this inner angle of the Mediterranean to Thap-
sus or Zeugma on the Euphrates there has always
been one of the highways of men. It was necessary,
above all things, to hold this route now, for the new
kingdom was to be Greek or Hellenistic — European,
if you Uke — and not oriental, and was to draw its
official language, its soldiery, its whole culture, so
far as possible, from the West.

So Seleucus and his descendants declared them-
selves as kings upon the Mediterranean with large
inner provinces — Asia, in fact — to feed and support
them, just as the Ptolemies were kings of Alexandria,
with Egypt and the Red Sea and Libya — Africa, in
fact — to supply them.

96 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

As regards the particular site, I see curious sug-
gestions, both of likeness and of contrast, with the
other most notable cities of the Greek world — Athens
and Alexandria. Of course, Alexandria was the great
new thing, but the Syrian port was not at the mouth
of its river, for this obvious reason that the Orontes
below Antioch was the main drain of a great city,
bringing all the pollutions of men into a tideless sea.
Hence Seleucia, the fortified port, was placed about
five miles north of the river mouth. The history
of Antioch is unfortunately known to us only in
stray moments, most of them moments of disaster
or humihation. We know that it owed a great deal
of its splendour to the two principal Seleucids, Anti-
ochus III and IV, who built new quarters, and did
all in their power to magnify and beautify this city.
The suburb Daphne was from this time on perhaps
the most famous resort of pleasure-seekers in the
world, so that this Antioch even came to be called
"Antioch near Daphne," to distinguish it from its
homonyms in Asia Minor and elsewhere.

Having now considered the capital, we may pro-
ceed to consider the provinces; for though this capital
was so splendid, and though we know that the early
Seleucids put some store on literature and science,
yet Antioch was not an art centre, but a centre of
pleasure. Under Antiochus Epiphanes we hear of
the splendid processions and feasts which rivalled
the great mummeries of Alexandria.

SYRIA 97

But as regards Syria itself, Coele-Syria, and
northern Palestine, we may safely assert that no
outlying country in Alexander's empire was ever so
thoroughly Hellenized. We know this by many
Macedonian names of towns and the renaming of
countries; we know that Greek was spoken com-
monly all through this region, and when we come
to consider the ruins of great cities founded then or
refounded under Roman rule, we find them not
oriental or foreign, but strictly Hellenistic — or
Roman-Greek, as it is vulgarly called. Baalbec
and Palmyra, Gerasa and the Decapolis, represent
Hellenistic culture, and direct imitation of Antioch.

There we find the Syrian population thoroughly
loyal to the Seleucids, and no revolution ever seems
to flourish there. We may say almost the same of
Mesopotamia, where the first Seleucus had long
reigned, and where before him Alexander the Great
had made a great impression. There was, indeed,
under Antiochus III, or rather shortly after his suc-
cession when he was still but a boy, an insurrection
under Molon and Alexander in Media and Persia,
who easily defeated the generals he sent against them,
and appeared a most dangerous opposition to the new
king. But as soon as he went in person against them,
their whole force melted away, for, says Polybius,
their soldiers thought it "foul scorn" to fight against
their hereditary king. Thus we may say that on
this side of the second great desert, which severed

98 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

the various parts of this ill-cemented kingdom — I
mean west of the great desert of Persia — the oriental
inhabitants, whether Aryan or Semitic, were quite
loyal. Seleucia on the Tigris was their capital —
now the great successor of Nineveh and Babylon.

But let us look farther east and north.

The first limitation of Alexander's empire came
from the region of India, where Chandragupta (San-
dracottus) made himself a great oriental kingdom
which was essentially non-Hellenistic. Even here,
however, a knowledge of what the Macedonians had
done produced its effects. There was always, we may
be sure, a Macedonian agent or minister at the court
of Chandragupta, and we are quite sure, from the
inscriptions of Afoka, his successor, who adopted
Buddhism, that Buddhist missionaries were sent
to preach their doctrine to all the Hellenistic kings
of the West. We have no detail of their number or
of their success, but when you consider that they
must have preached in Syria' two centuries before
Christ, the strange likenesses in the story of the bkth
and hfe of Buddha to that of the Ufe of Christ as-
sume a new and deep interest.

We are told that Seleucus made peace with
the Indian king on the basis of ceding provinces
and taking an Indian wife, while Chandragupta
gave him that enormous park of elephants where-
with he crushed his great rival, Antigonus, at Ipsus
(301 B. C).

SYRIA 99

It was not till more than half a century later
(about 247 B. C.) that the next great revolt took
place in the East. It was from that date that the
Parthian Arsakids dated the rise of their sovereignty.
These people, as you know, became gradually
stronger and stronger, and though subdued or kept
in check by Antiochus the Great, they were never
reunited to the Hellenistic kingdom of Syria, and
later on they became the heart of the oriental oppo-
sition to Roman extension.

Yet how deeply Greek ideas and culture here
penetrated we know from the story of the death of
Crassus. A strolling company of Greek players were
performing the Baccha at court when the news came
in of the Roman defeat, and the raging Bacchante
came on the stage with the actual head of the great
adversary. But these Parthians were blocked out
from Hellenism and so was the still more remote
province of the empire Bactria (Balkh), where we
should hardly have suspected that any Greek influ-
ences remained, were it not that the beautiful coins,
and the names of their kings upon these coins, show
that they assumed Greek titles and copied the coinage
of the Hellenistic empires.

Thus then you see two great facts: (i) the gradual
breaking off of eastern provinces from the Seleucid
empire, which was ill-cemented in many ways, and
moreover severed by two gigantic deserts; and (2) the
revolting provinces or kingdoms, though distinctly

loo THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

oriental in the main, were modified considerably by
the influence of Alexander's conquest. If it be true
that this fusion of people brought Buddhist teaching
into Galilee, who can estimate its vast significance ?

Let us now turn to Asia Minor, the other ex-
tremity of the vast kingdom of Seleucus. Here the
power which asserted itself as a separate kingdom,
and had a great effect upon the pohtics and the art
of the world, was the city and afterward the kingdom
of Pergamum. Originally the seat, not of govern-
ment, but of treasure, its strong position made it
the natural spot for a resolute governor (Philetaerus)
to assert his independence, and when the greater king-
doms were disturbed. King Lysimachus of Thrace
warring with Syria for the rule in Asia Minor,
the first satrap steered his way between the contend-
ing parties. His greatest successor, the first Attalus,
from whom the whole dynasty is called Attalid, ruled
long and brilliantly, having not only defeated all
the attempts of the Seleucids, but having earned
the gratitude of all Asia Minor by a great victory
over the Galatians, who were both terrifying and
plundering all Asia. During a reign of forty-five
years he consolidated the wealth and position of Per-
gamum so as to make it something distinctive in the
history of Hellenism.

A careful study of the relations of the Pergamene
kings to their city and people disclose to me clearly
the peculiar character of the Hellenistic sovereignties

SYRIA loi

SO popular in that age of the world. Pergamum was
a regular Greek city, with its assembly, its council,
its annual officers, its right of treaty with other free
states apparently untouched. The first Attalid
never pretended to be king over them, but was
merely an officer of a distant prince, keeping treasure
for him in the fortress, and conamanding a garrison
there. Presently he asserts his independence, and
shows it by declaring the independence of Pergamum
as a city-state. Hence he is hailed as the "benefac-
tor" of the state, presently as the "founder" of its
liberties, and its "defender." Even when he as-
sumes the title of king, it is an abstract title, not the
King of Pergamum. He keeps armies and conquers
outlying territory, but he never interferes, except by
way of advice, with the deliberations of the city. Of
course, his advice is that of a superior, with power
to enforce it, but theoretically he stands outside the
constitution as a powerful and ever-present friend.
The whole conception seems to us a strange hypoc-
risy, which deceived no one; yet how jealously did
the Emperor Augustus copy this very poHcy !

I thought it right to enter upon this digression
because my sketch of the Hellenistic world would
not only be incomplete, which it must be, but false,
which I hope it will not be, if you did not hear some-
thing about these second-rate states, which were
always striving to keep the balance of power among
their formidable neighbours.

I02 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

Of course, there was a great contrast between the
eastern and the western revolj^gainst Syria. The
eastern were national, the western political; for
Syria, or rather the kingdom of Antioch, affected
Hellenism thoroughly, as much as Pergamum or
Byzantium. But the restless nature of the Asiatic
Greeks, and their love of local liberties, still more
their fancy for the nobler title of "free cities," made
them bad subjects in the sense that Greeks have
always been bad subjects of any power.

I have left, however, for the last in the series of
revolts far the most interesting and important —
that of the Jews, resulting in a national dynasty and
a consoUdation of a distinct national type.

Let me review for a moment the history of the
Jews from the Babylonian conquest down to this
famous struggle. When they had returned from
their captivity and rebuilt their temple, it was natural
that the many Jews who had not come back, from
various motives, should nevertheless look with sen-
timental pride to their old reUgious capital and
regard it as a sort of spiritual centre. This was the
famous diaspora, of which we hear so much, and
which gradually came to support the temple by send-
ing yearly offerings, hke the Peter's pence sent from
Ireland and other countries to Rome. These for-
eign Jews were in many respects more devout than
the Palestine people, especially when the favour of
Alexander brought Hellenism into good repute
among the latter.

SYRIA 103

We find the educated classes gradually dividing
themselves into a worldly, cultivated, cosmopolitan
party, which thought it enough to believe the letter
of the five books of Moses, and adopt free-thinking
along with Greek culture beyond it; and the stricter
people, who with Ezra had given deeper meaning
and development to their faith, had adopted the
Prophets and the fuller interpretation of the Law,
and above all were exclusive as to all foreign culture.
You will have recognised in the former the aristo-
crats and people of dry Mosaic orthodoxy, the
Sadducees; in the latter, the Pharisees. During the
first century of Hellenism the influences of both
Egypt and Syria were such that the Sadducees
had their own way in Jerusalem. We are told by
Josephus that Greek games and exercises were com-
ing into fashion, that the Jewish youths were assum-
ing the ephebic dress, and that everything seemed
to portend a rapid Hellenization of this clever and
practical race. With the decay of the Egyptian
royal house, and the rise of Antiochus the Great,
Palestine passed permanently out of Egyptian hands,
and became annexed to Syria, so that henceforth it
is to Antioch they look as their capital, and no longer
to Alexandria. It is, however, most characteristic
of how far the Jewish domestication in Egypt had
gone, that they proposed to the seventh Ptolemy, and
carried out, the scheme of estabhshing an imitation
temple with its worship near Heliopolis, so as to

I04 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

save the trouble and expense of their many pilgrim-
ages to Jerusalem, now the province of another
kingdom. The practice, however, of both Ptolemies
and Seleucids had been to require of the Jewish
high-priest, who was practically their satrap, a
definite yearly tribute, and for the rest to allow the
Jews to abide by their own customs and laws. All
ambitious Jews learned Greek, and went to study man-
ners, and spend money, at Antioch or Alexandria, and
there seemed every prospect that gradually Palestine
would follow the example of Syria, and conform to
the habits of the many Greek cities settled along the
coast, and in groups at the upper course of the
Jordan. The hterature which remains to us shows
clearly this progressive influence of Hellenism.

But there came a crisis when one madman was
the instrument of Providence in staying all this
natural development and in restoring to its pristine
preciseness and vigour the definite and now indelible
nationality of the Jews. When the Romans came
to know them, there is not a word of what Josephus
tells regarding their Hellenistic tendencies. The
crisis was the reign of Antiochus IV, the Antiochus
Epiphanes of history, the "abomination of desola-
tion" in the prophet Daniel, whose persecutions
roused the national resistance, and established the
Maccabees on the throne of Jewish Palestine — all
these things you will find told and estimated in my
Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman
Conquest.

SYRIA 105

And now that we have gone through in brief
detail the principal features of the kingdoms of
Macedonia, Egypt, and Syria, as part of Alexander's
Hellenistic empire, I think I shall best occupy our
remaining time with some remarks upon the general
features of Hellenistic life, in which I shall resume
and repeat some of the points to which I have
already called your passing attention.

GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON
HELLENISM

LECTURE V

GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM

If we consider in its large features what the
early Hellenistic period has done for us in literature,
we may divide its action into the care and preserva-
tion of Hellenic masterpieces, and the production
of works of its own. As regards the former, there
can be no doubt that the creation of the great cosmo-
pohtan library at Alexandria, and the great trade in
books which came thence, were the greatest acts of
protection ever done for the greatest literature the
world has seen. And not only were all the master-
pieces of the Golden Age sought out and catalogued,
but the chief Hbrarian made it his business to pubUsh
critical studies on the purity of the texts, and to see
that the Alexandrian text represented the best and
soundest tradition. Recent discoveries on papyri,
commencing with the scrap I found in the Petrie
papyri, show, e. g., that the current texts of Homer
were very loose and various, so that the critics of
Alexandria, especially the famous Aristarchus, had
much to do in pruning, and in rejecting unauthorised
additions and repetitions. The Homer we now have
is that purified edition. What we now read is prob-
ably shorter by one-sixth than the pre-Alexandrine
texts. As regards the lyric and tragic poets, we may

109

no THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

be sure the same care was exercised, though the varia-
tions and additions and corruptions which occurred
in the texts of the widely diffused and much-recited
Homer could hardly occur in the early lyric poets,
where the very strict metre preserved the poet's words
and made the interpolation of stray lines gener-
ally impossible. It is a credible tradition that the
second Ptolemy borrowed from Athens the original
stage copies of the great tragedians on the huge
deposit of one hundred talents of silver, and that
he abandoned the money and secured the originals,
sending back copies to the city. So there was col-
lected at this wonderful library all that was rare
and precious, ordered and catalogued by competent
scholars. I go a step farther, and say that, though
we have no explicit record telhng us the fact, there
must have been some regular permission to copy
books in the library, and, multiplying them by slave
hands, to disperse them by way of trade all over the
Greek-speaking world. Let me cite to you one piece
of evidence which I think conclusive. We have
now got to know one Greek-speaking district — an
outlying and remote district of Egypt — the Fayyum.
By the researches first of Mr. Petrie, then of Messrs.
Grenfell and Hunt, we have unearthed in the walls
of coffins, in rubbish heaps, or even laid beside the
dead, during a period not merely post-Christian
or Roman, but reaching back to the second Ptol-
emy, all manner of fragments of writing, which

GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM iii

show us that not only the great masters — Homer,
Pindar, Euripides, Demosthenes, Menander — were
household books, but all manner of the more out-
of-the-way authors — the Contest of Homer and
Hesiod, the more difficult lyric poets, works on
metric and on chronology — all had filtered into this
outlying province, and had become part of the
people's education. If these things happened in
the Fayyum, how much more easily would the
export of books take place directly from Alexandria
to all the old Hellenic coasts ?

I say, then, that not merely for the preservation,
but for the diffusion, of Hellenic literature, the work
of Alexandria was a permanent education to the
whole Greek-speaking world; and we know that in
due time Pergamum began to do similar work. The
very words "paper" and "parchment" are the echo
of " papyrus " and " Pergamene," thus perpetuating to
modem Europe a record of the benefits of Hellenism.

But men who devote themselves to preserving
books are not the men likely to produce books,
unless it be books of learning; and of such there were
plenty. The Greek notes we call scholia, preserved
in some manuscripts of our classical texts, show us
the care and skill with which the Alexandrian schol-
ars published explanations and commentaries upon
the great masters.'

* There was found among the Petrie papyri (and smce lost) a short letter
asking for the loan of notes upon the Iliad. The scraps of commentary we
have found show us the practical nature of these notes. There was also a
received system of critical signs, which have survived in two or three texts.

112 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

But returning to literature, there is no doubt that
the most fashionable poets and prose writers of
Alexandria — the Robert Louis Stevensons and the
Rudyard Kiplings of their day — were not of the level
of the Golden Age. Yet withal, as I already have
told you, we have from Alexandria Theocritus, and we
have the love-novel. ' I will here add a word upon two
more of these poets, whom I had then passed by.
The first is Aratus, who was indeed a Hellenistic,
but not an Alexandrian, poet, whose didactic work
on the astronomy of use for navigation, and on the
signs of the weather of use for farming, has survived
to us complete. The poem in itself is calm and
prosy, nor would it command any modem inter-
est, had not one of the greatest artists the world
has ever seen — the poet Virgil — used it as the model
for the signs of weather in his exquisite Georgics.
He has translated faithfully and closely enough, but
by his marvellous alchemy has transformed the
Greek silver into Roman gold.

Nor is this the only debt that Virgil, and through
him the whole world of European Uterature, owes to
the Hellenism of Alexandria. We still possess the
Argonautics of ApoUonius the Rhodian — a pedant-
poet of the same generation. In the midst of pages
of tedious prolixity, which have forever damned the
popularity of the work, occurs the great episode of the
meeting and love at first sight of Medea and Jason.

' Above, p. 70

GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 113

The treatment of this world-wide, but never world-
worn, theme is so wholly fresh, so wholly un-Hellenic,
that it requires no subtle criticism to see in it the
broad light of the oriental love-novel which had first
dawned in the East upon the companions of
Alexander. It is no longer the physical, but the
sentimental, side of that passion which interests the
poet and his readers. The actual marriage of the
lovers is but an episode, in which the surrounding
anxieties and the unhappy omens take the foremost
place. Whether Virgil, in painting the love of Dido
for ^neas, had any closer model to copy we may
never know. But it is now a commonplace of criti-
cism that the episode has been inspired by the
spirit, if not the letter, of Apollonius. There are
the same psychology, the same portrait of the all-
absorbing sentiment, the same chastity of language
where a Hellenic poet would have been naturalistic.
The world has neglected this third book of the Argo-
nautics as if it were a poem of no importance, and
it is not for me to do more than record my dissent.
But even were my judgment astray, surely the poet
who attuned the dehcate instrument on which
Virgil rendered his pathetic melody has done no
ordinary service to mankind.'

Time fails me to speak of the other Alexandrians
from whom lesser Roman poets — Tibullus, Proper-

» I refer the reader for further details to my History of Creek Literature,
where there is a chapter on Theocritus and Apollonius.

114 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

tius, Catullus — drew whatever quasi-inspiration they
possessed. The most remarkable poem of the best
of these — Catullus — is the Atys. We have no direct
clue or indication that it is borrowed from the Greek.
And yet there is no man who has studied the obliga-
tions of Latin to Greek poetry who is not convinced
that it must have been derived from some Hellenistic
original.

If you will learn fully what that age of Hel-
lenism produced, look at the huge catalogues of
Susemihl (Liieratur der Alexandrinerzeit) and Vol. V
of Croiset's Litteraiure Grecque. And yet, astonishing
to relate, both these books omit all mention of our
greatest and best specimen of Syrian Greek — I mean
the books of the New Testament. Here, if any-
where, you will see the force of Hellenism in inter-
penetrating and moulding the culture of a very foreign,
a very stubborn, race. I shall not dwell on Paul of
Tarsus, for though born a Jew and always in spirit a
Jew, he had enjoyed the education of a great centre of
Greek learning — the schools of Tarsus. But consider
the language of the synoptic gospels. Here we have
the ordinary Greek of Palestine and Syria written
by men who seem to have laid little claim to be liter-
ary artists. They write a dialect simple and rude in
comparison with Attic Greek; they use forms which
shock the purists who examine for Cambridge
scholarships. But did any men ever tell a great
story with more simplicity, with more directness,

GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 115

with more power ? Take, for example, the opening
chapter of St. Luke's gospel. Can any artist from
Theocritus down show us an idyll of more perfect
grace? Take the narrative of the Passion. Who
has ever told great sorrow with simpler pathos,
with more touching modesty, with more native
dignity ? Believe me against all the pedants of the
world, the dialect that tells such a story in such a
way is no poor language, but the outcome of a great
and a fruitful intellectual education. Such was the
education that Hellenism brought to the Syrian world.
Let us now turn to art, and ask what was the
influence of Hellenism upon the nations which it
drew within its mighty influence. Of the recognised
fine arts the two most subtle and subjective are lost
to us — music and painting. The hand of time has
been against us, and we have only stray fragments
which give us not even adequate suggestions. The
wall-painting of Pompeii, and in a few of the Pala-
tine rooms at Rome, is not the work of artists, but
of operatives, and is as defective in drawing as are
most of the clay figurines of similar date from Tana-
gra and elsewhere. The remains of Greek melodies,
of which we understand the notation, are not only to
us exceedingly ugly, but so queer and strange that
no musician can attempt to restore a single bar,
where there is a gap or fracture in the inscription.
But let us take up sculpture and architecture. And
first of all let us reduce to its proper value the vulgar

ii6 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

phrase which assigns to Greek art a golden and a
silver age. The hfe of Alexander was supposed to
be the dividing line. Lysippus the sculptor, who
had the privilege of reproducing the king's form,
was the last of the real masters. Among the many
falsehoods I was taught about Greek art when I
was young, that was one of the most flagrant. Go
now to the Louvre in Paris, and walk through that
famous collection of Greek and Grseco-Roman
sculpture. Two masterpieces will forever stand out
from the rest in your memory. The first is the Nik^
of Samothrace, that figure of victory that once stood
on a marble prow heralding the success of King
Demetrius the Besieger with her trumpet. The
other, in the place of honour in its gallery, surrounded
by a crowd whose comments admiration is wont to
hush, is the Venus of Melos. Both are works of the
so-called silver age — one of them as late as the
Roman domination of Greece. Need I add that
at Rome the very inferior Apollo Belvedere and
the Laocoon, truly works of a silver age, yet have
fascinated centuries of men ever since the Renais-
sance ?

In recent years we have much fresh evidence of
the diffusion of this noble art into the East. The
great glory of the museum at Constantinople is the
famous tomb of Sidon, which so amazed its dis-
coverers that they called it the tomb of Alexander
the Great. That, of course, was absurd. But as

GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 117

to its age there is no doubt. It commemorates in its
noble reliefs the conflicts of Macedonians, Greeks,
and Persians, and was evidently intended to honour
the tomb of some companion of Alexander, probably
the Sidonian king Philocles, who was high admiral
to the first Ptolemy. We have never found any
sepulchral monument of such consummate beauty.

But if the date had not been thus fixed, we should
have seen another recurrence of the controversy
which rages over every new masterpiece in marble
or in bronze which is recovered from the earth or the
sea. Is it Hellenic or Hellenistic? Is it of the
fourth or the third century before Christ ? Can there
be any better proof than this, that Hellenism had not
only spread a knowledge of, and a taste for, great
plastic art throughout the nearer East, but that it
also raised up no mean successors to the great men
of genius whose work in marble and in bronze has
never since been rivalled, not even by all the study
and all the resources of modern civilisation?

The case is far simpler with architecture. We
may say broadly that the Corinthian style is exclu-
sively Hellenistic and Roman. All the great remains
in that style, from the splendours of the Olympian
temple at Athens to the colonnades at Palmyra — all
are essentially the product of Hellenism. Nay
more, the restorations of old buildings in that age
are so artistic that in many cases — as, for example,
at the temple of Eleusis — we are still in doubt

ii8 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

whether the work is archaistic or archaic; whether
it be the original execution of Mnesicles, the con-
temporary of Pericles, or a far later Hellenistic, nay
possibly Roman- Greek, restoration.

As regards the refinements and the luxuries of
everyday life, we may confidently assert that this
age advanced with great strides. Hellenic and
Macedonian household furniture was so simple as to
be almost rude, and we can quite appreciate the
astonishment of Alexander when he burst in upon
the splendours of the Persian court, even under can-
vas, in the midst of a campaign. "This indeed,"
he cried when he saw the purple and the plate, "is
dining like a king ! " So in Egypt the antique refine-
ments of a civihsation of thousands of years must
have impressed the Macedonians, whose hfe had
been spent in rude camps and campaigns, and we
may be sure that all manner of small conveniences
in daily hfe were added to the so-called necessities
of an advancing culture. The implements of toilet
found at Pompeii show what the middle classes of
Italy had attained when in near contact with Helle-
nistic refinement.

Recent discoveries have shed new light on the
achievements of Hellenism in pure science and in
practical business. The longer we study the mathe-
matical books of the Greeks, most of them dating
from this epoch, the more we are persuaded that
they knew vastly more than we learn from their

GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 119

explicit statements. It was only of late ye^rs that
Mr. Penrose discovered the delicate and complicated
system of curves applied to the building of the Par-
thenon, which does not contain in its plan a single
straight line. There must have been large mathe-
matical knowledge in the mind of this Hellenic
Wren; we know from the fragments of Pythagorean
lore that the science of numbers occupied the deepest
attention of that early sect. We know also that the
somewhat clumsy notation of quantities in Attic
accounts, which is very analogous to the Roman
figures, was replaced by the much simpler alphabetic
notation, wherein all the accountants of the Fayyum
papyri make up their sums. Historians of Greek
mathematics, in ignorance of this new notation, have
said marvellous things concerning the impossibility
of multiplication and division, and the necessity of
using the primitive abacus with its counters. We
have never yet found a Greek abacus, and shall not
find one till we dig up an infant school. The papyri
deal in very large and complicated computations
which range from the use of millions down to series
of minute fractions, and though they do make mis-
takes, their counting is as accurate as average work
of the present day. It would lead us too far to give
you the details proving these statements. They
will presently be published by my friend, Professor
Smyly, who combines an exceptional knowledge
of Greek papyri with a very complete training in
mathematics.

120 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

Not only in pure science, and in practical sci-
ence, but in the whole management of affairs by
departments, by a series of graduated officials, by
keeping careful minutes, by all the machinery now
used in business houses, and in state bureaus — in
all this the Hellenistic age had reached quite a high
level. Need I add that banking, the keeping of
money out on interest, the payment of bills and
draughts on bankers, were all perfectly understood
and practised in Greek Egypt two centuries before
Christ ? If all this attainment had not been lost or
hopelessly blurred in the Dark Ages, what centuries
of time would Europe have saved in her painful
progress toward civilisation ?

On the change in the political ideals of the age I
have already said a good deal in my discourse on
Xenophon. According as Greek conquests and
Greek culture spread over a vast area, the old city
constitutions with their tiny states were found
wholly inadequate. Two solutions were possible;
either large confederations or monarchies. The
natural question for any American to ask is this:
How was it that a confederation among free states
did not commend itself universally, as opposed to
monarchy — an idea to which almost all the Greeks
had been for centuries hostile ? The answer is very
direct and simple, and will come home with peculiar
force to those who have Uved through a great crisis
in the history of these United States. When a num-

GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 121

ber of independent states enter a league or confedera-
tion and enjoy its benefits, has each one of them a
right to carry on separate negotiations with foreign
states; or, if that be not permitted, has it a right to
secede? To these two questions the Greeks gave
but the one answer. Each contracting state pre-
serves its inherent right to treat with any power it
chooses, and every such state has also the right to
secede from its confederation. Even when states
bound themselves by promises to maintain joint
action, all Greek sentiment was against coercing
disobedient members. It might be done by force,
but it was never done as a matter of argument
upon the rights of the case. This condition of the
Greek mind wrecked all confederations in the long
run and left as the only other imperial solution the
acquiescence in a monarchy with sufficient military
force to keep its subject cities in order. From a
material point of view, these monarchies had the
power to carry out conquests, and so open up
new provinces to Greek commerce and Greek enter-
prise. Moreover, there were many city-states,
especially in Asia Minor, which were bordered by
wild mountaineers, or semi-savage tribes, from whom
they required protection. A strong monarch could
subdue, or At least repress, the raids of these people,
and so the subjects of a king found themselves far
safer then the members of a league. These con-
verging reasons, not to speak of the briUiant example

122 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

set by Alexander the Great, determined the Helle-
nistic world, still jealous for the internal liberties of
every Greek city, to acquiesce in the sundry "bene-
factors" and "saviours," by which titles they justified
to themselves the submission to personages who
differed only in outward circumstances from the
tyrants that were the bugbears of Hellenic life.

Yet one more reflection, and I conclude. The
brilhancy of city hfe, the comforts and conveniences
with which the citizens became supphed, the privi-
leges which they obtained, gave to all this epoch of
men a strong tendency to migrate from the country
into the towns. So it was that to Hve Acw/itTjSoV, in
villages, Hke the pagani of the Romans, came to
suggest boorishness and want of refinement. In the
book of Revelations, which concludes our New Tes-
tament, the ideal of the future is no longer the Ely-
sian fields, but the New Jerusalem come down from
heaven, a city with walls and gates and splendid
streets. This, and not fair glades and trees and
streams, was the conception of the highest happiness
produced by average Hellenism. But with the
change there was also a loss of simplicity and inno-
cence such as has always been the boon and privilege
of country Uf e, and this was felt by a few superior
minds. The old adage, "God made the country,
but the devil made the towns," is best of all illus-
trated by Dion Chrysostom in his famous oration
(VII) About Poverty, which you will see fully re-

GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 123

hearsed in my forthcoming Greek Life from Polyhius
to Plutarch; and so it came to pass that strong and
fresh barbarians from their wild fields and forests
were able to overthrow all the refined but effete
town civiUsation of the Graeco- Roman empire.

HELLENISTIC INFLUENCES ON
CHRISTIANITY

LECTURE VI
HELLENISTIC INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY

In these modem utilitarian days, when it is put
upon us to prove what was formerly taken for granted
with regard to the Greeks, and we are asked to show in
what respects modern culture is still indebted to them,
it may be well to make an excursion for once into the
domain of theology, into that precious preserve which
is supposed the peculiar apanage of the Jews. In
the minds of modern Christians Hellenism has been
too often associated with heathenism; its art has been
considered the handmaid of false gods, and an im-
pure mythology; the sermons and letters of St. Paul
have been understood as the protest of a converted
Jew against the Greek influence that then dominated
the world; and there are not wanting those that
point to the Italian Renaissance to show that the
revival of Greek letters brought with it a violent
reaction against the strict dogma and practice of the
Christian church. I will now therefore inquire what
effects the contact with Hellenistic thought, religion,
and civilisation had upon the Christian faith.

You may have been taught perhaps that here the
contact was somewhat remote; that the Jews, a dis-
tinct nation, notorious for their hatred of foreigners,
127

128 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

developed this faith by the teaching of Christ among
themselves, and that it was not till after a great
struggle that the completed Christianity was extended
to the Gentiles. And you might quote in favour of
that view that the first Gentile notice taken of the
Christians — the early persecutions, for example,
by Nero — merely regarded them as a pecuhar sect
of Jews, adding to the unsocial and intolerant char-
acter of that race new vices pecuHarly their own.
The separation of Jew and Gentile seems so strong
in the New Testament that you may be inclined
to doubt any serious influence from the Greek
side.

If you will look into Josephus, and read his account
of Palestine from the death of Alexander down to the
days of Herod the Great, that is to say, for the two
centuries preceding the Hf e of Christ — you will change
that opinion. As the Jews had once been on the
highway between the great mihtary powers of Egypt
and of Mesopotamia, and had suffered deep influence
from both, so now they lay between Ptolemaic Egypt
and the Hellenistic kingdom, of Syria, subject to
encroachment from both. In particular, the Seleucid
kings who reigned at Antioch had settled what were
called free Greek cities in lower Syria, along the
course of the Jordan, and Egypt had done so along
the sea; so that Palestine was studded with many
centres of Greek Hfe. All ambitious young men
among the Jews began to learn Greek, and seek

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 129

promotion at the Syrian or Egyptian courts, where
they often rose to high office and consideration.
And so there came to be formed at Jerusalem a
Hellenistic party, who thought that the Jews should
assimilate themselves to the Greeks, in opposition
to the national party, led by the Pharisees, who held
fast, not only to the law of Moses, but to the tradi-
tions which had grown up in the schools, such as we
have them in the Talmud. I have no time here to
follow out in detail this conflict, but will merely point
out to you that, close to the time of Christ, Herod the
Great had been a great Hellenizer of his subjects. He
had not only estabhshed a Greek theatre and amphi-
theatre at Jerusalem, but had rebuilt the Jewish
temple magnificently in Greek style, as he also
rebuilt many great temples for the Greeks of Asia
Minor and the ^gean islands. With him stood
that division of the Jewish nobility, known as the
Sadducees, who were ready to obey the mere law
of Moses, but repudiated all the later developments
of the Jewish faith, and with them the belief in
spirits and in angels and in a future Hfe.

In this temper of the governing class it is easy to
see how great would be the influence of the Greek-
speaking people settled in Palestine. All the higher
civilisation, all the art, all the science, lay with them.
They were the intermediaries between the Jews and
the rest of the cultivated world. How important
this was to Christianity is not a matter of inference.

I30 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

but to be seen clearly from our Lord's own words,
particularly as we find them recorded in the gospel
of St. John. Jesus teaches, in the first place, that his
religion is no longer a national reUgion, confined to
a special people, centred in a special shrine, but
intended for all men and all countries, when the
woman of Samaria puts forth the antiquated view,
and insists upon the importance of her place of wor-
ship.'

There is another passage in the same direction,
but even of more importance and this again in the
gospel of St. John, the most spiritual but by far the
most Hellenistic of our gospels.'' Who were these
Greeks? Plainly those of the free Greek cities
estabUshed in Palestine and hitherto standing aloof
from the Jewish rehgion. What Christ then meant
to say was plainly this: "It is only when Greeks
come to acknowledge my gospel that it will indeed
spread over the civilised world." And so from
the very beginning, though we may believe that in

' "Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh,
when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship
the Father. . . . i, God is a Spirit : and they that worship him
must worship in spirit and truth."+-John 4:21, 24.

2 " Now there were certain Greeks among those that went up
to worship at the feast: these therefore came to Philip, who was
of Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked him, saying, Sir, we would see
Jesus. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: Andrew cometh, and
Philip, and they tell Jesus. And Jesus answereth them, saying,
The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified." —
John 12:20-23.

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 131

Galilee and among his intimates our Lord spoke
Aramaic, and though we know that some of his last
words upon the cross were in that language, yet his
public teaching, his discussions with the Pharisees,
his talk with Pontius Pilate, were certainly carried on
mainly in Greek. I need not dilate upon the details
of a question you will find fully discussed in many
theological works. It is not without significance that
the author of the first gospel was at the "receipt of
custom," where he must necessarily have used
Greek to deal with his Roman masters. And so we
find the first explanation of the gospel of Christ, not
intrusted to the simple fishermen who attended him,
but handed over to Mark, then to Matthew and Luke
— more educated men, who wrote at second hand,
advised by the original witnesses; nor is it till late
in the first century, and after much training in the
Greek world, that the apostles come forward and
write epistles, and these uniformly in Greek.

Meanwhile the propagation of the gospel to the
Gentiles is intrusted to Paul — a man versed not only
in the Greek language, but in Greek philosophy;
and, far from insisting upon the radical difference
of the Greek notions of religion from those of the
new Christianity, he is at pains more than once to
tell his Greek hearers that the faith he advocates
is not so much a new religion as an explicit and clear
revelation of truths in accordance with the theology
and the morahty which the best of the Greeks had

132 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

taught. Read the two passages: Rom. i : 16-20^ and
Acts 17 : 24-28.^ But before I go into the doctrine of
this latter passage, I must complete what I have said
about the language. It is not enough to say that
Greek was the current language of Christianity;
it may fairly be said that it was the only language.
Even the quotations from the Old Testament were
now accessible in the Septuagint, and we know
that is the version commonly used in the New Testa-
ment. There is no evidence whatever that any
other tongue (save Aramaic to certain Jewish audi-
ences by men whose native speech was Aramaic)

I "For I am not ashamed of the gospel: for it is the power of
God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first,
and also to the Greek. For therein is revealed a righteousness of
God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous
shall live by faith. For the vn-ath of God is revealed from heaven
against all ungodhness and unrighteousness of men, who hinder
the truth in unrighteousness; because that which is knovm of God
is manifest in them; for God manifested it unto them. For the
invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly
seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his
everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse."

= "The God that made the world and all things therein, he,
being Lord of heaven and earth, dweUeth not in temples made
with hands; neither is he served by men's hands, as though he
needed anything, seeing he himself giveth to aU life, and breath,
and all things; and he made of one every nation of men to dwell
on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed
seasons, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek
God, if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he is
not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and
have our being; as certain even of your own poets have said. For
we are also his offspring."

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 133

was used for at least a century after the foundation
of Christianity.

Some of you may, however, be anxious to cry out
to me : What about the gift of tongues ? What about
the crowd on the day of Pentecost ? Well, you ought
all to be familiar with the important fact that this
miracle of speaking in tongues was intended as a
manifestation of miraculous power, not as a practical
engine for converting the world. It is plain from
the very narrative in Acts, chap. 2, that the multitude
which came together, being "devout men living at
Jerusalem, Jews, out of every nation under heaven,"
had a common language, in which they communicated
and expressed their astonishment; and it was in this
language, probably Greek, that St. Peter addressed
them all. He has no difhculty in being understood.
When we further examine the preaching of the gospel
according to the Acts and Epistles, we are struck with
the absence of all use of this apparently powerful
engine for missionary labour. Never do we hear of it
being called into use. There was no more obvious,
nay more crying, need of using the gift of tongues,
which St. Paul says he possessed in a very high de-
gree, than when he was shipwrecked on the island of
Malta, and a venomous serpent fastened upon his
head. He shook it off and felt no hurt. But the
natives, who had at first thought him a malefactor
pursued by the vengeance of the gods, suddenly
thought him some divine person. Here, then, was

134 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

a rare opportunity for preaching the gospel to these
poor heathen. But no, St. Paul leaves them in their
ignorance, and proceeds forthwith to preach to the
Roman governor of the island, who of course under-
stood Greek.

But far more important, nay, decisive, is St. Paul's
I Cor., chap. 14,' which therefore needs no further

'"Follow after love; yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but
rather that ye may prophesy. For he that speaketh in a tongue
speaketh not unto men, but unto God; for no man understandeth;
but in the spirit he speaketh mysteries. But he that prophesieth
speaketh unto men edification, and exhortation, and consolation.
He that speaketh in a tongue edifieth himself; but he that prophe-
sieth edifieth the church. Now I would have you aU speak with
tongues, but rather that ye should prophesy: and greater is he
that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues, except he
interpret, that the church may receive edifying. But now,
brethren, if I come unto you speaking with tongues, what shall I
profit you, unless I speak to you either by way of revelation, or of
knowledge, or of prophesying, or of teaching? Even things
without life, giving a voice, whether pipe or harp, if they give not
a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped
or harped ? For if the trumpet give an uncertain voice, who shall
prepare himself for war ? So also ye, unless ye utter by the tongue
speech easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is
spoken ? for ye vsdll be speaking into the air. There are, it may
be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and no kind is without
signification. If then I know not the meaning of the voice, I
shall be to him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh
will be a barbarian unto me. So also ye, since ye are zealous of
spiritual gifts, seek that ye may abound unto the edifying of the
church. Wherefore let him that speaketh in a tongue pray that
he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prayeth,
but my understanding is unfruitful. AAThat is it then ? I will
pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also:

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 135

comment. The use of tongues not being once
alluded to as a missionary engine, I say, then, Greek
was not only the vehicle, but the exclusive vehicle,
of the new religion.

But why, you will ask me, have I been at such
pains to insist upon this point ? Does it matter
what language Christianity adopted, beyond the

I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding
also. Else if thou bless with the spirit, how shall he that filleth
the place of the unlearned say the Amen at thy giving of thanks,
seeing he knoweth not what thou sayest ? For thou verily givest
thanks well, but the other is not edified. I thank God I speak
with tongues more than you all : howbeit in the church I had rather
speak five words with my understanding, that I might instruct
others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue.

"Brethren, be not children in mind: yet in malice be ye babes,
but in mind be men. In the law it is written. By men of strange
tongues, and by the Ups of strangers will I speak unto this people;
and not even thus will they hear me, saith the Lord. Wherefore,
tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to the unbe-
lieving : but prophesying is for a sign, not to the unbelieving, but
to them that believe. If therefore the whole church be assem-
bled together and all speak with tongues, and there come in men
unlearned or unbelieving, will they not say that ye are mad ?
But if all prophesy, and there come in one unbelieving or unlearned,
he is reproved by all, he is judged by all; the secrets of his heart are
made manifest; and so he will fall down on his face and worship
God, declaring that God is among you indeed.

•'What is it then, brethren ? When ye come together, each one
hath a psalm, hath a teaching, hath a revelation, hath a tongue,
hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying.
If any man speaketh in a tongue, let it be by two, or at the most
three, and that in turn; and let one interpret: but if there be no
interpreier, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak
to himself, and to God."

136 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

importance and convenience of having the current
language of the Old World for its instrument ? Any
other person desiring to spread his knowledge over
the world at that time would have adopted the same
means; it is therefore not essential, but accidental,
to Christianity.

It seems to me that this is a very incomplete and
inadequate view of the importance of Greek to Chris-
tianity, and that the adoption of that language was of
far deeper import than that of mere convenience.

In the first place, the learning of Greek did not
mean the mere picking up of a foreign language
through servants or common people. It always
impUed mental training, the reading of Homer and
other classical authors, the study of some formal phi-
losophy. It was distinctly an education. Even in the
golden days Isocrates tells us that not he that is born,
but he that is educated, is a true Athenian. And so
whenever in Josephus, in Polybius, in any author of
that day, the knowledge of Greek is mentioned, it is
coupled with the attainment of a certain culture, quite
different from that of the rest of the world — and not
only different, but accepted by nations widely differ-
ing, as the best, and as a common, culture. We talk
now of European culture, because English, French,
Germans, and the rest meet on common ground, have
similar intellectual traditions, and use the same kind
of arguments. Such was the Hellenistic training of
that day; it was the common ground on which Roman

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 137

and Jew, Macedonian and Syrian, could meet and
hold intercourse.

Let me further insist that this civilisation was so
perfect that, as far as it reached, men were more
cultivated, in the strict sense, than they ever have
been since. We have discovered new forces in
nature; we have made new inventions; but we have
changed in no way the methods of thinking laid
down by the Greeks. None of us has ever replaced
Aristotle's logic, or EucUd's geometry, or the analysis
of Greek grammar, all of which were current in the
Greek world before the rise of Christianity. These
people had attained, for the first time in the history
of the human race, methods of rational argument
which have never been superseded. For which
reason, what they have thought out can hardly ever
become antiquated, save in small details. Their
books are far more modern than all the productions
of Europe of the Middle Ages, when Greek was
forgotten.

I said just now that the Hellenistic world was more
cultivated in argument than we are nowadays.
And if you think this is a strange assertion, examine,
I pray you, the intellectual aspects of the epistles of
St. Paul, the first Christian writer whom we know
to have been thoroughly educated in this training.
Remember that he was a practical teacher, not Hkely
to commit the fault of speaking over the heads of his
audience, as the phrase is. Remember, also, that

138 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

the people he addressed were not the specially
intellectual classes, but, with rare exceptions, the
middle and lower people. With these facts before
you, take up any of his epistles or open letters,
intended for such a public, and tell me whether you
are not surprised at their intellectual calibre. The
arguments are so subtle, the reasoning so close, that
the average man or woman of today does not follow
them without considerable effort.

It was my duty for many years to lecture a class of
theological students in Trinity College on the epistle
to the Romans, so I can speak from long practical
experience in this matter. I can tell you that the
ordinary college student in Ireland — where men are
not wanting, I can assure you, in intelligence — found
it well-nigh impossible to reproduce Paul's arguments
in any form which showed that he had grasped them,
and very often these young men and I wondered
together what manner of audience it could be to
which such instruction seems to have been simple
enough for their practical needs. It is certainly
now on the level of the highest university teaching
that we possess. '

' I think it right to observe here that American education,
which I have observed and discussed in many places and with
many competent people, appears to me above all things deficient
in its ignoring of common logic as a mental training for every
average student. Looking back over forty years' experience of
teaching in an old and successful university, I think the logic
which we make a compulsory part of our education does more

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 139

By reason, therefore, of his training in the Greek
schools — we might call it the university — of Tarsus,
which at that time had a good reputation, you find
yourself deahng, not with an Egyptian priest, a Bud-
dhist sage, or even a Hebrew prophet, who spoke
with the imperfect logic of poetry, substituting
authority and miracle for argument, but with a
trained dialectician working by rational discussion,
and fit to take his place in any theological school of
the present day. Such thinking can never grow anti-
quated; such culture can never be superseded. And
if it were for this reason only, Christianity is fit to
retain its hold upon men in the twentieth century,
and to withstand many of the objections of mod-
em science and of new-fangled philosophy. Can
you not imagine with what promptness Paul would
have fitted himself for the controversies of today,
and taken his place among our foremost thinkers ?
There are not a few recent objections that would
have seemed familiar to him.

I contend, therefore, that the pecuhar modemness,
the high intellectual standard, of Christianity as we
find it in the New Testament, is caused by its contact
with Greek culture.

It would be strange, indeed, if such contact had
not also shown itself in the form of Christian doc-
practical good than anything else we teach, for it helps men and
women in every walk of life to distinguish between good and bad
reasoning, and so saves them from falling victims to plausible
impostors in science, in theology, and in business.

140 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

trines, in Christian ways of approaching the great
mysteries of life. Is it likely that the Christian
teachers could adopt the tongue and the dialectic
of Plato and not agree with him in the great intel-
lectual and moral struggle against false views of the
world and false theories of conduct? Is it Hkely
that the Christian system would not profit by the
Attic Moses as well as by the Hebrew lawgiver ?

But even if nothing further could be traced to
Greek training, the reasonableness of the New Testa-
ment, the simplicity of the writers, is the feature
which distinguishes our canon from the many
spurious additions which were rejected by the early
church. If you will consult the apocryphal gospels
and Acts, which I take to represent the less educated
or oriental side of religion in those days, you will
find them to deal in unnecessary miracles, to parade
the abnormal and the occult. Compared with
these the books of the canon are exceptional in their
broad, open-air, noonday simplicity, and their desire
to bring everything to the test of fair evidence. This
is the rationahstic spirit in the proper and useful
sense.

But think not that this spirit excludes mysteries.
Far from it. Consider for a moment St. John's meta-
physic — the doctrine of the Logos proposed at the
opening of his gospel. This, so far as I know, is a
purely Hellenistic conception, derived ultimately from
Plato — the idea that the word expresses the Divine

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 141

Reason, which is incarnate in the second person of the
Trinity — the identification of Reason with its natural
expression, so that the necessary utterance of God's
will is through the word of his personification in the
flesh. This profound theory is most undoubtedly
foreign to the Semitic side of our rehgion, perfectly
strange to Pharisees and Sadducees, but imported
from the Greeks.

So much for speculative theology. What can
we find as regards practical life? We find that
among other systems of conduct the Greeks had
elaborated one, the Stoic, in which St. Paul was edu-
cated, which has so many points in common with
Christianity that, even if it did not adopt them from
the Stoics, we must recognise that the truth was
revealed to the Greeks independently of the teaching
of St. Paul. In the gospels and in the personal teach-
ing of Christ, there is but little which reminds us of
this noble but stem system. When we come to Paul's
writings, not only the thinking, but the phrases, are
frequently Stoic. Thus his whole sermon at Athens
paints Christianity as Uke as possible to the creed of
his Stoic hearers. He even approaches closely to the
pantheism which marks that system. Nor is this
likeness confined to a particular sermon, reported, per-
haps, not verbally by St. Luke. There are so many
points of contact between the most popular advocate
of Stoicism, Seneca, in that generation, that books
have been written arguing that the Roman sage

142 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

must have been intimate with the writings of the
Christian missionary. But this is unnecessary. Both
were educated in the same school, and had learned
the same commonplaces. Read the account in
Cicero' of the ideal wise man, the sage in the moral
sense, as the Stoics understood it, and you will
recognise at once whence Paul took his famous pas-
sage in 2 Cor. 6:9, 10.^

But before I analyse this notion of the ideal wise
man, let me point out to you some other Stoic
notions, which coincide most remarkably with those

" De Fin., iii, 75 : " Quam gravis vero, quam magnifica,
quam constans conficitur persona sapientis! .... Rectius
enim appellabitur rex, quam Tarquinius, qui nee se nee suos
regere potuit; reetius magister populi quam Sulla, qui trium pesti-
ferorum vitiorum, luxuriae, avaritiae, erudelitatis, magister fuit;
reetius dives quam Crassus, qui nisi eguisset, nunquam Euphra-
tem nulla belli eausa transire voluisset. Recte ejus omnia dicun-
tur, qui scit uti solus omnibus; recte etiam puleher appellabitur,
animi enim lineamenta sunt pulchriora, quam eorporis; recte
solus liber, nee dominationi eujusquam parens, neque obediens
eupiditati; reete etiam invictus, eujus etiam si corpus constringa-
tur, animo tamen vincula injici nulla possint. Neque expeetet
ultimum tempus aetatis, ut tum denique judicetur beatusne
fuerit, quum extremum vitae diem morte eonfecerit, quod ille
unus e septem sapientibus non sapienter monuit. Nam si beatus
unquam fuisset, beatam vitam usque ad ilium a C3T0 exstruetum
rogum pertulisset. Quod si ita est, ut neque quisquam, nisi bonus
vir, et omnes boni beati sunt, quid philosophia magis colendum,
aut quid ut virtute divinius ? "

= ".... as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and
behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet
always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having
nothing, and yet possessing all things."

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 143

of Christendom. First, there was the unity of the
human race, all ruled by the same Providence. As St.
Paul puts it: "there is no longer Jew or Gentile, bond
or free," all are in the same sense servants of God.
This, as you know, was directly contrary to the
Jewish creed of a pecuhar people. In the second
place comes the doctrine of the dignity of the individ-
ual man, wholly opposed to all the notions of oriental
despotism. The Stoic wise man was absolutely
free, though the tyrant might bind him; happy,
though the tyrant might torture him. The poorest
slave, the most complete barbarian, if he attained
this spiritual emancipation, was more royal than his
sovereign, more independent than his master. And
you will see how thoroughly this expresses the spirit
of the early Christians, in spite of all their humility.
The inestimable value of each human soul, which is
worth more than all the material world, is there main-
tained with trenchant clearness.

This strong individuahsm is not more important
than the vital doctrine that human virtue is active,
and consists in doing good, in promoting God's
will practically in the world; not, as many eastern
systems had preached, in mere contemplation and
passive resignation. This, as you know, has been
always and now is the contrast of eastern and western
Christianity. Even now the Greek church has not
attained the same ideal of active piety that we have;
and this our advantage is in no small degree owing

144 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

to the spread of Stoic ideas in the western empire,
where the philosophers of that school came to hold
the place almost of a local clergy, preaching the vir-
tues which Christianity sanctioned, and the purity of
life which Christianity enforced.'

Still more striking was the Stoic theory that unless
a man reformed his whole life by an ideal principle,
all isolated attempts at good were worth nothing.
The fool, as they called the unregenerate, could do
nothing good; the wise or regenerate could do no
wrong. He was saved from sin and error, and had
attained perfection. There was even a controversy
among the Stoic doctors, and this three centuries
before the time of Christ, whether the change from
the spiritual darkness of the ordinary man to the
Stoic light was gradual or must be sudden, and there
were told among them many cases of instantaneous
conversion.

These doctrines, as you will have at once per-
ceived, are not so much the doctrines of general
Christianity as those of Protestantism, and you know
that St. Paul has been often called the apostle of
Protestantism. This clear and bold, though perhaps
narrow, view of justification by faith only, the sudden
passage from darkness to light, the exclusion of all
attempts at virtue outside the pale of this convic-
tion — all has been inherited by the modem Protes-
tant from the ancient Stoic far more directly than

' This is admirably set forth in E. Renan's Marc Aurhle.

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 145

most men imagine. We can trace it historically,
with but few gaps in the obscurity of the Middle
Ages, from the rugged mountains of CiHcia, the
original home of Stoicism, to the equally rugged land
of the Scotch Covenanters. Among the bold
mountaineers of Cihcia, celebrated in their heathen
days for facing death instead of slavery, where whole
city populations committed suicide when pressed
by Persian, by Greek, by Roman besiegers, this
congenial doctrine found its home, till from Isauria,
the wildest part of these highlands, came the Emperor
Leo to sit on the Byzantine throne and open his
crusade against images. It was this Protestant or
Stoic spirit that dictated the whole iconoclastic war,
and when the adherents of this dynasty were driven
out, they took refuge in Wallachia and Moldavia,
whence they passed, or their spirit passed, into
Moravia and Bohemia, where in due time arose John
Huss and Jerome of Prague; and from these early
reformers Protestantism spread to Germany, Eng-
land, Scotland, and thence with the Pilgrim fathers
to North America — all the spirit of Stoicism, so
strong in Paul, and so strong in the Scotch Calvinist,
that it is difficult to find any closer spiritual relation-
ship asserting itself over diversities of race and lan-
guage across wide gulfs of space and time.

I know very well that all the special steps of this
progress are not easily proved. But a long consid-
eration of the matter has only confirmed me in adopt-

146 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

ing this hypothesis as the most reasonable to account
for the facts. The spiritual relationship of Stoicism
and Protestantism I think no candid inquirer will
be disposed to deny. From contact with the Greeks,
therefore, Christianity obtained this support, that
an ideal long known to the western world, the Stoic
ideal, was found to correspond with it, so that the
preaching of the apostles was in this respect not out
of harmony with the wants and the aspirations of the
higher and better minds of that age.

But, admitting the value of this noble and prac-
tical ideal, you may think that the tendency toward
scientific precision and the moral tameness in the
Greek mind would militate against the great enthu-
siasms preached by the Gospel and countenanced by
the eastern rehgions. To the Greek you will justly
say the habit of rational discussion was everything,
and he would be most unlikely to admit miracles,
or mysteries, which are nevertheless essential to
Christian dogma. This is to some extent true; the
Greeks were essentially rationalists; but you would,
indeed, show Httle appreciation of the genius of the
race if you were satisfied with such a statement.
I will not urge what is very important — that at
Alexandria, and indeed in the later or Hellenistic
period of Greek life, this rationalising people came
in contact with oriental mysteries, and readily
adopted, from these older creeds, cults, and worships
wherein the hidden and the supernatural played the

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 147

principal part. The contact, for example, of Greece
and Egypt produced a great change in the worship
of almost all the Hellenistic world — Serapis and Isis
displaced the Hellenic gods, at least in practice. The
doctrine of the Trinity was developed by the Greek
Christians in contact with similar dogmas among
the Egyptians. But all those influences I think it
fairer to attribute to the people from whom they
cam?, and to treat them in that connection. There
is no difficulty, however, in showing you that the
feeUng for mystery, the pecuUar instinct in man, that
religion is no mere bargain with the gods, but some-
thing deeper and more poetical — this feeling, with-
out which we cannot imagine any saving faith, was
well known and thoroughly appreciated by the
Greeks, pure and simple, and the Greeks of the
best epoch.

There were, as most of you know, solemn mys-
teries celebrated every year in the very heart of
civilised Greece, at Eleusis, near Athens, in which
the sorrows of the goddess Demeter and her benevo-
lences to men were commemorated. These mys-
teries, which were not a soUtary occurrence in
Greece, attained in the best period of Greek history
a wide celebrity, and initiation was open to all who
satisfied the spiritual conditions, even women and
slaves. I have myself seen the excavated temple,
where, in contrast to other Greek temples, a vast
chamber was provided for a great congregation which

148 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM

met together to witness the rites — mysterious, awful,
secret — whereby man was raised to sympathy with
the sorrows of divine beings. So well, indeed, was the
secret kept that, as is the case now with Freemasonry,
not one of the vast number of initiated people has
told us what he saw and heard, and even in the early
Christian controversies no renegade from the faith
of Demeter and Cora was found to divulge the
mystery. Nevertheless there are not wanting many
heartfelt expressions of the immense spiritual bene-
fits to be obtained by this exceptional service.'

"Much that is excellent and divine," says Cicero
(de Legg., II, 14), "does Athens seem to me to have
produced and added to our Kfe, but nothing better
than these mysteries, by which we are formed and
moulded from a rude and savage life into humanity;
and indeed in the mysteries we perceive the real
principles of Hfe, and learn not only to live happily,
but to die with a fairer hope."

How far these subHme ideas may reach into
modem life, with what vicissitudes, under what
difficulties, I will illustrate, in conclusion, by a
strange passage in Irish history. If you look at any
mediaeval map of Europe, you will find in Ireland
but one place noted as of world-wide interest — the
Purgatory of St. Patrick at Lough Derg in the wilds
of Donegal. It is a little rocky island on this lonely
lake, which is surrounded with solitary moors, and

^Rambles and Studies, pp. 186 ff.

INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 149

studded with other islands deep in heather and
plumed with splendid ferns. We first hear of this
place of pilgrimage from a knight who went there
about 1200 A. D., and with the help of a monk
described his experiences — his being laid in a cave
to sleep, where he saw the horrors and wonders of
the next world, and scarce escaped with his Hfe from
this terrible ordeal. His account is so closely
similar to what we hear of the Eleusian mysteries
that there can hardly be doubt that the one came,
by some obscure maze of tradition, to influence the
other. This narrative took hold of all Europe, and
especially, I think, of Dante, when composing his
Purgatorio; it brought hundreds of pilgrims through
danger and discomfort to remote Ireland, and
offered the wild natives such opportunities for extor-
tion that Pope Alexander VI sent a legate to visit
it about 1490, who describes his adventures in an
extant letter to Isabella d'Este, and it was suppressed
by the pope in 1494. Nevertheless it has survived
not only this, but the fury of the Protestant Reformers,
who in 1628 devastated the shrine, destroyed the
small artificial cave, and threw the carved stones
into the lake. For even now, in July, four thousand
pilgrims wander to this lonely retreat and endeavour
to carry out the penance and vigils once suggested
by the Eleusinian mysteries, but now modified by
the priests of the Church of Rome into a semi-pagan
Christianity.

INDEX

INDEX

AcH-EAN League, 48.

Alexander: dissemmates Hellenism,

32', successors of, accustomed to

rule, 35-, used small armies, 39.
Alexandria: population of, 67;

world's debt to, 68; literature of,

6p-, museum and library of, 71;

no record of literary and social life

at , 88.
Alexandrian: work of, scholars, 109.
Antioch: importance of, 95.
Apollonius: influence of, 113.
Architecture: Hellenistic, 117.
Art: fusion of different schools of,

possible, 75; Greek, in Egypt, 87",

mfluence of Hellenism upon, 115.
Artillery: developed by Alexander,

38.
Athens : remained the home of Greek

philosophy, 87.

Banking, lao.

Barbarians: change of Greek atti-
tude toward, 14.
Bible (sec under New Testament).
Business: advance in methods of,

Cavalry: use of, by Alexander, 37.
Celts: invasion of, 42.
Christianity: influences of HeUen-

ism on, 127; relation of Stoicism to,

142.
Culture: high standard of, reached

by average people, 137-
Cyropmdia: praise of Persian ideals, 7.
Cyrus: the later ideal of Xenophon,

Democracy: attitude of Xenophon
toward, 16 ff.; Greek, checked by
Macedonian garrisons, 47-

Dialect: writers of — Sappho, Theoc-
ritus, Herodotus, 8.

Economy^ On Household: picture of
Attic hfe, 8.

Egypt: mercenaries from, 12 ; Rela-
tion of, to Hellenism, Lecture III,
65; easily defended, 66; civilisation
of, neglected by Greece, 74; not
Hellemzed, 75, 84; influence of
priests in, 76; foreign policy of, 78;
tenacious of nationality, 85; influ-
ence of, on Greek reUgion, 147.

Flowers: appreciation of, 10.

Greece: position of, in the empire,
46; flattered by Rome, 51; freed
by Rome, 52; dissatisfied with
Roman rule, 54; conquered by
Rome, 57; relation of, to Egypt
under the Ptolemies, 86.

Greek: the chief bond of Alexander's
empire, 40; used by Christ, 130;
language of Christianity, 133;
knowledge of, imphed culture, 136.

Hellenedom: corresponds to Hel-
lenic, 3.

Hellenic: literature, how preserved,
log; diffusion of, hteratiu"e, iii.

Hellenic ISM, 4.

Hellenism: corresponds to "Hel-
lenic" in Grote, to "Hellenistic"
in Droysen, 3; to both in Bevan's
House of Sdeucus, 4; the "sflver
age" of Greek art and literature, 4;
beginnings of, 5; General Reflec-
tions on. Lecture V, 109; achieve-
ments of, in science, 118; brings
advance in refinements of life, 118;
preference for city hfe character-
istic of, 122; Influence of, on Chris-
tianity, Lecture VI, 127.

Hellenistic: adjective from Hellen-
ism, 4; hterature of, period, 112;
architecture, 117.

Herod the Great: a HeUenizer, 129.

Homer: HeUenistic criticism of, 109.

^S3

INDEX

IS4

IsocRATES: on Attic culture, 6; ad-
vocates conquest of Persia, 15;
hails Philip as leader of the Greeks,
31.

Jews: development of, 102-, progress
of Hellenism among, ceases, 104.

Library: work of Alexandrian, log.

Macedonia : and Greece, Lecture II,
31; not a unit, 34; governed by
feudal lords, 35; retains its identity
in the empire, 41 ; character of kings
of, 42 ; barrier against barbarian
invasion of Greece, 45 ; divided into
four republics by Rome, 58; dis-
appearance of, as a nation, 59;
made a Roman province, 59.

Mercenaries: Greek, 5; Egyptian,
12; women captives of Greek, 14',
Greek, characteristics of , ly; Greek,
in Egypt, 73, 86.

Monarchy: spread of, 22.

Music: Greek, 115.

Mysteries: of Eleusis, 147.

New Testament: exhibits influence

of Hellenism, 114.
Novel: origin of the modem, 70.

Palestine : progress of Hellenism in,

128.
Parthians : origin of, 99.
Paul: used Greek, 41; imbued with

Greek culture, 131; influence of

Stoicism on, 141.
PERGAUtTM: history of, loo.
Persia : conquest of, planned by

Agesilaus, advocated by Isocrates,

IS-
Phalanx: pmrpose and character of,

36; not favored by Alexander, 37.
Philip: organizer of the phalanx, 36.

Politics: change of ideals in, 120.
Polity: of the Athenians represents

Xenophon's opinion, 16; On the

Lacedemonian, 19.
PoLYBius; favors union of Greece

and Rome, 56.
Ptolemies : rule of the, 72 ; the later,

become thoroughly Egyptian, 82.

Race fusion: slow, 14.

Romans: mmoticed by the Greeks, 12.

Rome: flatters Greece, 51; interferes
in Greece, 51; relation of, to Egypt,
83.

Scholars : work of Alexandrian, 109.

Science: in Hellenistic period, 118;
mathematical, 118.

Sculpture: so-called "silver age" of
Greek 116.

Septuagint: importance of, 80.

Socrates: attitude of, toward patri-
otism, 6.

Sparta: imfitted todiile Greece, 19.

St. John : influence of Greek philoso-
phy on, 140.

Stoicism: influence of, on Christi-
anity, 142.

Syria: great rival of Egypt, 79; con-
quered by Ptolemy, 80; and Hellen-
ism, Lecture IV, 93; character and
extent of, 94.

Tyrants : pourtrayed in the Hiero of
Xenophon, 24; character of, 49-,
in Greek cities encouraged by Mace-
donian policy, 50.

Xenophon: the Precursor of Hellen-
ism, I-ecture I, 3; On Household
Economy, 8; attitude toward hunt-
ing, 9; travels of, n; Polity 0/ the
Athenians, 16; on Greek tyrants,
24; on monarchy 26.

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