JKw
EDUCATION DEFT
THE OUTLINE OF HISTOEY
THE OUTLINE OF
HISTORY
Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
BY
H. G. WELLS/ '
WRITTEN ORIGINALLY WITH THE ADVICE AND EDITORIAL HELP OF
MR. ERNEST BARKER,
SIR H. H. JOHNSTON, SIR E. RAY LANKESTER,
AND PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY
AND ILLUSTRATED BY
J. F. HORRABIN
TTIE ENTIRE WORK, REVISED AND
REARRANGED BY THE AUTHOR
PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
FOR THE
REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY
NEW YORK
1921
All Rights Reserved
FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CoPYniGHT, 1920 AND 1921,
BY THE MA^MILLAN COMPANY.
COPYRIGHT, 1920 AND 1921,
RY II. G. WELLS.
Set up and clcctrotyped. Published November, 1920.
Third Edition revised and rearranged September, 1921.
INTRODUCTION
"A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy
of its name, must ~begin with the heavens and descend to
the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all
existence is one a single conception sustained from be-
ginning to end upon one identical law"
FRIEDRICH RATZEL.
THIS Outline of History, of which this is a third edition,
freshly revised and rearranged, is an attempt to tell,
truly and clearly, in one continuous narrative, the whole
story of life and mankind so far as it is known to-day. It is
written plainly for the general reader, but its aim goes beyond
its use as merely interesting reading matter. There is a feeling
abroad that the teaching of history considered as a part of gen-
eral education is in an unsatisfactory condition, and particu-
larly that the ordinary treatment of this "subject" by the class
and teacher and examiner is too partial and narrow. But the
desire to extend the general range of historical ideas is con-
fronted by the argument that the available time for instruction
is already consumed by that partial and narrow treatment, and
that therefore, however desirable this extension of range may
be, it is in practice impossible. If an Englishman, for example,
has found the history of England quite enough for his powers
of assimilation, then it seems hopeless to expect his sons and
daughters to master universal history, if that is to consist of
the history of England, plus the history of France, plus the
history of Germany, plus the history of Russia, and so on. To
which the only possible answer is that universal history is at
once something more and something less than the aggregate
of the national histories to which we are accustomed, that it
must be approached in a different spirit and dealt with in a
different manner. This book seeks to justify that answer. It
has been written primarily to show that history as one whole
is amenable to a more broad and comprehensive handling than
is the history of special nations and periods, a broader handling
' 961.669
vi INTRODUCTION
that will bring it within the normal limitations of time and
energy set to the reading and education of an ordinary citizen.
This outline deals with ages and races and nations, where the
ordinary history deals with reigns and pedigrees and campaigns ;
but it will not be found to be more crowded with names and
dates, nor more difficult to follow and understand. History is
no exception amongst the sciences ; as the gaps fill in, the out-
line simplifies ; as the outlook broadens, the clustering multitude
of details dissolves into general laws. And many topics of quite
primary interest to mankind, the first appearance and the growth
of scientific knowledge for example, and its effects upon human
life, the elaboration of the ideas of money and credit, or the
story of the origins and spread and influence of Christianity,
which must be treated fragmentarily or by elaborate digressions
in any partial history, arise and flow completely and naturally
in one general record of the world in which we live.
The need for a common knowledge of the general facts of
human history throughout the world has become very evident
during the tragic happenings of the last few years. Swifter
means of communication have brought all men closer to one
another for good or for evil. War becomes a universal disaster,
blind and monstrously destructive; it bombs the baby in its
cradle and sinks the food-ships that cater for the non-combatant
and the neutral. There can be no peace now, we realize, but a
common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general
prosperity. But there can "be no common peace and prosperity
without common historical ideas. Without such ideas to hold
them together in harmonious co-operation, with nothing but nar-
row, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and
peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction. This
truth, which was apparent to that great philosopher Kant a
century or more ago it is the gist of his tract upon universal
peace is now plain to the man in the street. Our internal
policies and our economic and social ideas are profoundly
vitiated at present by wrong and fantastic ideas of the origin
and historical relationship of social classes. A sense of history
as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for
peace within as it is for peace between the nations.
The writer will offer no apology for making this experiment.
His disqualifications are manifest. But such work needs to be
don& by as many people as possible, he was free to make his
INTRODUCTION vii
contribution, and he was greatly attracted by the task. He
has read sedulously and made the utmost use of all the help
he could obtain. There is not a chapter that has not been
examined by some more competent person than himself and
very carefully revised. He has particularly to thank his friends
Sir E. Eay Lankester, Sir H. H. Johnston, Professor .Gilbert
Murray, and Mr. Ernest Barker for much counsel and direc-
tion and editorial help. Mr. Philip Guedalla has toiled most
efficiently and kindly through all the proofs. Mr. A. Allison,
Professor T. W. Arnold, Mr. Arnold Bennett, the Eev. A. H.
Trevor Benson, Mr. Aodh de Blacam, Mr. Laurence Binyon,
the Eev. G. W. Broomfield, Sir William Bull, Mr. L. Cranmer
Byng, Mr. A. J. D. Campbell, Mr. A. Y. Campbell, Mr. L. Y.
Chen, Mr. A. E. Cowan, Mr. O. G. S. Crawford, Dr. W. S.
Culbertson, Mr. E. Langton Cole, Mr. B. G. Collins, Mr.
J. J. L. Duyvendak, Mr. O. W. Ellis, Mr. G. S. Eerrier, Mr.
David Ereeman, Mr. S. !N". Eu, Mr. G. B. Gloyne, Sir Eichard
Gregory, Mr. E. H. Hayward, Mr. Sydney Herbert, Dr. Er.
Krupicka, Mr. H. Lang Jones, Mr. C. H. B. Laughton, Mr.
B. I. Macalpin, Mr. G. H. Mair, Mr. E. S. Marvin, Mr. J. S.
Mayhew, Mr. B. Stafford Morse, Professor J. L. Myres, the
Hon. W. Ormsby-Gore, Sir Sydney Olivier, Mr. E. I. Pocock,
Mr. J. Pr ingle, Mr. W. H. E. Eivers, Sir Denison Eoss, Dr.
E. J. Eussell, Dr. Charles Singer, Mr. A. St. George Sanford,
Dr. C. O. Stallybrass, Mr. G. H. Walsh, Mr. G. P. Wells, Miss
Eebecca West, and Mr. George Whale have all to be thanked for
help, either by reading parts of the MS. or by pointing out
errors in the published parts, making suggestions, answering
questions or giving advice. Numerous other helpful corre-
spondents have pointed out printer's errors and minor slips in
the serial publication which preceded the book edition, and
they have added many useful items of information, and to those
writers also the warmest thanks are due. Mr. C. M. Anton
Belaiew, Mr. Henry Coates, Mr. J. A. Corry, Mr. Archibald
Craig, Mr. W. V. Cruden, Mr. A. H. Dodd, Mr. T. B. Gold-
smith, Mr. E. E. Green, Mr. E. S. Hare, Mr. Homer B. Hul-
bert, Mr. Walter Ingleby, Mr. J. H. Leviton, Mr. H. Comyn
Maitland, Mr. Karsten" Meyer, Mr. William Platt, Mr. E.
Gordon Eoe, Mr. Alden Sampson, Mr. Neville H. Smith, Mr.
M. Timur, Mr. W. H. Thompson, Mr. A. J. Vogan, Mr. W. A.
Voss, Mr. G. E. Wates, and one or two correspondents with
viii INTRODUCTION
illegible signatures, have made valuable suggestions since the
publication of the second edition. Pamphlets against, the Out-
line by Mr. Gomme and Dr. Downey have also been useful in
this later revision. But of course none of these helpers are to
be held responsible for the judgments, tone, arrangement or
writing of this Outline. In the relative importance of the
parts, in the moral and political implications of the story, the
final decision has necessarily fallen to the writer. The problem
of illustrations was a very difficult one for him, for he had
had no previous experience in the production of an illustrated
book. In Mr. J. F. Horrabin he has had the good fortune to
find not only an illustrator but a collaborator. Mr. Horrabin
has spared no pains to make this work informative and exact.
His maps and drawings are a part of the text, the most vital
and decorative part. Some of them represent the reading and
inquiry of many laborious days.
The index to this edition is the work of Mr. Strickland Gib-
son of Oxford. Several correspondents have asked for a pro-
nouncing index and accordingly this has been provided.
The writer owes a word of thanks to that living index of
printed books, Mr. J. F. Cox of the London Library. He
would also like to acknowledge here the help he has received
from Mrs. Wells. Without her labour in typing and re-typing
the drafts of the various chapters as they have been revised and
amended, in checking references, finding suitable quotations,
hunting up illustrations, and keeping in order the whole mass
of material for this history, and without her constant help and
watchful criticism, its completion would have been impossible.
H. G. WELLS.
SCHEME OF CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTEB I. TEE EARTH IN SPACE AND TIME 1
CHAPTER II. THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS
1. The first living things .5
2. How old is the world? 10
CHAPTER III. NATURAL SELECTION AND THE CHANGES OF SPECIES . 13
CHAPTER IV. THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND BY LIFE
1. Life and water 19
2. The earliest animals 21
CHAPTER V. THE AGE OF REPTILES
1. The age of lowland life 25
2. Flying dragons 29
3. The first birds 30
4. An age of hardship and death ..... .32
5. The first appearance of fur and feathers . . .34
CHAPTER VI. THE AGE OF MAMMALS
1. A new age of life . . . . . . . . .37
2. Tradition comes into the world .38
3. An age of brain growth ...... .42
4. The world grows hard again 44
CHAPTER VII. THE ANCESTRY OF MAN
1. Man descended from a walking ape .... .40
2. First traces of man-like creatures . . . 51
3. The Heidelberg sub-man 52
4. The Piltdown sub-man 53
CHAPTER VIII. THE NEANDERTHAL MEN, AN KXTINCT RACE. (THE
EARLY PALAEOLITHIC AGE)
1. The world 50,000 years ago 55
2. The daily life of the first men .59
CHAPTER IX. THE LATER POSTGLACIAL PALEOLITHIC MEN, THE FIRST
TRUE MEN. (LATER PALEOLITHIC AGE)
1. The coming of men like ourselves ...... 65
2. Hunters give place to herdsmen ..... .74
3. No sub-men in America 75
ix
x SCHEME OF CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER X. NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE
1. The age of cultivation begins 77
2. Where did the Neolithic culture arise? .... 81
3. Everyday Neolithic life 81
4. Primitive trade 37
5. The flooding of the Mediterranean valley .... 88
CHAPTER XI. EARLY THOUGHT
1. Primitive philosophy ....... 92
2. The Old Man in religion 94
3. Fear and hope in religion . . . . . .96
4. Stars and seasons 97
5. Story-telling and myth-making 99
6. Complex origins of religion 100
CHAPTER XII. THE RACES OF MANKIND
1. Is mankind still differentiating ? 106
2. The main races of mankind 110
3. The Heliolithic culture of the Brunct peoples . . .111
CHAPTER XIII. THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND
1. No one primitive language 117
2. The Aryan languages 118
3. The Semitic languages 120
4. The Hamitic languages 121
5. The Ural-Altaic languages 123
6. The Chinese languages 123
7. Other language groups ....... 124
8. A possible primitive language group .... 127
9. Some isolated languages 129
CHAPTER XIV. THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS
1. Early cities and early nomads 131
2A. The Sumerians 135
2e. The empire of Sargon the First 137
2c. The empire of Hammurabi 137
2o. The Assyrians and their empire ,138
2E. The Chaldean empire .140
3. The early history of Egypt 141
4. The early civilization of India 147
5. The early history of China .147
6. While the civilizations were growing . . . . . 152
CHAPTER XV. SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES
1. The earliest ships and sailors . . . . . . 155
2. The ^Egean cities before history 158
SCHEME OF CONTENTS xi
PAGE
3. The first voyages of exploration ...... 162
4. Early traders 164
5. Early travellers 166
CHAPTER XVI. WRITING
1. Picture writing 168
2. Syllable writing 171
3. Alphabet writing 172
4. The place of writing in human life 173
CHAPTER XVII. GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS
1. The priest conies into history ...... 177
2. Priests and the stars 181
3. Priests and the dawn of learning 184
4. King against priests ....... 185
5. How Bel-Marduk struggled against the kings . . . 188
6. The god-kings of Egypt 191
7. Shi Hwang-ti destroys the books 195
CHAPTER XVIII. SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES, AND FREE IN-
DIVIDUALS
1. The common man in ancient times 196
2. The earliest slaves 198
3. The first "independent" persons 201
4. Social classes three thousand years ago .... 204
5. Classes hardening into castes . . . . . . 207
6. Caste in India ......... 210
7. The system of the Mandarins . . . . . .212
8. A summary of five thousand years ..... 214
CHAPTER XIX. THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS
1. The place of the Israelites in history ..... 217
2. Saul, David, and Solomon 225
3. The Jews a people of mixed origin 230
4. The importance of the Hebrew prophets .... 232
CHAPTER XX. THE ARYAN- SPEAKING PEOPLES IN PREHISTORIC TIMES
1. The spreading of the Aryan-speakers ..... 236
2. Primitive Aryan life 240
3. Early Aryan daily life 245
CHAPTER XXI. THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS
1. The Hellenic peoples . .252
2. Distinctive features of the Hellenic civilization . . . 255
3. Monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in Greece . . 258
4. The kingdom of Lydia 265
5. The rise of the Persians in the East . . . . .266
6. The story of Croesus , , . 270
xii SCHEME OF CONTENTS
7. Darius invades Russia 274
8. The battle of Marathon 280
9. Thermopylae and Sal amis ....... 282
10. Platsea and Mycale . 288
CHAPTER XXII. GREEK THOUGHT IN RELATION TO HUMAN SOCIETY
1. The Athens of Pericles 291
2. Socrates .298
P3. Plato and the Academy 299
4. Aristotle and the Lyceum . . . . . .301
5. Philosophy becomes unworldly ...... 303
6. The quality and limitations of Greek thought . . . 304
CHAPTER XXIII. THE CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
1. Philip of Macedonia 310
2. The murder of King Philip 315
3. Alexander's first conquests 319
4. The wanderings of Alexander 327
5. Was Alexander indeed gr^at? 331
6. The successors of Alexander 337
7. Pergamum a refuge of culture 338
8. Alexander as a portent of w r orld unity ..... 340
CHAPTER XXIV. SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA
1. The science of Alexandria 342
2. Philosophy of Alexandria 349
3. Alexandria as a factory of religions 349
CHAPTER XXV. THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM
1. The story of Gautama 354
2. Teaching and legend in criiflrt 3S9
3. The gospel of Gautama Buddha 361
4. Buddhism and Asoka 365
5. Two great Chinese teachers . . . . . . .371
6. The corruptions of Buddhism 376
7. The present range of Buddhism 378
CHAPTER XXVI. THE Two WESTEBX REPUBLICS
1. The beginnings of the Latins 380
2. A new sort of state 388
3. The Carthaginian republic of rich men .... 399
4. The First Punic War 400
5. Cato the Elder and the spirit of Cato 404
6. The Second Punic War 407
7. The Third Punic War 412
8. How the Punic War undermined Roman liberty . . . 417
9. Comparison of the Roman republic with a modern state . 418
SCHEME OE CONTENTS xiii
PACK
CHAPTER XXVII. FROM TIBERIUS GRACCHUS TO THE GOD-EMPEROB
IN ROME
1. The science of thwarting the common man .... 424
2. Finance in the Roman state 427
3. The last years of republican politics ..... 429
4. The era of the adventurer generals 435
5. The end of the republic 439
6. The coming of the Princeps 443
7. Why the Roman republic failed 446
CHAPTER XXVIII. THE C^SARS BETWEEN THE SEA AND THE GREAT
PLAINS OF THE OLD WORLD
1. A short catalogue of emperors 451
2. Roman civilization at its zenith ...... 458
3. Limitations of the Roman mind 467
4. The stir of the great plains 469
5. The Western (true Roman) Empire crumples up . . 480
6. The Eastern (revived Hellenic) Empire .... 487
CHAPTER XXIX. THE BEGINNINGS, THE RISE, AND THE DIVISIONS
OF CHRISTIANITY
1. Judea at the Christian era ....... 493
2. The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth 496
3. The universal religions ....... 505
4. The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth 507
5. Doctrines added to the teachings of Jesus .... 509
6. The struggles and persecutions of Christianity . . . 516
7. Constantine the Great ........ 520
8. The establishment of official Christianity . . . .522
9. The map of Europe, A.D. 500 526
10. The salvation of learning by Christianity .... 530
CHAPTER XXX. SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA (CIRCA 50 B.C. TO
A.D. 650)
1. Justinian the Great 535
2. The Sassanid empire in Persia . . . . . . 537
3. The decay of Syria under the Sassanids .... 540
4. The first message from Islam 544
5. Zoroaster and Mani 545
6. Hunnish peoples in central Asia and India . . . 547
7. The great age of China 550
8. Intellectual fetters of China 555
9. The travels of Yuan Chwang . . . . . .561
CHAPTER XXXI. MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM
1. Arabia before Muhammad 567
2. Life of Muhammad to the Hegira ...... 570
3. Muhammad becomes a fighting prophet . . . . 574
xiv SCHEME OF CONTENTS
PAGE
4. The teachings of Islam 579
5. The caliphs Abu Bekr and Omar . . . . .582
6. The great days of the Omayyads 588
7. The decay of Islam under the Abbasids .... 596
8. The intellectual life of Arab Islam 599
CHAPTER XXXII. CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES
1. The Western world at its lowest ebb 605
2. The feudal system 607
3. The Frankish kingdom of the Merovingians . . .610
4. The Christianization of the western barbarians . . . 613
5. Charlemagne becomes emperor of the West .... 619
6. The personality of Charlemagne 623
7. The French and the Germans become distinct . . . 626
8. The Normans, the Saracens, the Hungarians, and the Seljuk
Turks 628
9. How Constantinople appealed to Rome .... 637
10. The Crusades 640
11. The Crusades a test of Christianity 648
12. The Emperor Frederick II 650
13. Defects and limitations of the papacy .... 654
14. A list of leading popes 660
CHAPTER XXXIII. THE GREAT EMPIRE OF JENGIS KHAN AND HIS
SUCCESSORS (The Age of the Land Ways)
1. Asia at the end of the twelfth century . . . .666
2. The rise and victories of the Mongols 669
3. The travels of Marco Polo 675
4. The Ottoman Turks and Constantinople . . . .681
5. Why the Mongols were not Christianized .... 687
5A. Kublai Khan founds the Yuan dynasty .... 688
SB. The Mongols revert to tribalism 688
5c. The Kipchak empire and the Tsar of Muscovy . . . 688
5o. Timurlajie . . 690
OE. The Mongol empire of India 693
SF. The Mongols and the Gipsies 697
CHAPTER XXXIV. THE RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
(Land Ways Give Place to Sea Ways)
1. Christianity and popular education 699
2. Europe begins to think for itself 707
3. The Great Plague and the dawn of communism . . .712
4. How paper liberated the human mind . . . . .717
5. Protestantism of the princes and Protestantism of the
peoples 719
6. The reawakening of science ....... 725
SCHEME OF CONTENTS xv
PAGE
7. The new growth of European towns 734
8. America comes into history . . . . . . . 740
9. What Machiavelli thought of the world . . . .749
10. The republic of Switzerland . . . . . .753
HA. The life of the Emperor Charles V . . . . . .754
1 IB. Protestants if the prince wills it 765
llc. The intellectual under-tow .765
CHAPTER XXXV. PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWER?
1. Princes and foreign policy 767
2. The Dutch republic 769
3. The English republic . . . . . . . .773
4. The break-up and disorder of Germany . . . . 783
5. The splendours of Grand Monarchy in Europe . . . 786
6. The growth of the idea of Great Powers .... 793
7. The crowned* republic of Poland and its fate . . . 798
8. The first scramble for empire overseas 801
9. Britain dominates India 805
10. Russia's ride to the Pacific 809
11. What Gibbon thought of the world in 1780 . . . . 811
12. The social truce draws to an end ..... 818
CHAPTER XXXVI. THE NEW DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICS OF AMERICA
AND FRANCE
1. Inconveniences of the Great Power system .... 826
2. The thirteen colonies before their revolt . . . .828
3. Civil war is forced upon the colonies . . . . . 833
4. The War of Independence 838
5. The constitution of the United States 840
6. Primitive features of the United States constitution . . 847
7. Revolutionary ideas in France ...... 853
8. The Revolution of the year 1789 856
9. The French "crowned republic" of '89-'91 .... 859
10. The Revolution of the Jacobins 866
11. The Jacobin republic, 1792-94 876
'12. The Directory 881
13. The pause in reconstruction and the dawn of modern
Socialism 883
CHAPTER XXXVII. THE CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
1. The Bonaparte family in Corsica ...... 892
2. Bonaparte as a republican general ..... 893
3. Napoleon First Consul, 1799-1804 898
4. Napoleon I Emperor, 1804-14 903
5. The Hundred Days 911
6. The map of Europe in 1815 916
xvi SCHEME OF CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTEB XXXVIII. THE REALITIES AND IMAGINATIONS OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
1. The mechanical revolution 922
2. Relation of the mechanical to the industrial revolution . 931
3. The fermentation of ideas, 1848 936
4. The development of the idea of Socialism . . . .938
5. Shortcomings of Socialism as a scheme of human society . 946
6. How Darwinism affected religious and political ideas . 951
7. The idea of Nationalism 959
8. Europe between 1848 and 1878 963
9. The (second) scramble for overseas empires . . . 977
10. The Indian precedent in Asia 987
11. The history of Japan 991
12. Close of the period of overseas expansion . . . ' . 996
13. The British Empire in 1914 997
CHAPTER XXXIX. THE INTERNATIONAL CATASTROPHE OF 1914
1. The armed peace before the Great War .... 1000
2. Imperial Germany 1002
3. The spirit of Imperialism in Britain and Ireland . . 1011
4. Imperialism in France, Italy, and the Balkan* . . . 1023
5. Russia still a Grand Monarchy in 1914 .... 1025
6. The United States and the Imperial idea .... 1027
7. The immediate causes of the Great War .... 1031
8. A summary of the Great War up to 1917 .... 1036
9. The Great War from the Russian collapse to the armistice 1046
10. The political, economic, and social disorganization caused
by the Great War 1053
11. President Wilson and the problems of Versailles . . . 1061
12. Summary of the first Covenant of the League of Nations 1072
13. A general outline of the treaties of 1919 and 1920 . . 1076
14. A forecast of the next war 1081
CHAPTER XL. THE NEXT STAGE OF HISTORY
1. The possible unification of men's wills in political matters 1086
2. How a Federal World Government may come about . . 1090
3. Some fundamental characteristics of a modern world state 1092
4. What this world might be were it under one law and justice 1094
A CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FROM 800 B.C. TO 1920 ..... 1102
FIVE TIME CHARTS OF THE WORLD'S AFFAIRS FROM 1000 B.C. TO
A.D. 1920 1122
INDEX . 1127
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGB
Life in the Early Palaeozoic 9
Time Chart from earliest life to present age 11
Life in the Later Palaeozoic Age ....... .16
Australian Lung Fish 22
Some Reptiles of the Later Palaeozoic Age .23
Some Mesozoic Reptiles 27
Later Mesozoic Reptiles ......... 30
Pterodactyls and Archaeopteryx 31
Hesperornis ........... .35
Some Oligocene Mammals ......... 39
Miocene Mammals .......... 41
Time Diagram of the Glacial Ages ....... 47
Early Pleistocene Animals, contemporary with Earliest Man . . 48
The Sub-Man Pithecanthropus . . 49
Map of Europe and Western Asia 50,000 Years Ago .... 56
Neanderthal Man ........... 58
Early Stone Implements ......... 60
Australia and the Western Pacific in the Glacial Age . . . 62
Cro-magnon Man 66
Europe and Western Asia in the Later Palaeolithic Age ... 68
Reindeer Age Articles . .69
A Reindeer Age Masterpiece ........ 72
Reindeer Age Engravings and Carvings 73
Neolithic Implements 79
Pottery from Lake Dwellings .82
Hut Urns 86
A Menhir of the Neolithic Period . 98
Bronze Age Implements ......... 101
Diagram showing the Duration of the Neolithic Period . . . 103
Heads of Australoid Types 109
Bushwoman Ill
Negro Types 112
Mongolian Types 113
Caucasian Types 113
Map of Europe, Asia, Africa 15:000 Years Ago 114
The Swastika 115
Relationship of Human Races (Diagrammatic Summary) . . . 116
xvii
xviii LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Possible Relationship of Languages ....... 122
Racial Types (after Champollion ) 128
The Cradle of Western Civilization 133
Sumerian Warriors in Phalanx 136
Assyrian Warrior (temp. Sargon II) 139
Time Chart 6000 B.C. to A.D . . . . . 142
Egyptian Hippopotamus Goddess 143
The Cradle of Chinese Civilization (Map) . . . .* .149
Boats on Nile, 2500 B.C 157
Egyptian Ship on Red Sea, 1250 B.C .158
JSgean Civilization (Map) . . . 160
A Votary of the Snake Goddess 161
American Indian Picture-Writing . . . . . . .171
Egyptian Gods Set, Anubis, Typlion, Bes ...... 179
Egyptian Gels Thoth-lunus, Hathor, Chnemu 182
An Assyrian King and his Chief Minister ..... 186
Pharaoh Chephren 190
Pharaoh Rameses III as Osiris (Sarcophagus relief) . . . 192
Pharaoh Akhnaton 194
Egyptian Peasants (Pyramid Age) ....... 199
Brawl among Egyptian Boatmen (Pyramid Age) .... 201
Egyptian Social Types (from Tombs) 203
The Land of the Hebrews 219
Aryan-speaking Peoples 1000-500 B.C. (Map) 237
Combat between Menelaus and Hector 246
Archaic Horses and Chariots ........ 247
Hellenic Races 1000-800 B.C. (Map) 253
Greek Sea Fight, 550 B.C. 254
Athenian Warship, 400 B.C 257
Scythian Types 269
Median and Second Babylonian Empires (in Nebuchadnezzar's Reign) 270
The Empire of Darius 276
Wars of the Greeks and Persians (Map) 280
Athenian Foot-soldier 282
Persian Body-guard (from Frieze at Susa) 286
The World according to Herodotus 287
Athene of the Parthenon 296
Philip of Macedon . . . . . . . . .311
Growth of Macedonia under Philip 313
Macedonian Warrior (Bas-relief from Pella) ..... 316
Campaigns of Alexander the Great 323
Alexander the Great .......... 333
Break-up of Alexander's Empire 335
Seleucus I 336
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS xix
PAGE
Later State of Alexander's Empire ....... 339
The World according to Eratosthenes, 200 B.C 344
The Known World, 250 B.C ,346
Isis and Horus . .351
Serapis . 352
The Rise of Buddhism . . . .358
Hariti . . 360
Chinese Image of Kuan-yin . . . . . . . . . 369
The Spread of Buddhism 370
Indian Gods Vishnu, Brahma, Siva ....... 374
Indian Gods Krishna, Kali, Ganesa 377
The Western Mediterranean, 800-600 B.C 381
Early Latium 382
Burning the Dead: Etruscan Ceremony 384
Statuette of a Gaul 385
Roman Power after the Samnite Wars 386
Italy after 275 B.C . . .387
Roman Coin Celebrating the Victory over Pyrrhus .... 389
Mercury . . 391
Carthaginian Coins .......... 400
Roman As 404
Rome and its Alliances, 150 B.C. ........ 414
Gladiators 421
Roman Power, 50 B.C 438
Julius Caesar ... ........ 442
Roman Empire at Death of Augustus ...... 448
Roman Empire in Time of Trajan 153
Asia and Europe: Life of the Period (Map) . . . . .471
Central Asia, 200-100 B.C . .477
Tracks of Migrating and Raiding Peoples, A.D. 1-700 . . . . 483
Eastern Roman Empire 488
Constantinople (Map to show value of its position) .... 490
Galilee 495
Map of Europe, A.D. 500 . 529
The Eastern Empire and the Sassanids . . . . . .541
Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia 543
Ephthalite Coin 549
Chinese Empire, Tang Dynasty .552
Yuan Chwang's Route from China to India . . . . . 582
Arabia and Adjacent Countries 569
The Beginnings of Moslem Power . 583
The Growth of Moslem Power in 25 Years 587
The Moslem Empire, A.D. 750 590
Europe, A.D, 500 609
xx LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Frankisii Dominions in the Time of Charles Martel . . . .611
England, A.D. 640 615
England, A.D. 878 617
Europe at the Death of Charlemagne 620
France at the Close of 10th Century . 629
Empire of Otto the Great 633
The Coming of the Seljuka (Map) 634
The First Crusade (Map) 641
Europe and Asia, 1200 G68
Empire of Jengis Khan, 1227 671
Travels of Marco Polo . . . 676
Ottoman Empire, 1453 684
Ottoman Empire, 1566 686
Empire of Timurlane 692
Europe at the Fall of Constantinople 701
"We have the payne . . ." John Ball's Speech 714
Ignatius of Loyola 722
European Trade Routes in the 14th Century 738
The Chief Voyages of Exploration up to 1522 745
Mexico and Peru ........... 748
Switzerland 753
Europe in the Time of Charles V 756
Martin Luther 757
Francis I 759
Henry VIII 760
Charles V .761
Central Europe, 1648 784
Louis XIV 787
Europe in 1714 790
The Partitions of Poland 800
Britain, France and Spain in America, 1750 804
Chief Foreign Settlements in India, 17th Century .... 807
India in 1750 810
American Colonies, 1760 . . .830
Boston in 1775 837
U.S.A. in 1790 841
The U.S.A., showing Dates of the Chief Territorial Extensions . . 845
Benjamin Franklin ......*... . 849
George Washington 850
The Flight to Varennes (Map) 867
North Eastern Frontier of France, 1792 . . . . ' . . 874
Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign 897
Napoleon as Emperor 904
Tsar Alexander I ... 906
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS xxi
PAGE
Napoleon's Empire, 1810 908
Trail of Napoleon 912
Europe after the Congress of Vienna 918
The Natural Political Map of Europe 921
Tribal gods of the 19th Century 961
Map of Europe, 1848-1871 966
Italy, 1861 967
Bismarck 970
The Balkans, 1878 974
Comparative Maps of Asia under different projections . . . 976
The British Empire in 1815 978
Africa in the Middle of 19th Century 985
Africa, 1914 ' 986
Japan and the East Coast of Asia ....... 995
Overseas Empires of European Powers, 1914 ..... 999
Emperor William II 1006
Ireland 1016
The Balkan States, 1913 1024
The Original German Plan, 1914 1035
The Western Front, 1915-18 1039
Time Chart of the Great War, 1914-18 1052-53
President Wilson 1066
M. Clemenceau 1067
Mr. Lloyd George 1068
Germany after the Peace Treaty, 1919 1075
The Turkish Treaty, 1920 . 1077
The Break-up of Austria-Hungary 1079
Time Chart 1000 B.C.-300 B.C 1122
400 B.C.-A.D. 300 1123
A.D. 200-A.D. 900 1124
A.D. 800-A.D. 1500 1125
" " A.D. 1220-A.. 1920 . 1126
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
THE EARTH IN SPACE AND TIME
THE earth on which we live is a spinning globe. Vast
though it seems to us, it is a mere speck of matter in
the greater vastness of space.
Space is, for the most part, emptiness. At great intervals
there are in this emptiness flaring centres of heat and light,
the "fixed stars." They are all moving about in space, not-
withstanding that they are called fixed stars, but for a long
time men did not realize their motion. They are so vast and
at such tremendous distances that their motion is not per-
ceived. Only in the course of many thousands of years is it
appreciable. These fixed stars are so far off that, for all their
immensity, they seem to be, even when we look at them through
the most powerful telescopes, mere points of light, brighter
or less bright. A few, however, when we turn a telescope upon
them, are seen to be whirls and clouds of shining vapour
which we call nebula. They are so far off that a movement of
millions of miles would be imperceptible.
One star, however, is so near to us that it is like a great ball
of flame. This one is the sun. The sun is itself in its nature
like a fixed star, but it differs from the other fixed stars in
appearance because it is beyond comparison nearer than they
are ; and because it is nearer men have been able to learn some-
thing of its nature. Its mean distance from the earth is
ninety-three million miles. It is a mass of flaming matter, hav-
ing a diameter of 866,000 miles. Its bulk is a million and
a quarter times the bulk of our earth.
These are difficult figures for the imagination. If a bullet
fired -from a Maxim gun at the sun kept its muzzle velocity
unimpaired, it would take seven years to reach the sun. And
1
,V : & : OUTLINE OF HISTORY
lje ssitt-Ss near, measured by the scale of the stars.
If the earth were a small ball, one inch in diameter, the sun
would be a globe of nine feet diameter; it would fill a small
bedroom. It is spinning round on its axis, but since it is an in-
candescent fluid, its polar regions do not travel with the same
velocity as its equator, the surface of which rotates in about
twenty-five days. The surface visible to us consists of clouds
of incandescent metallic vapour. At what lies below we can
only guess. So hot is the sun's atmosphere that iron, nickel,
copper, and tin are present in it in a gaseous state. About
it at great distances circle not only our earth, but certain
kindred bodies called the planets. These shine in the sky
because they reflect the light of the sun; they are near enough
for us to note their movements quite easily. Night by night
their positions change with regard to the fixed stars.
It is well to understand how empty is space. If, as we have
said, the sun were a ball nine feet across, our earth would, in
proportion, be the size of a one-inch ball, and at a distance
of 323 yards from the sun. The moon would be a speck the
size of a small pea, thirty inches from the earth. Nearer
to the sun than the earth would be two other very similar specks,
the planets Mercury and Venus, at a distance of 125 and 250
yards respectively. Beyond the earth would come the planets
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, at distances of
500, 1,680, 3,000, 6,000, and 9,500 yards respectively. There
would also be a certain number of very much smaller specks,
flying about amongst these planets, more particularly a num-
ber called the asteroids circling between Mars and Jupiter,
and occasionally a little puff of more or less luminous vapour
and dust would drift into the system from the almost limit-
less emptiness beyond. Such a puff is what we call a comet.
All the rest of the space about us and around us and for un-
fathomable distances beyond is cold, lifeless, and void. The
nearest fixed star to us, on this minute scale, be it remem-
bered the earth as a one-inch ball, and the moon a little pea
would be over 40,000 miles away. Most of the fixed stars we
see would still be scores and hundreds of millions of miles away.
The science that tells of these things and how men have
come to know about them is Astronomy, and to books of
astronomy the reader must go to learn more about the sun and
THE EARTH IN SPACE AND TIME 3
stars. The science and description of the world on which we
live are called respectively Geology and Geography.
The diameter of our world is a little under 8,000 miles. Its
surface is rough, the more projecting parts of the roughness
are mountains, and in the hollows of its surface there is a
film of water, the oceans and seas. This film of water is about
five miles thick at its deepest part that is to say, the deepest
oceans have a depth of five miles. This is very little in com-
parison with the bulk of the world.
About this sphere is a thin covering of air, the atmosphere.
As we ascend in a balloon or go up a mountain from the level
of the sea-shore the air is continually less dense, until at last it
becomes so thin that it cannot support life. At a height of
twenty miles there is scarcely any air at all not one hun-
dredth part of the density of air at the surface of the sea. The
highest point to which a bird can fly is about four miles up
the condor, it is said, can struggle up to that; but most small
birds and insects which are carried up by aeroplanes or bal-
loons drop off insensible at a much lower level, and the greatest
height to which any mountaineer has ever climbed is under
five miles. Men have flown in aeroplanes to a height of over
four miles, and balloons with men in them have reached very
nearly seven miles, but at the cost of considerable physical
suffering. Small experimental balloons, containing not men,
but recording instruments, have gone as high as twenty-two
miles.
It is in the uppter few hundred feet of the crust of the earth,
in the sea, and in the lower levels of the air below four miles
that life is found. We do not know of any life at all except in
these films of air and water upon our planet. So far as we
know, all the rest of space is as yet without life. Scientific
men have discussed the possibility of life, or of some process
of a similar kind, occurring upon such kindred bodies as the
planets Venus and Mars. But they point merely to question-
able possibilities.
Astronomers and geologists and those who study physics
have been able to tell us something' of the origin and history
of the earth. They consider that, vast ages ago, the sun was a
spinning, flaring mass of matter, not yet concentrated into a
compast centre of heat and light, considerably larger than it is
now, and spinning very much faster, and that as it whirled,
4 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
a series of fragments detached themselves from it, which be-
came the planets. Our earth is one of these planets. The
flaring mass that was the material of the earth broke into two
masses as it spun; a larger, the earth itself, and a smaller,
which is now the dead, still moon. Astronomers give us con-
vincing reasons for supposing that sun and earth and moon
and all that system were then whirling about at a speed much
greater than the speed at which they are moving to-day, and
that at first our earth was a flaming thing upon which no
life could live. The way in which they have reached these
conclusions is by a very beautiful and interesting series of
observations and reasoning, too long and elaborate for us to
deal with here. But they oblige us to believe that the sun,
incandescent though it is, is now much cooler than it was,
and that it .spins more slowly now than it did, and that it
continues to cool and slow down. Arid they also show that
the rate at which the earth spins is diminishing and con-
tinues to diminish that is to say, that our day is growing
longer and longer, and that the heat at the centre of the earth
wastes slowly. There was a time when the day was not a half
and not a third of what it is to-day; when a blazing hot sun,
much greater than it is now, must have moved visibly had
there been an eye to mark it from its rise to its setting
across the skies. There will be a time when the day will be
as long as a year is now, and the cooling sun, shorn of its beams,
will hang motionless in the heavens.
It must have been in days of a much hotter sun, a far
swifter day and night, high tides, great heat, tremendous
storms and earthquakes, that life, of which we are a part, began
upon the world. The moon also was nearer and brighter in
those days and had a changing face.
THE KECOKD OF THE ROCKS
g 1. The First Living Things. 2. How Old Is the World?
WE do not know how life began upon the earth. 1
Biologists, that is to say, students of life, have
made guesses about these beginnings, but we will
not discuss them here. Let us only note that they all agree
that life began where the tides of those swift days spread and
receded over the steaming beaches of mud and sand.
The atmosphere was much denser then, usually great cloud
masses obscured the sun, frequent storms darkened the heavens.
The land of those days, upheaved by violent volcanic forces,
was a barren land, without vegetation, without soil. The
almost incessant rain-storms swept down upon it, and rivers
and torrents carried great loads of sediment out to sea, to
become muds that hardened later into slates and shales, and
sands that became sandstones. The geologists have studied
the whole accumulation of these sediments as it remains to-
day, from those of the earliest ages to the most recent. Of
course the oldest deposits are the most distorted and changed
and worn, and in them there is now no certain trace to be
found of life at all. Probably the earliest forms of life were
small and soft, leaving no evidence of their existence behind
1 Here in thJs history of life we are doing our best to give only known
and established facts in the broadest way, and to reduce to a minimum
the speculative element that must necessarily enter into our account. The
reader who is curious upon this question of life's beginning will find a very
good summary of current suggestions done by Professor L. L. Woodruff
in President Lull's excellent compilation The Evolution of the Earth (Yale
University "Press). Professor H. F. Osborn's Origin and Evolution of Life
is also a very vigorous and suggestive book upon this subject, but it de-
mands a fair knowledge of physics and chemistry. Two very stimulating
essays for the student are A. H. Church's Botanical Memoirs. No. 183,
Ox. Univ. Press.
6 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
them. It was only when some of these living things developed
skeletons and shells of lime and such-like hard material that
they left fossil vestiges after they died, and so put themselves
on record for examination.
The literature of geology is very largely an account of the
fossils that are found in the rocks, and of the order in which
layers after layers of rocks lie one on another. The very
oldest rocks must have been formed before there was any sea
at all, when the earth was too hot for a sea, to exist, and when
the water that is now sea was an atmosphere of steam mixed with
the air. Its higher levels were dense with clouds, from which
a hot rain fell towards the rocks below, to be converted again
into steam long before it reached their incandescence. Be-
low this steam atmosphere the molten world-stuff solidified as
the first rocks. These first rocks must have solidified as a
cake over glowing liquid material beneath, much as cooling
lava does. They must have appeared first aa crusts and
clinkers. They must have been constantly remelted and re-
crystallized before any thickness of them became permanently
solid. The name of Fundamental Gneiss is given to a great
underlying system of crystalline rocks which probably formed
age by age as this hot youth of the world drew to its close.
The scenery of the world in the days when the Fundamental
Gneiss was formed must have been more like the interior of a
furnace than anything else to be found upon earth at the pres-
ent time.
After long ages the steam in the atmosphere began also to
condense and fall right down to earth, pouring at last over
these warm primordial rocks in rivulets of hot water and
gathering in depressions as pools and lakes and the first seas.
Into those seas the streams that poured over the rocks brought
with them dust and particles to form a sediment, and this sedi-
ment accumulated in layers, or as geologists call them, strata,
and formed the first Sedimentary Rocks. Those earliest sedi-
mentary rocks sank into depressions and were covered by
others; they were bent, tilted up, and torn by great volcanic
disturbances and by tidal strains that swept through the rocky
crust of the earth. We find these first sedimentary rocks still
coming to the surface of the land here and there, either not
covered by later strata or exposed after vast ages of conceal-
ment by the wearing off of the rock that covered them later
THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS 7
there are great surfaces of them in Canada especially; they
are cleft and bent, partially remelted, recrystallized, hardened
and compressed, but recognizable for what they are. And
they contain no single certain trace of life at all. They are
frequently called Azoic (lifeless) Rocks. But since in some
of these earliest sedimentary rocks a substance called graphite
(black lead) occurs, and also red and black oxide of iron, and
since it is asserted that these substances need the activity of
living things for their production, which may or may not be
the case, some geologists prefer to call these earliest sedi-
mentary rocks Archceozoic (primordial life). They suppose
that the first life was soft living matter that had no shells or
skeletons or any such structure that could remain as a recog-
nizable fossil after its death, and that its chemical influence
caused the deposition of graphite and iron oxide. This is pure
guessing, of course, and there is at least an equal probability
that in the time of formation of the Azoic Rocks, life had
not yet begun.
Overlying or overlapping these Azoic or Archseozoic rocks
come others, manifestly also very ancient and worn, which do
contain traces of life. These first remains are of the simplest
description ; they are the vestiges of simple plants called algse,
or marks like the tracks made by worms in the sea mud. There
are also the skeletons of the microscopic creatures called Radio-
laria. This second series of rocks is called the Proterozoic (be-
ginning of life) series, and marks a long age in the world's
history. Lying over and above the Proterozoic rocks is a third
series, which is found to contain a considerable number and
variety of traces of living things. First comes the evidence
of a diversity of shellfish, crabs, and such-like crawling
things, worms, seaweeds, and the like ; then of a multitude of
fishes and of the beginnings of land plants and land creatures.
These rocks are called the Palaeozoic (ancient life) rocks.
They mark a vast era, during which life was slowly spreading,
increasing, and developing in the seas of our world. Through
long ages, through the earliest Palaeozoic time, it was no more
than a proliferation of such swimming and creeping things
in the water. There were creatures called trilobites ; they were
crawling things like big sea woodlice that were probably re-
lated to the American king-crab of to-day. There were also
sea scorpions, the prefects of that ear'y world. The individuals
8 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
of .certain species of these were nine feet long. These were
the very highest sorts of life. There were abundant different
sorts of an order of shellfish called brachiopods. There were
plant animals, rooted and joined together like plants, and loose
weeds that waved in the waters.
It was not a display of life to excite our imaginations. There
was nothing that ran or flew or even swam swiftly or skilfully.
Except for the size of some of the creatures, it was not very
different from, and rather less various than, the kind of lifi
a student would gather from any summer-time ditch nowadays
for microscopic examination. Such was the life of the shallow
seas through a hundred million years or more in the early
Palaeozoic period. The land during that time was apparently
absolutely barren. We find no trace nor hint of land life.
Everything that lived in those days lived under water for most
or all of its life.
Between the formation of these Lower Palaeozoic rocks in
which the sea scorpion and trilobite ruled, and our own time,
there have intervened almost immeasurable ages, represented
by layers and masses of sedimentary rocks. There are first
the Upper Palaeozoic rocks, and above these the geologists dis-
tinguish two great divisions. Next above the Palaeozoic come
the Mesozoic (middle life) rocks, a second vast system of fossil-
bearing rocks, representing perhaps a hundred millions of
swift years, and containing a \vonderful array of fossil re-
mains, bones of giant reptiles and the like, which we will pres-
ently describe; and above these again are the Cainozoic (recent
life) rocks, a third great volume in the history of life, an un-
finished volume of which the sand and mud that was carried
out to sea yesterday by the rivers of the world, to bury the bones
and scales and bodies and tracks that will become at last fossils of
the things of to-day, constitute the last written leaf.
These markings and fossils in the rocks and the rocks them-
selves are our first historical documents. The history of life
that men have puzzled out and are still puzzling out from them
is called the Record of the Rocks. By studying this record
men are slowly piecing together a story of life's beginnings,
and of the beginnings of our kind, of which our ancestors a
century or so ago had no suspicion. But when we call these
rocks and the fossils a record and a history, it must not be
supiposed that there is any sign of an orderly keeping of a
THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS
10 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
record. It is merely that whatever happens leaves some trace,
if only we are intelligent enough to detect the meaning of that
trace. Nor are the rocks of the world in orderly layers one
above the other, convenient for men to read. They are not
like the books and pages of a library. They are torn, dis-
rupted, interrupted, flung about, defaced, like a carelessly ar-
ranged office after it has experienced in succession a bombard-
ment, a hostile military occupation, looting, an earthquake,
riots, and a fire. And so it is that for countless generations
this Eecord of the Kocks lay unsuspected beneath the feet
of men. Fossils were known to the Ionian Greeks in the sixth
century B.C., they were discussed at Alexandria by Eratos-
thenes and others in the third century B.C., a discussion which
is summarised in Strabo's Geography ( ?20-10 B.C.). They
were known to the Latin poet Ovid, but he did not understand
their nature. He thought they were the first rude efforts of
creative power. They were noted by Arabic writers in the
tenth century. Leonardo da Vinci, who lived so recently as
the opening of the sixteenth century (1452-1519), was one
of the first Europeans to grasp the real significance of fossils,
and it has been only within the last century and a half that
man has begun the serious and sustained deciphering of these
long-neglected early pages of his world's history.
2.
Speculations about geological time vary enormously. Esti-
mates of the age of the oldest rocks by geologists and
astronomers starting from different standpoints have varied
between 1,600,000,000, and 25,000,000. That the period of
time has been vast, that it is to be counted by scores and pos-
sibly by hundreds of millions of years, is the utmost that can
be said" with certainty in the matter. It is quite open to the
reader to divide every number in the appended time diagram
by ten or multiply it by two; no one can gainsay him. Of
the relative amount of time as between one age and another
we have, however, stronger evidence; if the reader cuts down
the 800,000,000 we have given here to 400,000,000, then he
must reduce the 40,000,000 of the Cainozoic to 20,000,000.
And be it noted that whatever the total sum may be, most
geologists are in agreement that half or more than half of the
THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS
11
whole of geological time had passed before life had developed
to the Later Palaeozoic level. The reader reading quickly
through these opening chapters may be apt to think of them
million.
years oao
/I*
M
> Azote or Arckaeozotc
Possibly vntnout lx& at all
"Proterozoic
"Without' visible traces of Zivrruj
ur<2. JICLC- or j^niztialcxJU.
Green Scutn. and tke- I2cc
a*iy "Palaeozoic
"Before, the appearance, o^Tany
animals ^flg& of Sea Scorpions & Tnlobvbzs.
\AX&T Palaeozoic
of 'Fishes,
anci Swaznp
-, (jrmss,
Land
as a mere swift prelude of preparation to the apparently much
longer history that follows, but in reality that subsequent his-
tory is longer only because it is more detailed and more in-
teresting to us. It looms larger in perspective. For ages
that stagger the imagination this earth spun hot and lifeless,
12 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
and again for ages of equal vastness it held no life above the
level of the animalculse in a drop of ditch-water.
Not only is Space from the point of view of life and human-
ity empty, but Time is empty also. Life is like a little glow,
scarcely kindled yet, in these void immensities.
m
NATURAL SELECTION AND THE CHANGES
OF SPECIES
NOW here it will be well to put plainly certain general
facts about this new thing, life, that was creeping in
the shallow waters and intertidal muds of the early
Palaeozoic period, and which is perhaps confined to our planet
alone in all the immensity of space.
Life differs from all things whatever that are without life
in certain general aspects. There are the most wonderful dif-
ferences among living things to-day, but all living things past
and present agree in possessing a certain power of growth, all
living things take nourishment, all living things move about
as they feed and grow, though the movement be no more
than the spread of roots through the soil, or of branches in the
air. Moreover, living things reproduce; they give rise to
other living things, either by growing and then dividing or
by means of seeds or spores or eggs or other ways of producing
young. Reproduction is a characteristic of life.
No living thing goes on living for ever. There seems to
be a- limit of growth for every kind of living thing. Among
very small and simple living things, such as that microscopic
blob of living matter the Amoeba, an individual may grow and
then divide completely into two new individuals, which again
may divide in their turn. Many other microscopic creatures
live actively for a time, grow, and then become quiet and
inactive, enclose themselves in an outer covering and break
up wholly into a number of still smaller things, spores, which
are released and scattered and again grow into the likeness
of their parent. Among more complex creatures the reproduc-
tion is not usually such simple division, though division does
occur even in the case of many creatures big enough to be
visible to the unassisted eye. But the rule with almost all
13
14 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
larger beings is that the individual grows up to a certain limit
of size. Then, before it becomes unwieldy, its growth declines
and stops. As it reaches its full size it matures, it begins to
produce young, which are either born alive or hatched from
eggs. But all of its body does not produce young. Only a
special part does that. After the individual has lived and
produced offspring for some time, it ages and dies. It does
so by a sort of necessity. There is a practical limit to its
life as well as to its growth. These things are as true of plants
as they are of animals. And they are not true of things that
do not live. Non-living things, such as crystals, grow, but
they have no set limits of growth or size, they do not move of
their own accord and there is no stir within them. Crystals
once formed may last unchanged for millions of years. There
is no reproduction for any non-living thing.
This growth and dying and reproduction of living things
leads to some very wonderful consequences. The young which
a living thing produces are either directly, or after some inter-
mediate stages and changes (such as the changes of a cater-
pillar and butterfly), like the parent living thing. But they
are never exactly like it or like each other. There is always
a slight difference, which we speak of as individuality. A
thousand butterflies this year may produce two or three thou-
sand next year; these latter will look to us almost exactly
like their predecessors, but each one will have just that slight
difference. It is hard for us to see individuality in butter-
flies because we do not observe them very closely, but it is easy
for us to see it in men. All the men and women in the world
now are descended from the men and women of A.D. 1800, but
not one of us now is exactly the same as one of that vanished
generation. And what is true of men and butterflies is true
of every sort of living thing, of plants as of animals. Every
species changes all its individualities in each generation. That
is true of all the minute creatures that swarmed and repro-
duced and died in the Archseozoic and Proterozoic seas, as it is
of men to-day.
Every species of living things is continually dying and
being born again, as a multitude of fresh individuals.
Consider, then, what must happen to a new-born generation
of living things of any species. Some of the individuals will
be stronger or sturdier or better suited to succeed in life in
NATURAL SELECTION 15
some way than the rest, many individuals will be weaker or
less suited. In particular single cases any sort of luck or
accident may occur, but on the whole the better equipped in-
dividuals will live and grow up and reproduce themselves and
the weaker will as a rule go under. The latter will be less able
to get food, to fight their enemies and pull through. So that
in each generation there is as it were a picking over of a
species, a picking out of most of the weak or unsuitable and
a preference for the strong and suitable. This process is called
Natural Selection or the Survival of the Fittest. 1
It follows, therefore, from the fact that living things grow
and breed and die, that every species, so long as the conditions
under which it lives remain the same, becomes more and more
perfectly fitted to those conditions in every generation.
But now suppose those conditions change, then the sort of
individual that used to succeed may now fail to succeed and a
sort of individual that could not get on at all under the old
conditions may now find its opportunity. These species will
change, therefore, generation by generation; the old sort of
individual that used to prosper and dominate will fail and die
out and the new sort of individual will become the rule,
until the general character of the species changes.
Suppose, for example, there is some little furry whitey-
brown animal living in a bitterly cold land which is usually
under snow. Such individuals as have the thickest, whitest
fur will be least hurt by the cold, less seen by their enemies,
and less conspicuous as they seek their prey. The fur of this
species will thicken and its whiteness increase with every gen-
eration, until there is no advantage in carrying any more fur.
Imagine now a change of climate that brings warmth into
the land, sweeps away the snows, makes white creatures glar-
ingly visible during the greater part of the year and thick
fur an encumbrance. Then every individual with a touch of
brown in its colouring and a thinner fur will find itself at
an advantage, and very white and heavy fur will be a handi-
cap. There will be a weeding out of the white in favour of
the brown in each generation. If this change of climate
come about too quickly, it may of course exterminate the
species altogether ; but if it come about .gradually, the species,
although it may have a hard time, may yet be able to change
1 It might be called with more exactness the Survival of the Fitter,
16
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
NATURAL SELECTION t1
itself and adapt itself generation by generation. This change
and adaptation is called the Modification of Species.
Perhaps this change of climate does not occur all over the
lands inhabited by the species ; maybe it occurs only on one side
of some great arm of the sea or some great mountain range
or such-like divide, and not on the other. A warm ocean cur-
rent like the Gulf Stream may be deflected, and flow so as
to warm one side of the barrier, leaving the other still cold.
Then on the cold side this species will still be going on to its
utmost possible furriness and whiteness and on the other side
it will be modifying towards brownness and a thinner coat.
At the same time there will probably be other changes going
on; a difference in the paws perhaps, because one half
of the species will be frequently scratching through snow for
its food, while the other will be scampering over brown earth.
Probably also the difference of climate will mean differences in
the sort of food available, and that may produce differences
in the teeth and the digestive organs. And there may be
changes in the sweat and oil glands of the skin due to the
changes in the fur, and these will affect the excretory organs
and all the internal chemistry of the body. And so through
all the structure of the creature. A time will come when
the two separated varieties of this formerly single species will
become so unlike each other as to be recognizably different
species. Such a splitting up of a species in the course of gen-
erations into two or more species is called the Differentiation
of Species.
And it should be clear to the reader that given these ele
mental facts of life, given growth and death and reproduction
with individual variation in a world that changes, life must
change in this way, modification and differentiation must
occur, old species must disappear, and new ones appear. We
have chosen for our instance here a familiar sort of animal,
but what is true of furry beasts in snow and ice is true of
all life, and equally true of the soft jellies and simple be-
ginnings that flowed and crawled for hundreds of millions of
years between the tidal levels and in the shallow, warm waters
of the Proterozoic seas.
The early life of the early world, when the blazing sun
rose and set in only a quarter of the time it now takes, when
the warm seas poured in great tides over the sandy and
18 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
muddy shores of the rocky lands and the air was full of
clouds and steam, must have been modified and varied and
species must have developed at a great pace. Life was prob-
ably as swift and short as the days and years ; the generations,
which natural selection picked over, followed one another in
rapid succession.
Natural selection is a slower process with man than with
any other creature. It takes twenty years or more before an
ordinary human being in western Europe grows up and re-
produces. In the case of most animals the new generation
is on trial in a year or less. With such simple and lowly be-
ings, however, as first appeared in the primordial seas, growth
and reproduction was probably a matter of a few brief hours
or even of a few brief minutes. Modification and differentia-
tion of species must accordingly have been extremely rapid,
and life had already developed a great variety of widely con-
trasted forms before it began to leave traces in the rocks.
The Record of the Rocks does not begin, therefore, with any
group of closely related forms from which all subsequent and
existing creatures are descended. It begins in the midst of
the game, with nearly every main division of the animal
kingdom already represented. Plants are already plants, and
animals animals. The curtain rises on a drama in the sea
that has already begun, and has been going on for some time.
The brachiopods are discovered already in their shells, accept-
ing and consuming much the same sort of food that oysters
and mussels do now; the great water scorpions crawl among
the seaweeds, the trilobites roll up into balls and unroll and
scuttle away. In that ancient mud and among those early
weeds there was probably as rich and abundant and active
a life of infusoria and the like as one finds in a drop of ditch-
water to-day. In the ocean waters, too, down to the utmost
downward limit to which light could filter, then as now, there
was an abundance of minute and translucent, and in many
cases phosphorescent, beings.
But though the ocean and intertidal waters already swarmed
with life, the land above the high-tide line was still, so far as
we can guess, a stony wilderness without a trace of life.
IV
THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND BY LIFE
1. Life and Water. 2. The Earliest Animals.
WHEREVER the shore line ran there was life, and
that life went on in and by and with water as its
home, its medium, and its fundamental necessity.
The first jelly-like beginnings of life must have perished
whenever they got out of the water, as jelly-fish dry up and
perish on our beaches to-day. Drying up was the fatal thing
for life in those days, against which at first it had no protec-
tion. But in a world of rain-pools and shallow seas and tides,
any variation that enabled a living thing to hold out and keep
its moisture during hours of low tide or drought met with
every encouragement in the circumstances of the time. There
must have been a constant risk of stranding. And, on the
other hand, life had to keep rather near the shore and beaches
in the shallows because it had need of air (dissolved of course
in the water) and light.
No creature can breathe, no creature can digest its food,
without water. We talk of breathing air, but what all living
things really do is to breathe oxygen dissolved in water. The
air we ourselves breathe must first be dissolved in the moisture
in our lungs; and all our food must be liquefied before it
can be assimilated. Water-living creatures which are always
under water, wave the freely exposed gills by which they
breathe in that water, and extract the air dissolved in it. But
a creature that is to be exposed for any time out of the water
must have its body and its breathing apparatus protected from
drying up. Before the seaweeds could creep up out of the
Early Palaeozoic seas into the intertidal line of the beach, they
had to develop a tougher outer skin to hold their moisture.
19
20 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Before the ancestor of the sea scorpion could survive being
left by the tide it had to develop its casing and armour. The
trilobites probably developed their tough covering and rolled
up into balls, far less as a protection against each other and
any other enemies they may have possessed, than as a precau-
tion against drying. And when presently, as we ascend the
Paleozoic rocks, the fish appear, first of all the back-boned
or vertebrated animals, it is evident that a number of them
are already adapted by the protection of their gills with gill
covers and by a sort of primitive lung swimming-bladder, to
face the same risk of temporary stranding.
Now the weeds and plants that were adapting themselves
to intertidal conditions were 'also bringing themselves into a
region of brighter light, and light is very necessary and
precious to all plants. Any development of structure that
would stiffen them and hold them up to the light, so that in-
stead of crumping and flopping when the waters receded, they
would stand up outspread, was a great advantage. And so
we find them developing fibre and support, and the beginning
of woody fibre in them. The early plants reproduced by soft
spores, or half-animal "gametes," that were released in water,
were distributed by water and could only germinate under
water. The early plants were tied, and most lowly plants to-
day are tied, by the conditions of their life cycle, to water.
But here again there was a great advantage to be got by the
development of some protection of the spores from drought
that would enable reproduction to occur without submergence.
So soon as a species could do that, it could live and reproduce
and spread above the high-water mark, bathed in light and
out of reach of the beating and distress of the waves. The
main classificatory divisions of the larger plants mark stages
in the release of plant life from the necessity of submergence
by the development of woody support and of a method of
reproduction that is more and more defiant of drying up. The
lower plants are still the prisoner attendants of water. The
lower mosses must live in damp, and even the development of
the spore of the ferns demands at certain stages extreme wet-
ness. The highest plants have carried freedom from water
so far that they can live and reproduce if only there is some
moisture in the soil below them. They have solved their
problem of living out of water altogether.
THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND 21
The essentials of that problem were worked out through
the vast aeons of the Proterozoic Age and the early Palaeozoic
Age by nature's method of experiment and trial. Then slowly,
but in great abundance, a variety of new plants began to
swarm away from the sea and over the lower lands, still keep-
ing to swamp and lagoon and water-course as they spread.
2
And after the plants came the animal life.
There is no sort of land animal in the world, as there is
no sort of land plant, whose structure is not primarily that of
a water-inhabiting being which has been adapted through
the modification and differentiation of species to life out of the
water. This adaptation is attained in various ways. In the
case of the land scorpion the gill-plates of the primitive sea
scorpion are sunken into the body so as to make the lung-
books secure from rapid evaporation. The gills of crustaceans,
such as the crabs which run about in the air, are protected
by the gill-cover extensions of the back shell or carapace. The
ancestors of the insects developed a system of air pouches
and air tubes, the tracheal tubes, which carry the air all over
the body before it is dissolved. In the case of the vertebrated
land animals, the gills of the ancestral fish were first supple-
mented and then replaced by a bag-like growth from the throat,
the primitive lung swimming-bladder. To this day there sur-
vive certain mudfish which enable us to understand very clearly
the method by which the vertebrated land animals worked
their way out of the water. These creatures (e.g. the African
lung fish) are found in tropical regions in which there is a
rainy full season and a dry season, during which the rivers
become mere ditches of baked mud. During the rainy season
these fish swim about and breathe by gills like any other, fish.
As the waters of the river evaporate, these fish bury them-
selves in the mud, their gills go out of action, and the creature
keeps itself alive until the waters return by swallowing air,
which passes into its swimming-bladder. The Australian lung
fish, when it is caught by the drying up of the river in stagnant
pools, and the water has become deaerated and foul, rises to
the surface and gulps air. A newt in a pond does exactly
the same thing. These creatures still remain at the transition
22
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
stage, the stage at which the ancestors of the higher vertebrated
animals were released from their restriction to an under-water
life.
The amphibia (frogs, newts, tritons, etc.) still show in their
life history all the stages in the process of this liberation.
They are still dependent on water for their reproduction ; their
eggs must be laid in sunlit water, and there they must develop.
The young tadpole has branching external gills that wave in
the water; then a
gill cover grows
back over them and
forms a gill cham-
ber. Then as the
creature's legs ap-
pear and its tail is
absorbed, it begins
to use its lungs, and
its gills dwindle
and vanish. The
adult frog can live all the rest of its days in the air, but
it can be drowned if it is kept steadfastly below water. When
we come to the reptile, however, we find an egg which is pro-
tected from evaporation by a tough egg case, and this egg
produces young which breathe by lungs from the very moment
of hatching. The reptile is on all fours with the seeding plant
in its freedom from the necessity to pass any stage of its life
cycle in water.
The later Palaeozoic Rocks of the northern hemisphere give
us the materials for a series of pictures of this slow spreading
of life over the land. Geographically, all round the northern
half of the world it was an age of lagoons and shallow seas
very favourable to this invasion. The new plants, now that
they had acquired the power to live this new aerial life, de-
veloped with an extraordinary richness and variety.
There were as yet no true flowering plants, 1 no grasses nor
trees that shed their leaves in winter ; 2 the first "flora" con-
sisted of great tree ferns, gigantic equisetums, cycad ferns,
and kindred vegetation. Many of these plants took the form
of huge-stemmed trees, of which great multitudes of trunks
survive fossilized to this day. Some of these trees were over
1 Phanerogams. a Deciduous trees.
THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND
23
a hundred feet high, of orders and classes now vanished from
the world. They stood with their stems in the water, in which
no doubt there was a thick tangle of soft mosses and green
slime and fungoid growths that left few plain vestiges behind
them. The abundant remains of these first swamp forests
constitute the main coal measures of the world to-day.
Amidst this luxuriant primitive vegetation crawled ,and
glided and flew the first insects. They were rigid-winged, four-
winged creatures, often very big, some of them having wings
?4 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
measuring a foot in length. There were numerous dragon flies
one found in the Belgian coal-measures had a wing span
of twenty-nine inches! There were also a great variety of
flying cockroaches. Scorpions abounded, and a number of
early spiders, which, however, had no spinnerets for web mak-
ing. Land snails appeared. So, too, did the first-known step
of our own ancestry upon land, the amphibia. As we ascend
the higher levels of the Later Pabeozoic record, we find the
process of air adaptation has gone as far as the appearance of
true reptiles amidst the abundant and various amphibia.
The land life of the Upper Palaeozoic Age was the life of
a green swamp forest without flowers or birds or the noises
cf modern insects. There were no big land beasts at all ; wal-
lowing amphibia and primitive reptiles were the very highest
creatures that life had so far produced. Whatever land lay
away from the water or high above the water was still alto-
gether barren and lifeless. But steadfastly, generation by
generation, life was creeping away from the shallow sea-water
of its beginning.
THE AGE OF EEPTILES
1. The Age of Lowland Life. 2. Flying Dragons.
3. The First Birds. 4. An age of Hardship and
Death. 5. The first appearance of Fur and Feathers.
WE know that for hundreds of thousands of years the
wetness and warmth, the shallow lagoon conditions
that made possible the vast accumulations of vegetable
matter which, compressed and mummified, 1 are now coal, pre-
vailed over most of the world. There were some cold intervals,
it is true; but they did not last long enough to destroy the
growths. Then that long age of luxuriant low-grade vegetation
drew to its end, and for a time life on the earth seems to have
undergone a period of world-wide bleakness.
We cannot discuss fully here the changes that have gone
on and are going on in the climate of the earth. A great variety
of causes, astronomical movements, changes in the sun and
changes upon and within the earth, combine to produce a cease-
less fluctuation of the 1 conditions under which life exists. As
these conditions change, life, too, must change or perish.
When the story resumes again after this arrest at the end
of the Paleozoic period we find life entering upon a fresh
phase of richness and expansion. Vegetation has made great
advances in the art of living out of water. While the Paleozoic
plants of the coal measures probably grew with swamp water
flowing over their roots, the Mesozoic flora from its very out-
set included palm-like cycads and low-grown conifers that were
distinctly land plants growing on soil above the water level.
1 Dr. Marie Stopes, Monograph on the Constitution of Coal.
25
26 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
The lower levels of the Mesozoic land were no doubt covered
by great fern brakes and shrubby bush and a kind of jungle
growth of trees. But there existed as yet no grass, no small
flowering plants, no turf nor greensward. Probably the Mes-
ozoic was not an age of very brightly coloured vegetation. It
must have had a flora green in the wet season and brown and
purple in the dry. There were no gay flowers, no bright autumn
tints before the fall of the leaf, because there was as yet no
fall of the leaf. And beyond the lower levels the world was
still barren, still unclothed, still exposed without any mitigation
to the wear and tear of the wind and rain.
When one speaks of conifers in the Mesozoic the reader
must not think of the pines and firs that clothe the high moun-
tain slopes of our time. He must think of low-growing ever-
greens. The mountains were still as bare and lifeless as ever.
The only colour effects among the mountains were the colour
effects of naked rock, such colours as make the landscape of
Colorado so marvellous to-day.
Amidst this spreading vegetation of the lower plains the
reptiles were increasing mightily in multitude and variety.
They were now in many cases absolutely land animals. There
are numerous anatomical points of distinction between a reptile
and an amphibian; they held good between such reptiles and
amphibians as prevailed in the carboniferous time of the Upper
Paleozoic; but the fundamental difference between reptiles
and amphibia which matters in this history is that the am-
phibian must go back to the water to lay its eggs, and that in
the early stages of its life it must live in and under water.
The reptile, on the other hand, has cut out all the tadpole stages
from its life cycle, or, to be more exact, its tadpole stages are
got through before the young leave the egg case. The reptile
has come out of the water altogether. Some had gone back to
it again, just as the hippopotamus and the otter among mam-
mals have gone back, but that is a further extension of the
story to which we cannot give much attention in this Outline.
In the Palaeozoic period, as we have said, life had not spread
beyond the swampy river valleys and the borders of sea lagoons
and the like; but in the Mesozoic, life was growing ever more
accustomed to the thinner medium of the air, was sweeping
boldly up over the plains and towards the hill-sides. It is well
for the student of human history and the human future to
THE AGE OF REPTILES
28 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
note that. If a disembodied intelligence with no knowledge
of the future had come to earth and studied life during the early
Paleozoic age, he might very reasonably have concluded that
life was absolutely confined to the water, and that it could never
spread over the land. It found a way. In the Later Palae-
ozoic Period that visitant might have been equally sure that
life could not go beyond the edge of a swamp. The Mesozoic
Period would still have found him setting bounds to life far
more limited than the bounds that are set to-day. And so
to-day, though we mark how life and man are still limited to
five miles of air and a depth of perhaps a mile or so of sea,
we must not conclude from that present limitation that life,
through man, may not presently spread out and up and down
to a range of living as yet inconceivable.
The earliest known reptiles were beasts with great bellies
and not very powerful legs, very like their kindred amphibia,
wallowing as the crocodile wallows to this day; but in the
Mesozoic they soon began to stand up and go stoutly on all
fours, and several great sections of them began to balance them-
selves on tail and hind-legs, rather as the kangaroos do now,
in order to release the fore limbs for grasping food. The bones
of one notable division of reptiles which retained a quadrupedal
habit, a division of which many remains have been found in
South African and Russian Early Mesozoic deposits, display
a number of characters which approach those of the mammalian
skeleton, and because of this resemblance to the mammals
(beasts) this division is called the Theriomorpha (beastlike).
Another division was the crocodile branch, and another devel-
oped towards the tortoises and turtles. The Plesiosaurs and
Ichthyosaurs were two groups which have left no living repre-
sentatives; they were huge reptiles returning to a whale-like
life in the sea. Pliosaurus, one of the largest plesiosaurs,
measured thirty feet from snout to tail tip of which half was
neck. The Mosasaurs were a third group of great porpoise-like
marine lizards. But the largest and most diversified group of
these Mesozoic reptiles was the group we have spoken of as
kangaroo-like, the Dinosaurs, many of which attained enor-
mous proportions. In bigness these greater Dinosaurs have
never been exceeded, although the sea can still show in the
whales creatures as great. Some of these, and the largest
among them, were herbivorous animals; they browsed on the
THE AGE OF REPTILES 29
rushy vegetation and among the ferns and bushes, or they stood
up and grasped trees with their fore-legs while they devoured
the foliage. Among the browsers, for example, were the
Diplodocus camegii, which measured eighty-four feet in length,
and the Atlantosaurus. The Giganiosawrus, disinterred by a
German expedition in 1912 from rocks in East Africa, was
still more colossal. It measured well over a hundred feet!
These greater monsters had legs, and they are usually figured
as standing up on them ; but it is very doubtful if they could
have supported their weight in this way, out of water. Buoyed
up by water or mud, they may have got along. Another note-
worthy type we have figured is the Triceratops. There were
also a number of great flesh-eaters who preyed upon these
herbivores. Of these, Tyrannosaurus seems almost the last
word in "frightfulness" among living things. Some species of
this genus measured forty feet from snout to tail. Appar-
ently it carried this vast body kangaroo fashion on its tail and
hindlegs. Probably it reared itself up. Some authorities
even suppose that it leapt through the air. If so, it pos-
sessed muscles of a quite miraculous quality. A leaping
elephant would be a far less astounding idea. Much more
probably it waded half submerged in pursuit of the herbivorous
river saurians.
2
One special development of the dinosaurian type of repitile
was a light, hopping, climbing group of creatures which de-
veloped a bat-like web between the fifth finger and the side
of the body, which was used in gliding from tree to tree after
the fashion of the flying squirrels. These bat-lizards were the
Pterodactyls. They are often described as flying reptiles, and
pictures are drawn of Mesozoic scenery in which they are
seen soaring and swooping about. But their breastbone has
no keel such as the breastbone of a bird has for the attachment
of muscles strong enough for long sustained flying. They
must have flitted about like bats. They must have had a
grotesque resemblance to heraldic dragons, and they played the
part of bat-like birds in the Mesozoic jungles. But bird-like
though they were, they were not birds nor the ancestors of
birds. The structure of their wings was altogether different
from that of birds. The structure of their wings was that of
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
a hand with one long finger and a web; the wing of a bird
is like an arm with feathers projecting from its hind edge.
And these Pterodactyls had no feathers.
.
Six -foot? man.
3
Far less prevalent at this time were certain other truly bird-
like creatures, of which the earlier sorts also hopped and
THE AGE OF REPTILES
SI
clambered and the later sorts skimmed and flew. These were
at first by all the standards of classification Reptiles. They
developed into true birds as they developed wings and as their
Wing of Pterodactyl
tihowizur elongated fifth, -finger
reptilian scales became long and complicated, fronds rather
than scales, and so at last, by much spreading and splitting,
feathers. Feathers are the distinctive covering of birds, and
they give a power of resisting heat and cold far greater than
32 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
that of any other integumentary covering except perhaps the
thickest fur. At a very early stage this novel covering of
feathers, this new heat-proof contrivance that life had chanced
upon, enabled many species of birds to invade a province for
which the pterodactyl was ill equipped. They took to sea fish-
ing if indeed they did not begin with it and spread to the
north and south polewards beyond the temperature limits set
to the true reptiles. The earliest birds seem to have been car-
nivorous divers and water birds. To this day some of the
most primitive bird forms are found among the sea birds of
the Arctic and Antarctic seas, and it is among these sea biids
that zoologists still find lingering traces of teeth ? which have
otherwise vanished completely from the beak of the bird.
The earliest known bird (the Archoeopteryx) had no beak;
it had a row of teeth in a jaw like a reptile's. It had three
claws at the forward corner of its wing. Its tail, too, was pe-
culiar. All modern birds liavt their tail feathers set in a
short compact bony rump; the Arcliceopieryx had a long bony
tail with a row of feathers along each side.
4
This great period of Mesozoic life, this second volume of
the book of life, is indeed an amazing story of reptilian life
proliferating and developing. But the most striking thing of
all the story remains to be told. Right up to the latest Meso-
zoic Rocks we find all these reptilian orders we have enumerated
still flourishing unchallenged. There is no hint of an enemy
or competitor to them in the relics we find of their world.
Then the record is broken. We do not know how long a time
the break represents; many pages may be missing here, pages
that may represent some great cataclysmal climatic change.
When next we find abundant traces of the land plants and the
land animals of the earth, this great multitude of reptile species
had gone. For the most part they have left no descendants.
They have been "wiped out." The pterodactyls have gone ab-
solutely, of the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs none is alive; the
mosasaurs have gone; of the lizards a few remain, the moni-
tors of the Dutch East Indies are the largest ; all the multitude
and diversity of the dinosaurs have vanished. Only the croco-
diles and the turtles and tortoises carry on in any quantity into
THE AGE OF REPTILES S3
Cainozoic times. The place of all these types in the picture that
the Cainozoic fossils presently unfold to us is taken by other
animals not closely related to the Mesozoic reptiles and cer-
tainly not descended from any of their ruling types. A new
kind of life is in possession of the world.
This apparently abrupt ending up of the reptiles is, beyond
all question, the most striking revolution in the whole history
of the earth before the coming of mankind. It is probably
connected with the close of a vast period of equable warm
conditions and the onset of a new austerer age, in which the
winters were bitterer and the summers brief but hot. The
Mesozoic life, animal and vegetable alike, was adapted to warm
conditions and capable of little resistance to cold. The new
life, on the other hand, was before all things capable 'of re-
sisting great changes of temperature.
Whatever it was that led to the extinction of the Mesozoic
reptiles, it was probably some very far-reaching change indeed,
for the life of the seas did at the same time undergo a similar
catastrophic alteration. The crescendo and ending of the
Reptiles on land was paralleled by the crescendo and ending
of the Ammonites, a division of creatures like squids with coiled
shells which swarmed in those ancient seas. All though the
rocky record of this Mesozoic period there is a vast multitude
and variety of these coiled shells ; there are hundreds of species,
and towards the end of the Mesozoic period they increased in
diversity and produced exaggerated types. When the record
resumes these, too, have gone. So far as the reptiles are con-
cerned, people may perhaps be inclined to argue that they were
exterminated because the Mammals that replaced them, com-
peted with them, and were more fitted to survive; but nothing
of the sort can be true of the Ammonites, because to this day
their place has not been taken. Simply they are gone. Un-
known conditions made it possible for them to live in the
Mesozoic seas, and then some unknown change made life im-
possible for them. !No genus of Ammonite survives to-day
of all that vast variety, but there still exists one isolated genus
very closely related to the Ammonites, the Pearly Nautilus. It
is found, it is to be noted, in the warm waters of the Indian
and Pacific oceans.
And as for the Mammals competing with and ousting the
less fit reptiles, a struggle of which people talk at times, there
34, THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
is not a scrap of evidence of any such direct competition. To
judge by the Record of the Rocks as we know it to-day, there
is much more reason for believing that first the reptiles in
some inexplicable way perished, and then that later on, after a
very hard time for all life upon the earth, the mammals, as
conditions became more genial again, developed and spread
tc fill the vacant world.
5
Were there mammals in the Mesozoic period?
This is a question not yet to be answered precisely. Pa-
tiently and steadily the geologists gather fresh evidence and
reason out completer conclusions. At any time some new
deposit may reveal fossils that will illuminate this question.
Certainly either mammals, or the ancestors of the mammals,
must have lived throughout the Mesozoic period. In the very
opening chapter of the Mesozoic volume of the Record there
were those Theriomorphous Reptiles to which we have already
alluded, and in the later Mesozoic a number of small jaw-
bones are found, entirely mammalian in character. But there
is not a scrap, not a bone, to suggest that there lived any
Mesozoic Mammal which could look a dinosaur in the face.
The Mesozoic mammals or mammal-like reptiles for we do not
know clearly which they were seem to have been all obscure
little beasts of the size of mice and rats, more like a down-
trodden order of reptiles than a distinct class; probably they
still laid eggs and were developing only slowly their distinctive
covering of hair. They lived away from big waters, and per-
haps in the desolate uplands, as marmots do now ; probably they
lived there beyond the pursuit of the carnivorous dinosaurs.
Some perhaps went on all fours, some chiefly went on their
hind-legs and clambered with their fore limbs. They became
fossils only so occasionally that chance has not yet revealed
a single complete skeleton in the whole vast record of the
Mesozoic rocks by which to check these guesses.
These little Theriomorphs, these ancestral mammals, de-
veloped hair. Hairs, like feathers, are long and elaborately
specialized scales. Hair is perhaps the clue to the salvation
of the early mammals. Leading lives upon the margin of ex-
isterice, away from the marshes and the warmth, they developed
THE AGE OF REPTILES
35
an outer covering only second in its warmth-holding (or heat-
resisting) powers to the down and feathers of the Arctic sea-
birds. And so they held out through the age of hardship be-
tween the Mesozoic and Cainozoic ages, to which most of the
true reptiles succumbed.
All the main characteristics of this flora and sea and land
fauna that came to an end with the end of the Mesozoic age
were such as were adapted to an equable climate and to shallow
86 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
and swampy regions. But in the case of their Cainozoic suc-
cessors, both hair and feathers gave a power of resistance to
variable temperatures such as no reptile possessed, and with it
they gave a range far greater than any animal had hitherto
attained.
The range of life of the Lower Palaeozoic Period was con-
fined to warm water.
The range of life of the Upper Paleozoic Period was con-
fined to warm water or to warm swamps and wet ground.
The range of life of the Mesozoic Period as we know it
was confined to water and fairly low-lying valley regions under
equable conditions.
Meanwhile in each of these periods there were types in-
voluntarily extending the range of life beyond the limits pre-
vailing in that period; and when ages of extreme conditions
prevailed, it was these marginal types which survived to in-
herit the depopulated world.
That perhaps is the most general statement we can make
about the story of the geological record ; it is a story of widen-
ing range. Classes, genera, and species of animals appear and
disappear, but the range widens. It widens always. Life
has never had so great a range as it has to-day. Life to-day,
in the form of man, goes higher in the air than it has ever
done before; man's geographical range is from pole to pole,
he goes under the water in submarines, he sounds the cold,
lifeless darkness of the deepest seas, he burrows into virgin
levels of the rocks, and in thought and knowledge he pierces
to the centre of the earth and reaches out to the uttermost star.
Yet in all the relics of the Mesozoic time we find no certain
memorials of his ancestry. His ancestors, like the ancestors
of all the kindred mammals, must have been creatures so rare,
so obscure, and so remote that they have left scarcely a trace
amidst the abundant vestiges of the monsters that wallowed
rejoicing in the steamy air and lush vegetation of the Meso-
zoic lagoons, or crawled or hopped or fluttered over the great
river plains of that time.
VI
THE AGE OF MAMMALS
1. A New Age of Life. 2. Tradition Comes into the
World. 3. An Age of Brain Growth. 4. The World
Grows Hard Again.
THE third great division of the geological record, the
Cainozoic, opens with a world already physically very
like the world we live in to-day. Probably the day
was at first still perceptibly shorter, but the scenery had be-
come very modern in its character. Climate was, of course,
undergoing, age by age, its incessant and irregular variations ;
lands that are temperate to-day have passed, since the Cainozoic
age began, through phases of great warmth, intense cold, and
extreme dryness; but the landscape, if it altered, altered to
nothing that cannot still be paralleled to-day in some part of
the world or other. In the place of the cycads, sequoias, and
strange conifers of the Mesozoic, the plant names that now
appear in the lists of fossils include birch, beech, holly, tulip
trees, ivy, sweet gum, bread-fruit trees. Flowers had developed
concurrently with bees and butterflies. Palms were now very
important. Such plants had already been in evidence in the
later levels of the (American Cretaceous) Mesozoic, but now
they dominated the scene altogether. Grass was becoming a
great fact in the world. Certain grasses, too, had appeared in
the later Mesozoic, but only with the Cainozoic period came
grass plains and turf spreading wide over a world that was
once barren stone.
The period opened with a long phase of considerable warmth ;
then the world cooled. And in the opening of this third part
of the record, this Cainozoic period, a gigantic crumpling of
37
$8 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the earth's crust and an upheaval of mountain ranges was in
progress. The Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, are all Cain-
ozoic mountain ranges; the background of an early Cainozoic
scene to be typical should display an active volcano or so. It
must have been an age of great earthquakes.
Geologists make certain main divisions of the Cainozoic
period, and it will be convenient to name them here and to
indicate their climate. First comes the Eocene (dawn of re-
cent life), an age of exceptional warmth in the world's his-
tory, subdivided into an older and newer Eocene; then the
Oligocene (but little of recent life), in which the climate was
still equable. The Miocene (with living species still in a
minority) was the great age of mountain building, and the
general temperature was falling. In the Pliocene (more living
than extinct species), climate was very much as its present
phase; but with the Pleistocene (a great majority of living
species) there set in a long period of extreme conditions it
was the Great Ice Age. Glaciers spread from the poles towards
the equator, until England to the Thames was covered in ice.
Thereafter to our own time came a period of partial recovery.
We may be moving now towards a warmer phase. Half a mil-
lion years hence this may be a much sunnier and pleasanter
world to live in than it is to-day.
2
In the forests and following the grass over the Eocene plains
there appeared for the first time a variety and abundance of
mammals. Before we proceed to any description of these mam-
mals, it may be well to note in general terms what a mammal is.
From the appearance of the vertebrated animals in the Lower
Palaeozoic Age, when the fish first swarmed out into the sea,
there has been a steady progressive development of vertebrated
creatures. A fish is a vertebrated animal that breathes by
gills and can live only in water. An amphibian may be de-
scribed as a fish that has added to its gill-breathing the power
of breathing air with its swimming-bladder in adult life, and
that has also developed limbs with five toes to them in place
of the fins of a fish. A tadpole is for a time a fish, it becomes
a land creature as it develops. A reptile is a further stage in
this detachment from water; it is an amphibian that is no
THE AGE OF MAMMALS 39
longer amphibious; it passes through its tadpole stage its fish
stage that is in an egg. From the beginning it must breathe
in air; it can never breathe under water as a tadpole can do.
Stoc-joot mazi
drawn to
S3axi& scale
Now a modern mammal is really a sort of reptile that has de-
veloped a peculiarly effective protective covering, hair; and
that also retains its eggs in the body until they hatch so that
40 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
it brings forth living young (viviparous), and even after
birth it cares for them and feeds them by its mammae for a
longer or shorter period. Some reptiles, some vipers for ex-
ample, are viviparous, but none stand by their young as the real
mammals do. Both the birds and the mammals, which escaped
whatever destructive forces made an end to the Mesozoic rep-
tiles, and which survived to dominate the Cainozoic world,
have these two things in common ; first, a far more effective
protection against changes of temperature than any other
variation of the reptile type ever produced, and, secondly, a
peculiar care for their eggs, the bird by incubation and the
mammal by retention, and a disposition to look after the young
for a certain period after hatching or birth. There is by com-
parison the greatest carelessness about offspring in the reptile.
Hair was evidently the earliest distinction of the mammals
from the rest of the reptiles. It is doubtful if the particular
Theriodont reptiles who were developing hair in the early
Mesozoic were viviparous. Two mammals survive to this day
which not only do not suckle their young, 1 but which lay eggs,
the OrnitJiorhynchus and the Echidna, and in the Eocene there
were a number of allied forms. They are the survivors of
what was probably a much larger number and variety of small
egg-laying hairy creatures, hairy reptiles, hoppers, climbers,
and runners, which included the Mesozoic ancestors of all ex-
isting mammals up to and including man.
Now we may put the essential facts about mammalian re-
production in another way. The mammal is a family animal.
And the family habit involved the possibility of a new sort of
continuity of experience in the world. Compare the com-
pletely closed-in life of an individual lizard with the life of
even a quite lowly mammal of almost any kind. The former
has no mental continuity with anything beyond itself; it is a
little self-contained globe of experience that serves its purpose
and ends; but the latter "picks up" from its mother, and
"hands on" to its offspring. All the mammals, except for the
two genera we have named, had already before the lower Eocene
age arrived at this stage of pre-adult dependence and imitation.
ir rhey secrete a nutritive fluid on which the young feeds from glands
scattered over the skin. But the glands are not gathered together into
mammae with nipples for suckling. The stuff oozes out, the mother lies
on her back, and the young browse upon her moist skin.
THE AGE OF MAMMALS
41
They were all more or less imitative in youth and capable of a
certain modicum of education; they all, as a part of their de-
Six- foot* man
"bo
same scale,
(lotxa- j
velopment, received a certain amount of care and example and
even direction from their mother. This is as true of the hyaena
and rhinoceros as it is of the dog or man; the difference of
42 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
educability is enormous, but the fact of protection and educa-
bility in the young stage is undeniable. So far as the verte-
brated animals go, these new mammals, with their viviparous,
young-protecting disposition, and these new birds, with their
incubating, young-protecting disposition, introduce at the open-
ing of the Cainozoic period a fresh thing into the expanding
story of life, namely, social association, the addition to hard
and inflexible instinct of tradition, and the nervous organisa-
tion necessary to receive tradition.
All the innovations that come into the history of life begin
very humbly. The supply of blood-vessels in the swimming-
bladder of the mudfish in the lower Palaeozoic torrent-river,
that enabled it to pull through a season of drought, would
have seemed at that time to that bodiless visitant to our planet
we have already imagined, a very unimportant side fact in
that ancient world of great sharks and plated fishes, sea
scorpions, and coral reefs and seaweed; but it opened the nar-
row way by which the land vertebrates arose to predominance.
The mudfish would have seemed then a poor refugee from the
too crowded and aggressive life of the sea. But once lungs
were launched into the world, every line of descent that had
lungs went on improving them. So, too, in the upper Palaeozoic,
the fact that some of the Amphibia were losing their "amphibi-
ousness" by a retardation of hatching of their eggs, would have
appeared a mere response to the distressful dangers that threat-
ened the young tadpole. Yet that prepared the conquest of
the dry land for the triumphant multitude of the Mesozoic
reptiles. It opened a new direction towards a free and vigor-
ous land-life along which all the reptilian animals moved. And
this viviparous, young-tending training that the ancestral mam-
malia underwent during that age of inferiority and hardship
for them, set going in the world a new continuity of percep-
tion, of which even man to-day only begins to appreciate the
significance.
3
A number of types of mammal already appear in the Eocene.
Some are differentiating in one direction, and some in another,
some are perfecting themselves as herbivorous quadrupeds,
some leap and climb among the trees, some turn back to the
water to swim, but all types are unconsciously exploiting and
THE AGE OF MAMMALS 43
developing the brain which is the instrument of this new power
of acquisition and educability. In the Eocene rocks are found
small early predecessors of the horse (Eohippus), tiny camels,
pigs, early tapirs, early hedgehogs, monkeys and lemurs,
opossums and carnivores. Now, all these were more or less
ancestral to living forms, and all have brains relatively much
smaller than their living representatives. There is, for in-
stance, an early rhinoceros-like beast, Titanotherium, with a
brain not one tenth the size of that of the existing rhinoceros.
The latter is by no means a perfect type of the attentive and
submissive student, but even so it is ten times more observant
and teachable than its predecessor. This sort of thing is true
of all the orders and families that survive until to-day. All
the Cainozoic mammals were doing this one thing in common
under the urgency of a common necessity; they were all grow-
ing brain. It was a parallel advance. In the same order or
family to-day, the brain is usually from six to ten times what
it was in the Eocene ancestor.
The Eocene period displayed a series of herbivorous brutes
of which no representative survives to-day. Such were the
Uintatheres and the Titanotheres. They were ousted by more
specialized graminivorous forms as grass spread over the world.
In pursuit of such beasts came great swarms of primitive dogs
some as big as bears, and the first cats, one in particular (Smi~
lodon), a small fierce-looking creature with big knife-like
canines, the first sabre-toothed tiger, which was to develop into
greater things. American deposits in the Miocene display a
great variety of camels, giraffe camels with long necks, gazelle
camels, llamas, and true camels. North America, throughout
most of the Cainozoic period, appears to have been in open and
easy continuation with Asia, and when at last the glaciers of
the Great Ice Age, and then the Bering Strait, came to separate
the two great continental regions, the last camels were left in the
old world and the llamas in the new.
In the Eocene the first ancestors of the elephants appear in
northern Africa as snouted creatures ; the elephant's trunk
dawned on the world in the Miocene.
One group of creatures is of peculiar interest in a history that
is mainly to be the story of mankind. We find fossils in the
Eocene of monkeys and lemurs, but of one particular creature
we have as yet not a single bone. It must have been a creature
44 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
half ape, half monkey; it clamhered about the trees and ran,
and probably ran well, on its hind-legs upon the ground. It
was small-brained by our present standards, but it had clever
hands with which it handled fruits and beat nuts upon the
rocks and caught up sticks and stones to smite its fellows.
Spite of the lack of material evidence, tho facts of biological
science almost compel us to believe that such a creature existed,
the common ancestor of the anthropoid apes and the two species
of men we will describe in the next chapter.
4
Through millions of simian generations the spinning world
circled about the sun; slowly its orbit, which may have been
nearly circular during the equable days of the early Eocene,
was drawn by the attraction of the circling outer planets into
a more elliptical form. Its axis of rotation, which had always
heeled over to the plane of its orbit, as the mast of a yacht under
sail heels over to the level of the water, heeled over by imper-
ceptible degrees a little more and a little more. And each year
its summer point shifted a little further from perihelion round
its path. These were small changes to happen to a one-inch ball,
circling at a distance of 330 yards from a flaming sun nine feet
across, in the course of a few million years. They were changes
an immortal astronomer in Neptune, watching the earth from
age to age, would have found almost imperceptible. But from
the point of view of the surviving mammalian life of the
Miocene, they mattered profoundly. Age by age the winters
grew on the whole colder and harder and a few hours longer
relatively to the summers in a thousand years; age by age
the summers grew briefer. On an average the winter snow
lay a little later in the spring in each century, and the glaciers
in the northern mountains gained an inch this year, receded
half an inch next, came on again a few inches. . . .
The Record of the Rocks tells of the increasing chill. The
Pliocene was a temperate time, and many of the warmth-loving
plants and animals had gone. Then, rather less deliberately,
some feet or some inches every year, the ice came on.
An arctic fauna, musk ox, woolly mammoth, woolly rhino-
ceros, lemming, ushers in the Pleistocene. Over North Amer-
ica, and Europe and Asia alike, the ice advanced. For thou-
THE AGE OF MAMMALS 45
sands of years it advanced, and then for thousands of years it
receded, to advance again. Europe down to the Baltic shores,
Britain down to the Thames, North America down to New
England, and more centrally as far south as Ohio, lay for ages
under the glaciers. Enormous volumes of water were with-
drawn from the ocean and locked up in those stupendous ice
caps so as to cause a world-wide change in the relative levels
of land and sea. Vast areas were exposed that are now again
sea bottom.
The world to-day is still coming slowly out of the last of four
great waves of cold. It is not growing warmer steadily. There
have been fluctuations. Remains of bog oaks, for example,
which grew two or three thousand years ago, are found in Scot-
land at latitudes in which not even a stunted oak will grow at
the present time. And it is amidst this crescendo and diminu-
endo of frost and snow that we first recognize forms that are
like the forms of men. The Age of Mammals culminated in ice
and hardship and man.
VII
THE ANCESTRY OF MAN
1. Man Descended from a Walking Ape. 2. First Traces
of Manlike Creatures. 3. The Heidelberg Sub-Man. 4.
The Piltdown Sub-Man. 5. The Riddle of the Piltdown
Remains.
THE origin of man is still very obscure. It is commonly
asserted that he is "descended" from some man-like ape
such as the chimpanzee, the orang-utang, or the gorilla,
but that of course is as reasonable as saying that I am "de-
scended" from some Hottentot or Esquimau as young or
younger than myself. Others, alive to this objection, say that
man is descended from the common ancestor of the chimpanzee,
the orang-utang, and the gorilla. Some "anthropologists" have
even indulged in a speculation whether mankind may not have
a double or treble origin ; the negro being descended from a
gorilla-like ancestor, the Chinese from a chimpanzee-like an-
cestor, and so on. These are very fanciful ideas, to be men-
tioned only to be dismissed. It was formerly assumed that the
human ancestor was "probably arboreal," but the current idea
among those who are qualified to form an opinion seems to be
that he was a "ground ape," and that the existing apes have
developed in the arboreal direction.
Of course if one puts the skeleton of a man and the skeleton
of a gorilla side by side, their general resemblance is so great
that it is easy to jump to the conclusion that the former is
derived from such a type as the latter by a process of brain
growth and general refinement. But if one examines closely
into one or two differences, the gap widens. Particular stress
has recently been laid upon the tread of the foot. Man walks
46
THE ANCESTRY OF MAN
I
I
.SHs
Mil
n
d
I
B s? e
fiJI*
w -T" . =:
EH S -5
^ ^^ g^
S'3
g ID ^ 3
< cs OQ >i
I B-S^
Q rt u 2
g &o 2
I^il
~ CO CO Si
oo
4-8
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
on his toe and his heel ; his great toe is his chief lever in walk-
ing, as the reader may see for himself if he examines his own
footprints on the bathroom floor and notes where the pressure
with e&rUcst:
[W&rc
Mtx^kOy
Sakr<r- tooth.
Ttyr
falls as the footprints become fainter. His great toe is the
king of his toes.
Among all the apes and monkeys, the only group that have
THE ANCESTRY OF MAN
49
their great toes developed on anything like the same fashion
as man are some of the lemurs. The baboon walks on a flat foot
and all his toes, using his middle toe as his chief throw-off,
much as the bear does. And the three great apes all walk on
the outer side of the foot in a very different manner from the
walking of man.
The great apes are forest dwellers; their walking even now
is incidental ; they
are at their happiest
among trees. They
have very distinctive
methods of climb-
ing; they swing by
the arms much more
than the monkeys do,
and do not, like the
latter, take off with
a spring from the
feet. They have a
specially developed
climbing style of
their own. But man
walks so well and
runs so swiftly as to
suggest a very long
ancestry upon the
POSSIBLE
APPEARANCE OF THE SUB-MAW
PITHECANTHROPUS.
The face, jaws, and teeth are mere guess-work
(see text). The creature may have been much
less human-looking than this.
ground. Also, he
does not climb well
now; he climbs with
caution and hesita-
tion. His ancestors may have been running creatures for
4ong ages. Moreover, it is to be noted that he does riot
swim naturally; he has to learn to swim, and that seems to
point to a long-standing separation from rivers and lakes and
the sea. Almost certainly that ancestor was a smaller and
slighter creature than its human descendants. Conceivably the
human ancestor at the opening of the Cainozoic period was a
running ape living chiefly on the ground, hiding among rocks
rather than .trees. It could still climb trees well and hold things
between its great toe and its second toe (as the Japanese can
to this day), but it was already coming down to the ground
50 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
again from a still remoter, a Mesozoic arboreal ancestry. It is
quite understandable that such a creature would very rarely die
in water in such circumstances as to leave bones to become
fossilized.
It must always be borne in mind that among its many other
imperfections the Geological Record necessarily contains abun-
dant traces only of water or marsh creatures or of creatures
easily and frequently drowned. The same reasons that make
any traces of the ancestors of the mammals rare and relatively
unprocurable in the Mesozoic rocks, probably make the traces
of possible human ancestors rare and relatively unprocurable
in the Cainozoic rocks. Such knowledge as we have of the
earliest men, for example, is almost entirely got from a few
caves, into which they went and in which they left their traces.
Until the hard Pleistocene times they lived and died in the
open, and their bodies were consumed or decayed altogether.
But it is well to bear in mind also that the record of the rocks
has still to be thoroughly examined. It has been studied only
for a few generations, and by only a few men in each genera-
tion. Most men have been too busy making war, making profits
out of their neighbours, toiling at work that machinery could
do for them in a tenth of the time, or simply playing about,
to give any attention to these more interesting things. There
may be, there probably are, thousands of deposits still untouched
containing countless fragments and vestiges of man and his
progenitors. In Asia particularly, in India or the East Indies,
there may be hidden the most illuminating clues. What we
know to-day of early men is the merest scrap of what will
presently be known.
The apes and monkeys already appear to have been differen-
tiated at the beginning of the Cainozoic Age, and there are a
number of Oligocene and Miocene apes whose relations to one
another and to the human line have still to be made out. Among
these we may mention Dryopithecus of the Miocene Age, with
a very human-looking jaw. In the Siwalik Hills of northern
India remains of some very interesting apes have been found,
of which Sivapithecus and Palceopithecus were possibly related
closely to the human ancestor. Possibly these animals already
used implements. Charles Darwin represents baboons as open-
ing nuts by breaking them with stones, using stakes to prise
up rocks in the hunt for insects, and striking blows with sticks
THE ANCESTRY OF MAN 51
and stones. The chimpanzee makes itself a sort of tree hut
by intertwining branches. Stones apparently chipped for use
have been found in strata of Oligocene Age at Boncelles in
Belgium. Possibly the implement-using disposition was al-
ready present in the Mesozoic ancestry from which we are
descended.
2
Among the earliest evidences of some creature, either human
or at least more manlike than any living ape upon earth, are a
number of flints and stones very roughly chipped and shaped
so as to be held in the hand. These were probably used as hand-
axes. These early implements ("Eoliths") are often so crude
and simple that there was for a long time a controversy whether
they were to be regarded as natural or artificial productions.
The date of the earliest of them is put by geologists as
Pliocene that is to say, before the First Glacial Age. They
occur also throughout the First Interglacial period. We know
of no bones or other remains in Europe or America of the quasi-
human beings of half a million years ago, who made and used
these implements. They used them to hammer with, perhaps
they used them to fight with, and perhaps they used bits of
wood for similar purposes. 1
But at Trinil, in Java, in strata which are said to correspond
either to the later Pliocene or to the American and European
First Ice Age, there have been found some scattered bones of
a creature, such as the makers of these early implements may
have been. The top of a skull, some teeth, and a thigh-bone
have been found. The skull shows a brain-case about half-way
in size between that of the chimpanzee and man, but the thigh-
bone is that of a creature as well adapted to standing and run-
ning as a man, and as free, therefore, to use its hands. The
creature was not a man, nor was it an arboreal ape like the
chimpanzee. It was a walking ape. It has been named by
naturalists Pithecanthropus erecius (the walking ape-man).
We cannot say that it is a direct human ancestor, but we may
guess that the creatures who scattered these first stone tools
1 Some writers suppose that a Wood and Shell Age preceded the earliest
Stone Age. South Sea Islanders, Negroes, and Bushmen still make use
of wood and the sharp-edged shells of land and water molluscs as im-
plements.
52 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
over the world must have been closely similar and kindred, and
that our ancestor was a heast of like kind. This little trayful
of bony fragments from Trinil is, at present, apart from stone
implements, the oldest relic of early humanity, or of the close
blood relations cf early humanity, that is known.
While these early men or "sub-men" were running about
Europe four or five hundred thousand years ago, there were
mammoths, rhinoceroses, a huge hippopotamus, a giant beaver,
and a bison and wild cattle in their world. There were also
wild horses, and the sabre-toothed tiger still abounded. There
are no traces of lions or true tigers at that time in Europe, but
there were bears, otters, wolves, and a wild boar. It may be
that the early sub-man sometimes played jackal to the sabre-
toothed tiger, and finished up the bodies on which the latter
had gorged itself.
3
After this first glimpse of something at least sub-human in the
record of geology, there is not another fragment of human or
man-like bone yet known from that record for an interval of
hundreds of thousands of years. It is not until we reach de-
posits which are stated to be of the Second Interglacial period,
200,000 years later, 200,000 or 250,000 years ago, that another
little scrap of bone comes to hand. Then we find a jaw-bone.
This jaw-bone was found in a sand-pit near Heidelberg, at a
depth of eighty feet from the surface, and it is not the jaw-
bone of a man as we understand man, but it is man-like in
every respect, except that it has absolutely no trace of a chin ;
it is more massive than a man's, and its narrowness behind
could not, it is thought, have given the tongue sufficient play
for articulate speech. It is not an ape's jaw-bone; the teeth
are human. The owner of this jaw-bone has been variously
named Homo Heidelbcrgensis and P alee oantlir opus Ileidelber-
gensis, according to the estimate formed of his humanity or
sub-humanity by various authorities. He lived in a world not
remotely unlike the world of the still earlier sub-man of the
first implements; the deposits in which it is found show that
there were elephants, horses, rhinoceroses, bison, a moose, and
so forth with it in the world, but the sabre-toothed tiger was
declining and the lion was spreading over Europe. The imple-
ments of this period (known as the Chellean period) are a very
THE ANCESTRY OF MAN 53
considerable advance upon those of the Pliocene Age. They
are well made but very much bigger than any truly human
implements. The Heidelberg man may have had a very big
body and large fore limbs. He may have been a woolly, strange-
looking creature.
N 4
We must turn over the Record for, it may be, another 100,000
years for the next remains of anything human or sub-human.
Then in a deposit ascribed to the Third Interglacial period,
which may have begun 100,000 years ago and lasted 50,000
years, the smashed pieces of a whole skull turn up. The de-
posit is a gravel which may have been derived from the washing
out of still earlier gravel strata, and this skull fragment may
be in reality as old as the First Glacial Period. The bony re-
mains discovered at Piltdown in Sussex display a creature still
ascending only very gradually from the sub-human.
The first scraps of this skull were found in an excavation
for road gravel in Sussex. Bit by bit other fragments of this
skull were hunted out from the quarry heaps until most of it
could be pieced together. It is a thick skull, thicker than that
of any living race of men, and it has a brain capacity inter-
mediate between that of Pithecanthropus and man. This crea-
ture has been named Eoanihropus, the dawn man. In the
same gravel-pits were found teeth of rhinoceros, hippopotamus,
and the leg-bone of a deer with marks upon it that may be cuts.
A curious bat-shaped instrument of elephant bone has also been
found.
There was moreover a jaw-bone among these scattered re-
mains, which was at first assumed naturally enough to belong to
EoanthropuSj, but which it was afterwards suggested was prob-
ably that of a chimpanzee. It is extraordinarily like that of a
chimpanzee, but Dr. Keith, one of the greatest authorities in
these questions, assigns it, after an exhaustive analysis in his
Antiquity of Man (1915), to the skull with which it is found.
It is, as a jaw-bone, far less human in character than the jaw
of the much more ancient Homo Heidelbergensis, but the teeth
are in some respects more like those of living men.
Dr. Keith, swayed by the jaw-bone, does not think that
Eoantliropus, in spite of its name, is a creature in the direct
ancestry of man. Much less is it an intermediate form between
54, THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the Heidelberg man and the Neanderthal man we shall pres-
ently describe. It was only related to the true ancestor of man
as the orang is related to the chimpanzee. It was one of a
number of sub-human running apes of more than ape-like in-
telligence, and if it was not on the line royal, it was at any
rate a very close collateral.
After this glimpse of a skull, the Record for very many
centuries gives nothing but flint implements, which improve
steadily in quality. A very characteristic form is shaped like a
sole, with one flat side stricken off at one blow and the other
side worked. The archa3ologists, as the Record continues, are
presently able to distinguish scrapers, borers, knives, darts,
throwing stones, and the like. Progress is now more rapid;
in a few centuries the shape of the hand-axe shows distinct
and recognizable improvements. And then comes quite a num-
ber of remains. The Fourth Glacial Age is rising towards its
maximum. Man is taking to caves and leaving vestiges there;
at Krapina in Croatia, at Neanderthal near Diisseldorf, at
Spy, human remains have been found, skulls and bones, of a
creature that is certainly a man. Somewhen about 50,000
years ago, if not earlier, appeared Homo Neanderthalensis
(also called Homo antiquus and Homo primigenius), a quite
passable human being. His thumb was not quite equal in flexi-
bility and usefulness to a human thumb, he stooped forward
and could not hold his head erect, as all living men do, he was
chinless and perhaps incapable of speech, there were curious
differences about the enamel and the roots of his teeth from
those of all living men, he was very thick-set, he was, indeed,
not quite of the human species; but there is no dispute about
his attribution to the genus Homo. He was certainly not de-
scended from Eoanthropus, but his jaw-bone is so like the
Heidelberg jaw-bone, as to make it possible that the clumsier
and heavier Homo Heidelbergensis, a thousand centuries before
him, was of his blood and race.
VIII
THE NEANDERTHAL MEN, AN EXTINCT RACE
(The Early Paleolithic Age l )
1. The World 50 } 000 Years Ago. 2. The Daily Life of
the First Men. 3. The Last Palwolithic Men.
IN the time of the Third Interglacial period the outline of
Europe and Western Asia was very different from what it
is to-day. Vast areas to the west and north-west which
are now under the Atlantic waters were then dry land; the
Irish Sea and the North Sea were river valleys. Over these
northern areas there spread and receded and spread again a
great ice cap such as covers central Greenland to-day (see Map
on p. 56). This vast ice cap, which covered both polar regions
of the earth, withdrew huge masses of water from the ocean,
and the sea-level consequently fell, exposing great areas of land
that are now submerged again. The Mediterranean area was
probably a great valley below the general sea-level, containing
two inland seas cut off from the general ocean. The climate
of this Mediterranean basin was perhaps cold temperate, and
the region of the Sahara, to the south was not then a desert of
baked rock and blown sand, but a well-watered and fertile coun-
try. Between the ice sheets to the north and the Alps and
Mediterranean valley to the south stretched a bleak wilderness
1 Three phases of human history before the knowledge and use of metals
are often distinguished. First there is the so-called Eolithic Age (dawn
of stone implements), then the Palaeolithic Age (old stone implements),
and finally an age in which the implements are skilfully made and fre-
quently well finished and polished (Neolithic Age). The Palaeolithic
Period is further divided into an earlier (sub-human) and a later (fully
hunian) period. We shall comment on these divisions later,
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
w S
THE NEANDERTHAL MEN 57
whose climate changed from harshness to a mild kindliness
and then hardened again for the Fourth Glacial Age.
Across this wilderness, which is now the great plain of
Europe, wandered a various fauna. At first there were hippo-
potami, rhinoceroses, mammoths, and elephants. The sabre-
toothed tiger was diminishing towards extinction. Then, as
the air chilled, the hippopotamus, and then other warmth-loving
creatures, ceased to come so far north, and the sabre-toothed
tiger disappeared altogether. The woolly mammoth, the woolly
rhinoceros, the musk ox, the bison, the aurochs, and the reindeer
became prevalent, and the temperate vegetation gave place to
plants of a more arctic type. The glaciers spread southward to
the maximum of the Fourth Glacial Age (about 50,000 years
ago), and then receded again. In the earlier phase, the Third
Interglacial period, a certain number of small family groups
of men (Homo Neanderthalensis) and probably of sub-men
(Eoantliropus) wandered over the land, leaving nothing but
their flint implements to witness to their presence. They prob-
ably used a multitude and variety of wooden implements also;
they had probably learnt much about the shapes of objects and
the use of different shapes from wood, knowledge which they
afterwards applied to stone; but none of this wooden material
has survived; we can only speculate about its forms and uses.
As the weather hardened to its maximum of severity, the
Neanderthal men, already it would seem acquainted with the
use of fire, began to seek shelter under rock ledges and in caves
and so leave remains behind them. Hitherto they had been
accustomed to squat in the open about the fire, and near their
water supply. But they were sufficiently intelligent to adapt
themselves to the new and harder conditions. (As for the sub-
men, they seem to have succumbed to the stresses of this Fourth
Glacial Age altogether. At any rate, the rudest type of Paleo-
lithic implements presently disappears.)
Not merely man was taking to the caves. This period also
had a cave lion, a cave bear, and a cave hyaena. These creatures
had to be driven out of the caves and kept out of the caves in
which these early men wanted to squat and hide ; and ro doubt
fire was an effective method of eviction and protection. Prob-
ably early men did not go deeply into the caves, because they
had no means of lighting their recesses. They got in far
enough to be out of the weather, and stored wood and food in odd
58
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
corners. Perhaps they barricaded the cave mouths. Their
only available light for going deeply into the caverns would be
torches.
What did these Neanderthal men hunt ? Their only possible
weapons for killing such giant creatures as the mammoth or
the cave bear, or even the reindeer, were spears of wood, wooden
clubs, and those big pieces of flint they left behind them, the
"Chellean" and "Mousterian" implements ; l and probably their
usual quarry was smaller game. But they did certainly eat
the flesh of the big beasts when they had a chance, and perhaps
they followed them
when sick or when,
wounded by combats,
or took advantage of
them when they were
bogged or in trouble
with ice or water.
(The Labrador Indi-
ans still kill the cari-
bou with spears at
awkward river cross-
ings.) At Dewlish,
in Dorset, an artifi-
cial trench has been
found which is sup-
posed to have been a
Palaeolithic trap for
elephants. 2 We know
that the !N"eanderthalers partly ate their kill where it fell ; but
they brought back the big narrow bones to the cave to crack and
eat at leisure, because few ribs and vertebrae are found in the
caves, but great quantities of cracked and split long bones.
They used skins to wrap about them, and the women probably
dressed the skins.
We know also that they were right-handed like modern men,
because the left side of the brain (which serves the right side
of the body) is bigger than the right. But while the back parts
of the brain which deal with sight and touch and the energy
of the body are well developed, the front parts, whic 1 - are con-
J From Chelles and Le Moustier in France.
8 Osmond Fisher, quoted jn Wright's Quaternary Ice
THE NEANDERTHAL MEN 59
nected with thought and speech, are comparatively small. It
was as big a brain as ours, but different. This species of Homo
had certainly a very different mentality from ours; its indi-
viduals were not merely simpler and lower than we are, they
were on another line. It may be they did not speak at all,
or very sparingly. They had nothing that we should call a
language.
In Worthington Smith's Man the Primeval Savage there is
a very vividly written description of early Palaeolithic life,
from which much of the following account is borrowed. In
the original, Mr. Worthington Smith assumes a more extensive
social life, a larger community, and a more definite division of
labour among its members than is altogether justifiable in the
face of such subsequent writings as J. J. Atkinson's memorable
essay on Primal Law. 1 For the little tribe Mr. Worthington
Smith described, there has been substituted, therefore, a family
group under the leadership of one Old Man, and the suggestions
of Mr. Atkinson as to the behaviour of the Old Man have been
worked into the sketch.
Mr. Worthington Smith describes a squatting-place near a
stream, because primitive man, having no pots or other vessels,
must needs have kept close to a water supply, and with some
chalk cliffs adjacent from which flints could be got to work.
The air was bleak, and the fire was of great importance, be-
cause fires once out were not easily relit in those days. When
not required to blaze it was probably banked down with ashes.
The most probable way in which fires were started was by
hacking a bit of iron pyrites with a flint amidst dry dead leaves ;
concretions of iron pyrites and flints are found together in
England where the gault and chalk approach each other. 2 The
little group of people would be squatting about amidst a litter
of fern, moss, and such-like dry material. Some of the women
and children would need to be continually gathering fuel to
keep up the fires. It would be a tradition that had grown up.
1 Social Origins, by Andrew Lang, and Primal Law, by J. J. Atkinson.
(Longmans, 1903.)
2 This first origin of fire was suggested by Sir John Lubbock (Prehistoric
Times), and Ludwig Hopf, in The Human Species, says that "Flints and
pieces of pyrites are found in close proximity in palaeolithic settlements
near the remains of mammoths."
60
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
tliic Stone Implement;
Call roughly to
seal* of hand
shown)
Three views < a. TOStro-
cartnate (earliest period)
implement
[N.B.Thi* us
a modem. not a. Neander-
thal- Hand.]
Piercer
<J. F! H
EARLY STONE IMPLEMENTS.
The Mousterian Age implements, and all above it, are those of
Neanderthal men or, possibly in the case of the rostro-carinates, of
sub-men. The lower row (Reindeer Age) are the work of true men.
The student should compare this diagram with the time diagram
attached to Chapter VII, 1, and he should note the relatively large
size of the pre-human implements.
THE NEANDERTHAL MEN 61
The young would imitate their elders in this task. Perhaps
there would be rude wind shelters of boughs on one side of
the encampment.
The Old Man, the father and master of the group, would
perhaps be engaged in hammering flints beside the fire. The
children would imitate him and learn to use the sharpened
fragments. Probably some of the women would hunt good
flints; they would fish them out of the chalk with sticks and
bring them to the squatting-place.
There would be skins about. It seems probable that at a
very early time primitive men took to using skins. Probably
they were wrapped about the children, and used to lie upon
when the ground was damp and cold. A woman would perhaps
be preparing a skin. The inside of the skin would be well
scraped free of superfluous flesh with trimmed flints, and then
strained and pulled and pegged out flat on the grass, and dried
in the rays of the sun.
Away from the fire other members of the family group prowl
in search of food, but at night they all gather closely round
the fire and build it up, for it is their protection against the
wandering bear and such-like beasts of prey. The Old Man
is the only fully adult male in the little group. There are
women, boys and girls, but so soon as the boys are big enough
to rouse the Old Man's jealousy, he will fall foul of them and
either drive them off or kill them. Some girls may perhaps go
off with these exiles, or two or three of these youths may keep
together for a time, wandering until they come upon some other
group, from which they may try to steal a mate. Then they
would probably fall out among themselves. Some day, when
he is forty years old perhaps or even older, and his teeth are
worn down and his energy abating, some younger male will
stand up to the Old Man and kill him and reign in his stead.
There is probably short shrift for the old at the squatting-
place. So soon as they grow weak and bad-tempered, trouble
and death come upon them.
What did they eat at the squatting-place ?
"Primeval man is commonly described as a hunter of the
great hairy mammoth, of the bear, and the lion, but it is in the
highest degree improbable that the human savage ever hunted
animals much larger than the hare, the rabbit, and the rat.
Man was probably the hunted rather than the hunter.
62
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
AUSTRALIA
"Western
Pacific
trttfc*
Glacial Acre
"The primeval savage was both herbivorous and carnivorous.
He had for food hazel-nuts, beech-nuts, sweet chestnuts, earth-
nuts, and acorns. He had crab-apples, wild pears, wild cherries,
wild gooseberries, bullaces, sorbs, sloes, blackberries, yewberries,
hips and haws, watercress, fungi, the larger and softer leaf-
buds, Nostoc (the vegetable substance called 'fallen stars' by
countryfolk), the fleshy, juicy, asparagus-like rhizomes or sub-
terranean stems of the Labiatce and like plants, as well as other
delicacies of the vegetable kingdom. He had birds' eggs, young
birds, and the honey
and honeycomb of
wild bees. He had
newts, snails, and
frogs the two latter
delicacies are still
highly esteemed in
Normandy and Brit-
tany. He had fish,
dead and alive, and
fresh-water mussels;
he could easily catch
fish with his hands
and paddle and dive
for and trap them.
By the seaside he
would have fish, mol-
lusca, and seaweed.
He would have many
of the larger birds
and smaller mam-
mals, which he could easily secure by throwing stones and sticks,
or by setting simple snares. He would have the snake, the
slow worm, and the crayfish. He would have various grubs
and insects, the large Iarva3 of beetles and Various cater-
pillars. The taste for caterpillars still survives in China, where
they are sold in dried bundles in the markets. A chief and
highly nourishing object of food would doubtlessly be bones
smashed up into a stiff and gritty paste.
"A fact of great importance is this primeval man would
not be particular about having his flesh food over-fresh. He
would constantly find it in a dead state, and, if semi-putrid, he
THE NEANDERTHAL MEN 63
would relish it none the less the taste for high or half-putrid
game still survives. If driven by hunger and hard pressed, he
would perhaps sometimes eat his weaker companions or un-
heahhy children who happened to be feeble or unsightly or
burthensome. The larger animals in a weak and dying state
would no doubt be much sought for ; when these were not forth-
coming, dead and half -rotten examples would be made to suffice.
An unpleasant odour would not be objected to; it is not ob-
jected to now in many continental hotels.
"The savages sat huddled close together round their fire,
with fruits, bones, and half-putrid flesh. We can imagine
the old man and his women twitching the skin of their shoul-
ders, brows, and muzzles as they were annoyed or bitten by
flies or other insects. We can imagine the large human nostrils,
indicative of keen scent, giving rapidly repeated sniffs at the
foul meat before it was consumed ; the bad odour of the meat,
and the various other disgusting odours belonging to a haunt
of savages, being not in the least disapproved.
"Man at that time was not a degraded animal, for he had
never been higher; he was therefore an exalted animal, and,
low as we esteem him now, he yet represented the highest
stage of development of the animal kingdom of his time."
That is at least an acceptable sketch of a Neanderthal squat-
ting-place. But before extinction overtook them, even the Nean-
derthalers learnt much and went far.
Whatever the older Palaeolithic men did with their dead, there
is reason to suppose that the later Homo N eanderthalensis
buried some individuals at least with respect and ceremony.
One of the best-known Neanderthal skeletons is that of a youth
who apparently had been deliberately interred. He had been
placed in a sleeping posture, head on the right fore-arm. The
head lay on a number of flint fragments carefully piled to-
gether "pillow fashion." A big hand-axe lay near his head,
and around him were numerous charred and split ox bones,
as though there had been a feast or an offering.
To this appearance of burial during the later Neanderthal
age we shall return when we are considering the ideas that were
inside the heads of primitive men.
This sort of men may have wandered, squatted about their
fires, and died in Europe for a period extending over 100,000
years, if we assume, that is, that the Heidelberg jaw-bone
64 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
belongs to a member of the species, a period so vast that all the
subsequent history of our race becomes a thing of yesterday.
Along its own line this species of men was accumulating a dim
tradition, and working out its limited possibilities. Its thick
skull imprisoned its brain, and to the end it was low-browed
and brutish.
IX
THE LATEK POSTGLACIAL PALAEOLITHIC MEN,
THE FIRST TRUE MEN
(Later Palaeolithic Age)
1. The Coming of Men Like Ourselves. 2. Hunters Give
Place to Herdsmen. 3. No Sub-Men in America.
THE Neanderthal type of man prevailed in Europe at
least for tens of thousands of years. For ages that make
all history seem a thing of yesterday, these nearly human
creatures prevailed. If the Heidelberg jaw was that of a
Neanderthaler, and if there is no error in the estimate of the
age of that jaw, then the Neanderthal Race lasted out for more
than 200,000 years! Finally, between 40,000 and 25,000
years ago, as the Fourth Glacial Age softened towards more
temperate conditions (see Map on p. 68), a different human
type came upon the scene, and, it would seem, exterminated
Homo Neanderthalensis. 1 This new type was probably de-
veloped in South Asia or North Africa, or in lands now sub-
ir lhe opinion that the Neanderthal race (Homo Neanderthalensis) is
an extinct species which did not interbreed with the true men (Homo
sapiens) is held by Professor Osborn, and it is the view to which the
writer inclines and to which he has pointed in the treatment of this
section; but it is only fair to the reader to note that many writers do not
share this view. They write and speak of living "Neanderthalers" in
contemporary populations. One observer has written in the past of such
types in the west of Ireland; another has observed them in Greece. These
so-called "living Neanderthalers" have neither the peculiarities of neck,
thumb, nor teeth that distinguish the Neanderthal race of pre-men. The
cheek teeth of true men, for instance, have what we call fangs, long fangs;
the Neanderthaler's cheek tooth is a more complicated and specialized
cheek tooth, a long tooth with short fangs, and his canine teeth were less
marked, less like dog-teeth, than ours. Nothing could show more clearly
that he was on a different line of development. We must remember that
so far only western Europe has been properly explored for Palaeolithic
65
66
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
merged in the Mediterranean basin, and, as more remains are
collected and evidence accumulates, men will learn more of
their early stages. At present we can only guess where and
how, through the slow ages, parallel with the Neanderthal
cousin, these first true men arose out of some more ape-like
progenitor. For hundreds of centuries they were acquiring
skill of hand and limb, and power and bulk of brain, in that
still unknown environment. They were already far above the
Neanderthal level of achievement and intelligence, when first
they come into our
ken, and they had al-
ready split into two
or more very distinc-
tive races.
These newcomers
did not migrate into
Europe in the strict
sense of the word,
but rather, as cen-
tury by century the
climate ameliorated,
they followed the
food and plants to
which they were ac-
customed, as those
spread into the new
realms that opened
to them. The ice was receding, vegetation was increasing,
big game of all sorts was becoming more abundant. Steppe-
like conditions, conditions of pasture and shrub, were bringing
with them vast herds of wild horse. Ethnologists (students of
race) class these new human races in one same species as our-
selves, and with all human races subsequent to them, under one
remains, and that practically all we know of the Neanderthal species
comes from that area (see Map, p. 56). No doubt the ancestor of
Homo sapiens (which species includes the Tasmanians) was a very similar
and parallel creature to Homo neanderthalensis. And we are not so
far from that ancestor as to have eliminated not indeed "Neanderthal,"
but "JS'eanderthaloid" types. The existence of such types no more proves
that the Neanderthal species, the makers of the Chellean and Mousterian
implements, interbred with Homo sapiens in the European area than do
monkey-faced people testify to an interbreeding with monkeys; or people
with faces like horses, that there is an equine strain in our population.
THE FIRST TRUE MEN 67
common specific name of Homo sapiens. They had quite human
brain-cases and hands. Their teeth and their necks were
anatomically as ours are.
We know of two distinct sorts of skeletal remains in this
period, the first of these known as the Cro-Magnon race, and
the second the Grimaldi race ; but the great bulk of the human
traces and appliances we find are either without human bones
or with insufficient bones for us to define their associated phys-
ical type. There may have been many more distinct races than
these two. There may have been intermediate types. In the
grotto of Cro-Magnon it was that complete skeletons of one
main type of these Newer Paleolithic men, these true men,
were first found, and so it is that they are spoken of as Cro-
Magnards.
These Cro-Magnards were a tall people with very broad faces,
prominent noses, and, all things considered, astonishingly big
brains. The brain capacity of the woman in the Cro-Magnon
cave exceeded that of the average male to-day. Her head had
been smashed by a heavy blow. There were also in the same
cave with her the complete skeleton of an older man, nearly six
feet high, the fragments of a child's skeleton, and the skeletons
of two young men. There were also flint implements and
perforated sea-shells, used no doubt as ornaments. Such is one
sample of the earliest true men. But at the Grimaldi cave,
near Mentone, were discovered two' skeletons also of the later
Paleolithic Period, but of a widely contrasted type, with,
negroid characteristics that point rather to the negroid type.
There can be no doubt that we have to deal in this period with
at least two, and probably more, highly divergent races of true
men. They may have overlapped in time, or Cro-Magnards
may have followed the Grimaldi race, and either or both may
have been contemporary with the late Neanderthal men. Vari-
ous authorities have very strong opinions upon these points,
but they are, at most, opinions.
The appearance of these truly human postglacial Paleolithic
peoples was certainly an enormous leap forward in the history
of mankind. Both of these main races had a human fore-
brain, a human hand, an intelligence very like our own. They
dispossessed Homo NcandertJialensis from his caverns and his
stone quarries. And they agreed with modern ethnologists, it
would seem, in regarding him as a different species. Unlike
68
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
THE FIRST TRUE MEN
69
most savage conquerors, who take the women of the defeated
side for their own and interbreed with them, it would seem that
the true men would have nothing to do with the Neanderthal
"Sane points
Australian nahx&s*
method of using
th^cwing-stick or
apear-throiver
(reindeer horn)
race, women or men. There is no trace of any intermixture
between the races, in spite of the fact that the newcomers, being
also flint users, were establishing themselves in the very same
spots that their predecessors had occupied. We know nothing
70 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this absence of
intermixture seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness,
or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his
low forehead, his beetle brows, his ape neek, and his inferior
stature. Or he and she may have been too fierce to tame.
Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a survey of the rise of modern
man in his Views and Reviews: "The dim racial remembrance
of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling
gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tend-
encies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore. . . ."
These true men of the Paleolithic Age, who replaced the
Neanderthalers, were coming into a milder climate, and al-
though they used the caves and shelters of their predecessors,
they lived largely in the open. They were hunting peoples,
and some or all of them appear to have hunted the mammoth
and the wild horse as well as the reindeer, bison, and aurochs.
They ate much horse. At a great open-air camp at Solutre,
where they seem to have had annual gatherings for many cen-
turies, it is estimated that there are the bones of 100,000 horses,
besides reindeer, mammoth, and bison bones. They probably
followed herds of horses, the little bearded ponies of that age,
as these moved after pasture. They hung about on the flanks
of the herd, and became very wise about its habits and disposi-
tions. A large part of these men's lives must have been spent
in watching animals.
Whether they tamed and domesticated the horse is still an
open question. Perhaps they learnt to do so by degrees as the
centuries passed. At any rate, we find late Paleolithic draw-
ings of horses with marks about the heads that are strongly
suggestive of bridles, and there exists a carving of a horse's
head showing what is perhaps a rope of twisted skin or tendon.
But even if they tamed the horse, it is still more doubtful
whether they rode it or had much use for it when it was tamed.
The horse they knew was a wild pony with a beard under its
chin, not up to carrying a man for any distance. It is improb-
able that these men had yet learnt the rather unnatural use of
animal's milk as food. If they tamed the horse at last, it
was the only animal they seem to have tamed. They had no
dogs, and they had little to do with any sort of domesticated
sheep or cattle.
It greatly aids us to realize their common humanity that
THE FIRST TRUE MEN 71
these earliest true men could draw. Both races, it would seem,
drew astonishingly well. They were by all standards savages,
but they were artistic savages. They drew better than any of
their successors down to the beginnings of history. They drew
and painted on the cliffs and cave walls th#t they had wrested
from the Neanderthal men. And the surviving drawings come
to the ethnologist, puzzling over bones and scraps, with the
effect of a plain message shining through guesswork and dark-
ness. They drew on bones and antlers; they carved little
figures.
These later Palaeolithic people not only drew remarkably well
for our information, and with an increasing skill as the cen-
turies passed, but they have also left us other information about
their lives in their graves. They buried. They buried their
dead, often with ornaments, weapons, and food; they used a
lot of colour in the burial, and evidently painted the body.
From that one may infer that they painted their bodies during
life. Paint was a big fact in their lives. They were inveterate
painters; they used black, brown, red, yellow, and white pig-
ments, and the pigments they used endure to this day in the
caves of France and Spain. Of all modern races, none have
shown so pictorial a disposition ; the nearest approach to it has
been among the American Indians.
These drawings and paintings of the later Palaeolithic people
went on through a long period of time, and present wide fluctua-
tions in artistic merit. We give here some early sketches, from
which we learn of the interest taken by these early men in the
bison, horse, ibex, cave bear, and reindeer. In its early stages
the drawing is often primitive like the drawing of clever chil-
dren; quadrupeds are usually drawn with one hind-leg and
one fore-leg, as children draw them to this day. The legs on
the other side were too much for the artist's technique. Possi-
bly the first drawings began as children's drawings begin, out
of idle scratchings. The savage scratched with a flint on a
smooth rock surface, and was reminded of some line or gesture.
But their solid carvings are at least as old as their first pic-
tures. The earlier drawings betray a complete incapacity to
group animals. As the centuries progressed, more skilful artists
appeared. The representation of beasts became at last astonish-
ingly vivid and like. But even at the crest of their artistic
time they still drew in profile as children do; perspective and
72 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the fore-shortening needed for back and front views were too
much for them. 1 They rarely drew themselves. The vast
majority of their drawings represent animals. The mammoth
and the horse are among the commonest themes. Some of the
people, whether Grimaldi people or Cro-Magnon people, also
made little ivory and soapstone statuettes, and among these are
some very fat female figures. These latter suggest the physique
of Grimaldi rather than of Cro-Magnon artists. They are like
dT.F1.KX.
*Paiirhna in -four colours (Gave ofAJtamirvL , Spain)
Bushmen women. The human sculpture of the earlier times
inclined to caricature, and generally such human figures as
they represent are far below the animal studies in vigour and
veracity.
Later on there was more grace and less coarseness in the
human representations. One little ivory head discovered is
that of a girl with an elaborate coiffure. These people at a
later stage also scratched and engraved designs on ivory and
bone. Some of the most interesting groups of figures are
1 R. I. Pocock.
THE FIRST TRUE MEN 73
carved very curiously round bone, and especially round rods
of deer bone, so that it is impossible to see the entire design
Stag and salmon.
gruxmvcd- on
rdndeerluani
u o
^- Snorraved
Stone...
"Head, of A woman, carved in-
altogether. Figures have also been found modelled in clay,
although no Palaeolithic people made any use of pottery.
Many of the paintings are found in the depths of unlit
caves. They are often difficult of access. The artists must
74 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
have employed lamps to do their work, and shallow soapstone
lamps in which fat could have been burnt have been found.
Whether the seeing of these cavern paintings was in some way
ceremonial or under what circumstances they were seen, we
are now altogether at a loss to imagine.
At last it would seem that circumstances began to turn alto-
gether against these hunting Newer Palaeolithic people who had
flourished for so long in Europe. They disappeared. New
kinds of men appeared in Europe, replacing them. These
latter seem to have brought in bow and arrows; they had do-
mesticated animals and cultivated the soil. A new way of
living, the Neolithic way of living, spread over the European
area ; and the life of the Reindeer Age and of the races of Rein-
deer men, the Later Palaeolithic men, after a reign vastly greater
than the time between ourselves and the very earliest begin-
nings of recorded history, passed off the European stage.
It was about 12,000 or fewer years ago that, with the spread
of forests and a great change of the fauna, the long prevalence
of the hunting life in Europe drew to its end. Reindeer van-
ished. Changing conditions frequently bring with them new
diseases. There may have been prehistoric pestilences. For
many centuries there may have been no men in Britain or
Central Europe (Wright). For a time there were in Southern
Europe drifting communities of some little known people who
are called the Azilians. 1 They may have been transition gen-
erations; they may have been a different race. We do not
know. Some authorities incline to the view that the Azilians
were the first wave of a race which, as we shall see later, has
played a great part in populating Europe, the dark-white or
Mediterranean or Iberian race. These Azilian people have
left behind them a multitude of pebbles, roughly daubed with
markings of an unknown purport (see illus. p. 73). The use or
significance of these Azilian pebbles is still a profound mystery.
Was this some sort of token writing? Were they counters in
some game ? Did the Azilians play with these pebbles or tell a
story with them, as imaginative children will do with bits of
1 From the cavq of Mas d'Azil.
THE FIRST TRUE MEN 75
wood and stone nowadays ? At present we are unable to cope
with any of these questions.
We will not deal here with the other various peoples who
left their scanty traces in the world during the close of the
New Palaeolithic period, the spread of the forests where for-
merly there had been steppes, and the wane of the hunters,
some 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. We will go on to describe
the new sort of human community that was now spreading over
the northern hemisphere, whose appearance marks what is called
the Neolithic Age. The map of the world was assuming some-
thing like its present outlines, the landscape and the flora and
fauna were taking on their existing characteristics. The pre-
vailing animals in the spreading woods of Europe were the royal
stag, the great ox, and the bison ; the mammoth and the musk
ox had gone. The great ox, or aurochs, is now extinct, but it
survived in the German forests up to the time of the Roman
Empire. It was never domesticated. 1 It stood eleven feet
high at the shoulder, as high as an elephant. There were still
lions in the Balkan peninsula, and they remained there until
about 1,000 or 1,200 B.C. The lions of Wiirtemberg and South
Germany in those days were twice the size of the modern lion.
South Russia and Central Asia were thickly wooded then, and
there were elephants in Mesopotamia and Syria, and a fauna
in Algeria that was tropical African in character.
Hitherto men in Europe had never gone farther north than
the Baltic Sea or the British Isles, but now the Scandinavian
peninsula and perhaps Great Russia were becoming possible
regions for human occupation. There are no Paleolithic re
mains in Sweden or Norway. Man, when he entered these
countries, was apparently already at the Neolithic stage of
social development.
3
Nor is there any convincing evidence of man in America
before the end of the Pleistocene. 2 The same relaxation of the
1 But our domestic cattle are derived from some form of aurochs
probably from some lesser Central Asiatic variety. H. H. J.
2 "The various finds of human remains in North America for which
the geological antiquity has been claimed have been thus briefly passed
under review. In every instance where enough of the bones is preserved
for comparison, the evidence bears witness against the geological antiquity
of the remains and for their close affinity to or identity with the modern
76 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
climate that permitted the retreat of the reindeer hunters into
Russia and Siberia, as the Neolithic tribes advanced, may have
allowed them to wander across the land that is now cut by
Bering Strait, and so reach the American continent. They
spread thence southward, age by age. When they reached
South America, they found the giant sloth (the Megatherium),
the glyptodon, and many other extinct creatures, still flourish-
ing. The glyptodon was a monstrous South American arma-
dillo, and a human skeleton has been found by Roth buried
beneath its huge tortoise-like shell. 1
All the human remains in America, even the earliest, it is
to be noted, are of an Amer-Indian character. In America
there does not seem to have been any preceding races of sub-
men. Man was fully man when he entered America. The old
world was the nursery of the sub-races of mankind.
Indian." (Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bul-
letin 33. Dr. Hrdlicka.)
But J. Deniker quotes evidence to show that eoliths and early palseoliths
have been found in America. See his compact but full summary of the
evidence and views for and against in his Races* of Man, pp. 510, 511.
* "Questioned by some authorities," says J. Deniker in The Races of Man.
X
NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE
1. The Age of Cultivation Begins. 2. Where Did the
Neolithic Culture Arise? 3. Everyday Neolithic Life.
4. Primitive Trade. 5. The Flooding of the Medi-
terranean Valley.
THE Neolithic phase of human affairs began in Europe
about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. But probably men
had reached the Neolithic stage elsewhere some thou-
sands of years earlier. Neolithic men came slowly into Europe
from the south or south-east as the reindeer and the open
steppes gave way to forest and modern European conditions.
The Neolithic stage in culture is characterized by: (1) the
presence of polished stone implements, and in particular the
stone axe, which was perforated so as to be the more effectually
fastened to a wooden handle, and which was probably used
rather for working wood than in conflict. There are also abun-
dant arrow-heads. The fact that some implements are polished
does not preclude the presence of great quantities of implements
of unpolished stone. But there are differences in the make
between even the unpolished tools of the Neolithic and of the
Palaeolithic Period. (2) The beginning of a sort of agricul-
ture, and the use of plants and seeds. But at first there are
abundant evidences that hunting was still of great importance
in the Neolithic Age. Neolithic man did not at first sit down
to his agriculture. He took snatch crops. He settled later.
(3) Pottery and proper cooking. The horse is no longer eaten.
(4) Domesticated animals. The dog appears very early. The
Neolithic man had domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs.
77
78 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
lie was a huntsman turned herdsman of the herds he once
hunted. (5) Plaiting and weaving.
These Neolithic people probably "migrated" into Europe,
in the same way that the Reindeer Men had migrated before
them; that is to say, generation by generation and century by
century, as the climate changed, they spread after their accus-
tomed food. They were not "nomads." Nomadism, like civili-
zation, had still to be developed. At present we are quite un-
able to estimate how far the Neolithic peoples were new-comers
and how far their arts were developed or acquired by the de-
scendants of some of the hunters and fishers of the Later
Paleolithic Age.
Whatever our conclusions in that matter, this much we may
say with certainty ; there is no great break, no further sweeping
away of one kind of man and replacement by another kind be-
tween the appearance of the Neolithic way of living and our
own time. There are invasions, conquests, extensive emigra-
tions and intermixtures, but the races as a whole carry on and
continue to adapt themselves to the areas into which they began
to settle in the opening of the Neolithic Age. The Neolithic
men of Europe were white men ancestral to the modern Euro-
peans. They may have been of a darker complexion than many
of their descendants; of that we cannot speak with certainty.
But there is no real break in culture from their time onward
until we reach the age of coal, steam, and power-driven ma-
chinery that began in the eighteenth century.
After a long time gold, the first known of the metals, appears
among the bone ornaments with jet and amber. Irish Neolithic
remains are particularly rich in gold. Then, perhaps 6,000
or 7,000 years ago in Europe, Neolithic people began to use
copper in certain centres, making out of it implements of much
the same pattern as their stone ones. They cast the copper in
moulds made to the shape of the stone implements. Possibly
they first found native copper and hammered it into shape. 1
Later we will not venture upon figures men had found out
how to get copper from its ore. Perhaps, as Lord Avebury sug-
gested, they discovered the secret of smelting by the chance put-
ting of lumps of copper ore among the ordinary stones with
which they built the fire pits they used for cooking. In China,
1 Native copper is still found to-day in Italy, Hungary, Cornwall, and
many other places.
NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE
79
Hungary, Cornwall, and elsewhere copper ore and tinstone
occur in the same veins ; it is a very common association, and
so, rather through dirtiness than skill, the ancient smelters, it
Implements
(drawn to
Axe-hammers-
cff* polished stone.
may be, hit upon the harder and better bronze, which is an
alloy of copper and tin. Bronze is not only harder than copper,
but the mixture of tin and copper is more fusible and easier to
reduce. The so-called "pure-copiper" implements usually con-
80 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
tain a small proportion of tin, and there are no tin implements
known, nor very much evidence to show that early men knew
of tin as a separate metal. 1 2 The plant of a prehistoric copper
smelter has been found in Spain, and the material of bronze
foundries in various localities. The method of smelting re-
vealed by these finds carries out Lord Avebury's suggestion.
In India, where zinc and copper ore occur together, brass
(which is an alloy of the two metals) was similarly hit upon.
So slight was the change in fashions and methods produced
by the appearance of bronze, that for a long time such bronze
axes and so forth as were made were cast in moulds to the shape
of the stone implements they were superseding.
Finally, perhaps as early as 3,000 years ago in Europe, and
even earlier in Asia Minor, men began to smelt iron. Once
smelting was known to men, there is no great marvel in the
finding of iron. They smelted iron by blowing up a charcoal
fire, and wrought it by heating and hammering. They produced
it at first in comparatively small pieces ; 3 its appearance
worked a gradual revolution in weapons and implements; but it
did not suffice to change the general character of men's sur-
roundings. Much the same daily life that was being led by
the more settled Neolithic men 10,000 years ago, was being led
by peasants in out-of-the-way places all over Europe at the be-
ginning of the eighteenth century.
People talk of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron
Age in Europe, but it is misleading to put these ages as if they
were of equal importance in history. Much truer is it to say
that there was:
(1) An Early Palaeolithic Age, of vast duration; (2) a
Later Palceolithic Age, that lasted not a tithe of the time; and
*Ridgeway (Early Age of Greece) says a lump of tin has been found
in the Swiss pile-dwelling deposits.
3 Tin was known as a foreign import in Egypt under the XVIIIth
Dynasty; there is (rare) Mycenaan tin, and there are (probably later,
but not clearly dated) tin objects in the Caucasus. But it is very diffi-
cult to distinguish tin from antimony. There is a good deal of Cyprus
bronze which contains antimony; a good deal which seems to be tin is
antimony the ancients trying to get tin, but actually getting antimony
and thinking it was tin. J. L. M.
a ln connection with iron, note the distinction of ornamental and useful
iron. Ornamental iron, a rarity, perhaps meteoric, as jewellery or magical
stuff, occurs in east Europe sporadically in the time of the XVIIIth
Dynasty. This must be distinguished from the copious useful iron
which appears in Greece much later from the North. J. \*. M,
NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 81
(3) the Age of Cultivation, the age of the white men in Europe,
which began 10,000 or at most 12,000 years ago, of which the
Neolithic Period was the beginning, and which is still going on.
2
We do not know yet the region in which the ancestors of the
brownish Neolithic peoples worked their way up from the
Palaeolithic stage of human development. Probably it was some-
where about south-western Asia, or in some region now sub-
merged beneath the Mediterranean Sea or the Indian Ocean,
that, while the Neanderthal men still lived their hard lives in
the bleak climate of a glaciated Europe, the ancestors of the
white men developed the rude arts of their Later Palaeolithic
period. But they do not seem to have developed the artistic
skill of their more northerly kindred, the European Later
Palaeolithic races. And through the hundred centuries or so
while Reindeer men were living under comparatively unprogres-
sive conditions upon the steppes of France, Germany, and
Spain, these more favoured and progressive people to the south
were mastering agriculture, learning to develop 1 their appli-
ances, taming the dog, domesticating cattle, and, as the climate
to the north mitigated and the equatorial climate grew more
tropical, spreading northward. All these early chapters of
our story have yet to be disinterred. They will probably be
found in Asia Minor, Persia, Arabia, India, or north Africa,
or they lie beneath the Mediterranean waters. Twelve thou-
sand years ago, or thereabouts we are still too early for any-
thing but the roughest chronology Neolithic peoples were scat-
tered all over Europe, north Africa, and Asia. They were
peoples at about the level of many of the Polynesian islanders
of the last century, and they were the most advanced peoples
in the world.
3
It will be of interest here to give a brief account of the life
of the European Neolithic people before the appearance of
metals. We get our light upon that life from various sources.
They scattered their refuse about, and in some places (e.g. on
the Danish coast) it accumulated in great heaps, known as the
kitchen-middens. They buried some of their people, but not
82
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the common herd, with great care and distinction, and made
huge heaps of earth over their sepulchres; these heaps are the
barrows or dolmens which contribute a feature to the Euro-
pean, Indian, and American scenery in many districts to this
day. In connection with these mounds, or independently of
them, they set up great stones (megaliths), either singly or
in groups, of which Stonehenge in Wiltshire and Carnac in
Brittany are among the best-known examples. In various
places their villages are still traceable.
One fruitful source of knowledge about Neolithic life comes
from Switzerland, and was first revealed by the very dry winter
of 1854, when the water level of one of the lakes, sinking to
an unheard-of lowness, revealed the foundations of prehistoric
Petbartr from Lake
pile dwellings of the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, built
out over the water after the fashion of similar homes that exist
to-day in Celebes and elsewhere. Not only were the timbers
of those ancient platforms preserved, but a great multitude of
wooden, bone, stone, and earthenware utensils and ornaments,
remains of food and the like, were found in the peaty accumu-
lations below them. Even pieces of net and garments have
been recovered. Similar lake dwellings existed in Scotland,
Ireland, and elsewhere there are well-known remains at Glas-
tonbury in Somersetshire; in Ireland lake dwellings were in-
habited from prehistoric times up to the days when O'Neil of
Tyrone was fighting against the English before the plantation
of Scotch colonists to replace the Irish in Ulster in the reign
of James I of England. These lake villages had considerable
defensive value, and there was a sanitary advantage in living
over flowing water.
NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 83
Probably these Neolithic Swiss pile dwellings did not shelter
the largest comrmmities that existed in those days. They were
the homes of small patriarchal groups. Elsewhere upon fertile
plains and in more open country there were probably already
much larger assemblies of homes than in those mountain valleys.
There are traces of such a large community of families in Wilt-
shire in England, for example; the remains of the stone circle
of Avebury near Silbury mound were once the "finest mega-
lithic ruin in Europe." It consisted of two circles of stones
surrounded by a larger circle and a ditch, and covering alto-
gether twenty-eight and a half acres. From it two avenues of
stones, each a mile and a half long, ran west and south on either
side of Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill is the largest prehistoric
artificial mound in England. The dimensions of this centre of
a faith and a social life now forgotten altogether by men indi-
cate the concerted efforts and interests of a very large number
of people, widely scattered though they may have been over
the west and south and centre of England. Possibly they as-
sembled at some particular season of the year in a primitive
sort of fair. The whole community "lent a hand" in building
the mounds and hauling the stones. The Swiss pile dwellers,
on the contrary, seem to have lived in practically self-contained
villages.
These lake-village people were considerably more advanced
in methods and knowledge, and probably much later in time
than the early Neolithic people who accumulated the shell
mounds, known as kitchen-middens, on the Danish and Scotch
coasts. These kitchen-midden folk may have been as early as
10,000 B.C. or earlier; the lake dwellings were probably occu-
pied continuously from 5,000 or 4,000 B.C. down almost to his-
toric times. Those early kitchen-midden people were among
the most barbaric of Neolithic peoples, their stone axes were
rough, and they had no domesticated animal except the dog.
The lake dwellers, on the other hand, had, in addition to the
dog, which was of a medium-sized breed, oxen, goats, and sheep.
Later on, as they were approaching the Bronze Age, they got
swine. The remains of cattle and goats prevail in their debris,
and, having regard to the climate and country about them, it
seems probable that these beasts were sheltered in the buildings
upon the piles in winter, and that fodder was stored for them.
Probably the beasts lived in the same houses with the people,
84, THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
as the men and beasts do now in Swiss chalets. The people
in the houses possibly milked the cows and goats, and milk per-
haps played as important a part in their economy as it does
in that of the mountain Swiss of to-day. But of that we are
not sure at present. Milk is not a natural food for adults; it
must have seemed queer stuff to take at first ; and it may have
been only after much breeding that a continuous supply of
milk was secured from cows and goats. Some people think that
the use of milk, cheese, butter, and other milk products came
later into human life when men became nomadic. The writer
is, however, disposed to give the Neolithic men credit for hav-
ing discovered milking. The milk, if they did use it (and,
no doubt, in that case sour curdled milk also, but not well-
made cheese and butter), they must have kept in earthenware
pots, for they had pottery, though it was roughly hand-made
pottery and not the shapely product of the potter's wheel. They
eked out this food supply by hunting. They killed and ate
red deer and roe deer, bison and wild boar. And they ate the
fox, a rather high-flavoured meat, and not what any one would
eat in a world of plenty. Oddly enough, they do not seem to
have eaten the hare, although it was available as food.
They are supposed to have avoided eating it, as some savages
are said to avoid eating it to this day, because they feared that
the flesh of so timid a creature might make them, by a sort of
infection, cowardly. 1
Of their agricultural methods we know very little. No
ploughs and no hoes have been found. They were of wood and
have perished. Neolithic men cultivated and ate wheat, barley,
and millet, but they knew nothing of oats or rye. Their grain
they roasted, ground between stones and stored in pots, to be
eaten when needed. And they made exceedingly solid and heavy
bread, because round flat slabs of it have been got out of these
deposits. Apparently they had no yeast. If they had no yeast,
then they had no fermented drink. One sort of barley that
they had is the sort that was cultivated by the ancient Greeks,
Romans, and Egyptians, and they also had an Egyptian variety
of wheat, showing that their ancestors had brought or derived
this cultivation from the south-east. The centre of diffusion of
wheat was somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region. A
Caesar do Bella Gallico says the Britons tabooed hare, fowl, and
goose. G. Wh.
NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 85
wild form is still found in the neighbourhood of Mt. Hermon
(see Footnote to Chap. XIV, 1). When the lake dwellers
sowed their little patches of wheat in Switzerland, they were
already following the immemorial practice of mankind. The
seed must have been brought age by age from that distant centre
of diffusion. In the ancestral lands of the south-east men had
already been sowing wheat perhaps for thousands of years. 1
Those lake dwellers also ate peas, and crab-apples the only
apples that then existed in the world. Cultivation and selection
had not yet produced the apple of to-day.
They dressed chiefly in skins, but they also made a rough
cloth of flax. Fragments of that flaxen cloth have been dis-
covered. Their nets were made of flax; they had as yet no
knowledge of hemp and hempen rope. With the coming of
bronze, their pins and ornaments increased in number. There
is reason to believe they set great store upon their hair,
wearing it in large shocks with pins of bone and afterwards
6f metal. To judge from the absence of realistic carvings or
engravings or paintings, they either did not decorate their gar-
ments or decorated them with plaids, spots, interlacing designs,
or similar conventional ornament. Before the coming of bronze
there is no evidence of stools or tables; the Neolithic people
probably squatted on their clay floors. There were no cats in
these lake dwellings; no mice or rats had yet adapted them-
selves to human dwellings ; the cluck of the hen was not as yet
added to the sounds of human life, nor the domestic egg to its
diet. 2
The chief tool and weapon of Neolithic man was his axe;
his next the bow and arrow. His arrow-heads were of flint,
Old World peoples who had entered upon the Neolithic stage grew
and ate wheat, but the American Indians must have developed agriculture
independently in America after their separation from the Old World
populations. They never had wheat. Their cultivation was maize, In-
dian corn, a New World grain.
a Poultry and hens' eggs were late additions to the human cuisine, in
spite of the large part they now play in our dietary. The hen is not
mentioned in the Old Testament (but note the allusion to an egg, Job
vi, 6) nor by Homer. Up to about 1,500 B.C. the only fowls in the world
were jungle denizens in India and Burmah. The crowing of jungle cocks
is noted by Glasfurd in his admirable accounts of tiger shooting as the
invariable preliminary of dawn in the Indian jungle. Probably poultry
were first domesticated in Burmah. They got to China, according to the
records, only about 1,100 B.C. They reached Greece via Persia before the
time of Socrates. In the New Testament the crowning of the cock re-
proaches Peter for his desertion of the Master.
86 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
beautifully made, and he lashed them tightly to their shafts.
Probably he prepared the ground for his sowing with a pole,
or a pole upon which he had stuck a stag's horn. Fish he
hooked or harpooned. These implements no doubt stood about
in the interior of the house, from the walls of which hung his
fowling-nets. On the floor, which was of clay or trodden cow-
dung (after the fashion of hut floors in India to-day), stood
pots and jars and woven baskets containing grain, milk, and
such-like food. Some of the pots and pans hung by rope loops
to the walls. At one end of the room, and helping to keep it
warm in winter by their animal heat, stabled the beasts. The
urns, the first probably representing a lake.- dutelluLcr
After
children took the cows and goats out to graze, and brought them
in at night before the wolves and bears came prowling.
Since Neolithic man had the bow, he probably also had
stringed instruments, for the rhythmic twanging of a bow-
string seems almost inevitably to lead to that. He also had
earthenware drums across which skins were stretched ; perhaps
also he made drums by stretching skins over hollow tree stems. 1
We do not know when man began to sing, but evidently he was
making music, and since he had words, songs were no doubt
being made. To begin with, perhaps, he just let his voice loose
as one may hear Italian peasants now behind their ploughs
singing songs without words. After dark in the winter he sat
in his house and talked and sang and made implements by
1 Later Palaeolithic bone whistles are known. One may guess that reed
pipes were an early invention.
NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 87
touch rather than sight. His lighting must have been poor,
and chiefly firelight, but there was probably always some fire
in the village, summer or winter. Fire was too troublesome to
make for men to be willing to let it out readily. Sometimes a
great disaster happened to those pile villages, the fire got free,
and they were burnt out. The Swiss deposits contain clear
evidence of such catastrophes.
All this we gather from the remains of the Swiss pile dwell-
ings, and such was the character of the human life that spread
over Europe, coming from the south and from the east with
the forests as, 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, the reindeer and
the Reindeer men passed away. It is evident that we have here
a way of life already separated by a great gap of thousands of
years of invention from its original Palaeolithic stage. The
steps by which it rose from that condition we can only guess
at. From being a hunter hovering upon the outskirts of flocks
and herds of wild cattle and sheep, and from being a co-hunter
with the dog, man by insensible degrees may have developed a
sense of proprietorship in the beasts and struck up a friendship
with his canine competitor. ITe learnt to turn the cattle when
they wandered too far; he brought his better brain to bear to
guide them to fresh pasture. He hemmed the beasts into
valleys and enclosures where he could be sure to find them again.
He fed them when they starved, and so slowly he tamed them.
Perhaps his agriculture began with the storage of fodder. He
reaped, no doubt, before he sowed. The Paleolithic ancestor
away in that unknown land of origin to the south-east first sup-
plemented the precarious meat supply of the hunter by eating
roots and fruits and wild grains. Man storing graminiferous
grasses for his cattle might easily come to beat out the grain
for himself.
All these early beginnings must have taken place far back
in time, and in regions of the world that have still to be effec-
tively explored by the archaeologists. They were probably going
on in Asia or Africa, in what is now the bed of the Mediter-
ranean, or in the region of the Indian Ocean, while the Rein-
deer man was developing his art in Europe. The Neolithic
men who drifted over Europe and Western Asia 12,000 or
10,000 years ago were long past these beginnings; they were
88 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
already close, a few thousand years, to the dawn of written
tradition and the remembered history of mankind. Without
any very great shock or break, bronze came at last into human
life, giving a great advantage in warfare to those tribes who
first obtained it. Written history had already begun before
weapons of iron came into Europe to supersede bronze.
Already in those days a sort of primitive trade had sprung
up. Bronze and bronze weapons, and such rare and hard stones
as jade, gold because of its plastic and ornamental possibilities,
and skins and flax-net and cloth, were being swapped and stolen
and passed from hand to hand over great stretches of country.
Salt also was probably being traded. On a meat dietary men
can live without salt, but grain-consuming people need it just
as herbivorous animals need it. Hopf says that bitter tribal wars
have been carried on by the desert tribes of the Soudan in re-
cent years for the possession of the salt deposits between Fezzan
and Murzuk. To begin with, barter, blackmail, tribute, and
robbery by violence passed into each other by insensible de-
grees. Men got what they wanted by such means as they could.
5
So far we have been telling of a history without events, a
history of ages and periods and stages in development. But be-
fore we conclude this portion of the human story, we must
record what was probably an event of primary importance and
at first perhaps of tragic importance to developing mankind,
and that was the breaking in of the Atlantic waters to the great
Mediterranean valley.
The reader must keep in mind that we are endeavouring to
give him plain statements that he can take hold of comfortably.
But both in the matter of our time charts and the three maps
we have given of prehistoric geography there is necessarily much
speculative matter. We have dated the last Glacial Age and
the appearance of the true men as about 40,000 or 35,000 years
ago. Please bear that "about" in mind. The truth may be
60,000 or 20,000. But it is no good saying "a very long time"
or "ages" ago, because then the reader will not know whether
we mean centuries or millions of years. And similarly in these
maps we give, they represent not the truth, but something like
the truth. The outline of the land was "some such outline."
NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 89
There were such seas and such land masses. But both Mr.
Horrabin, who has drawn these maps, and I, who have incited
him to do so, have preferred to err on the timid side. We are
not geologists enough to launch out into original research in
these matters, and so we have stuck to the 40-fathom line and
the recent deposits as our guides for our postglacial map and
for the map of 12,000 to 10,000 B.C. But in one matter we
have gone beyond these guides. It is practically certain that
at the end of the last Glacial Age the Mediterranean was a
couple of land-locked sea basins, not connected or only con-
nected by a torrential overflow river. The eastern basin was
the fresher; it was fed by the Nile, the "Adriatic' river, the
"Red-Sea" river, and perhaps by a river that poured down
amidst the mountains that are now the Greek Archipelago
from the very much bigger Sea of Central Asia that then existed.
Almost certainly human beings, and possibly even Neolithic
men, wandered over that now lost Mediterranean valley.
The reasons for believing this are very good and plain. To
this day the Mediterranean is a sea of evaporation. The rivers
that flow into it do not make up for the evaporation from its
surface. There is a constant current of water pouring into
the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, and another current
streaming in from the Bosporus' and Black Sea. For the
Black Sea gets more water than it needs from the big rivers
that flow into it; it is an overflowing sea, while the Mediter-
ranean is a thirsty sea. From which it must be plain that when
the Mediterranean was cut off both from the Atlantic Ocean
and the Black Sea it must have been a shrinking sea with its wa-
ters sinking to a much lower level than those of the ocean out-
side. This is the case of the Caspian Sea to-day. Still more
so is it the case with the Dead Sea.
But if this reasoning is sound, then where to-day roll the
blue waters of the Mediterranean there must once have been
great areas of land, and land with a very agreeable climate.
This was probably the case during the last Glacial Age, and
we do not know how near it was to our time when the change
occurred that brought back the ocean waters into the Mediter-
ranean basin. Certainly there must have been Grimaldi peo-
ple, and perhaps even Azilian and Neolithic people going about
in the valleys and forests of these regions that are now sub-
merged. The Neolithic Dark Whites, the people of the Mediter-
90 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
ranean race, may have gone far towards the beginnings of settle-
ment and civilization in that great lost Mediterranean valley.
Mr. W. B. Wright l gives us some very stimulating sugges-
tions here. He suggests that in the Mediterranean basin there
were two lakes, "one a fresh-water lake, in the eastern depres-
sion, which drained into the other in the western depression. It
is interesting to think what must have happened when the
ocean level rose once more as a result of the dissipation of the
ice-sheets, and its waters began to pour over into the Mediter-
ranean area. The inflow, small at first, must have ultimately
increased to enormous dimensions, as the channel was slowly
lowered by erosion and the ocean level slowly rose. If there
were any unconsolidated materials on the sill of the Strait,
the result must have been a genuine debacle, and if we consider
the length of time which even an enormous torrent would take
to fill such a basin as that of the Mediterranean, we must con-
clude that this result was likely to have been attained in any
case. Now, this may seem all the wildest speculation, but it
is not entirely so, for if we examine a submarine contour map
of the Straits of Gibraltar, we find there is an enormous valley
running up from the Mediterranean deep, right through the
Straits, and trenching some distance out on to the Atlantic
shelf. This valley or gorge is probably the work of the inflow-
ing waters of the ocean at the termination of the period of
interior drainage."
This refilling of the Mediterranean, which by the rough
chronology we are employing in this book may have happened
somewhen between 30,000 and 10,000 B.C., must have been one
of the greatest single events in the pre-history of our race. If
the later date is the truer, then, as the reader will see plainly
enough after reading the next two chapters, the crude be-
ginnings of civilization, the first lake dwellings and the first
cultivation, were probably round that eastern Levantine Lake
into which there flowed not only the Nile, but the two great
rivers that are now the Adriatic and the Red Sea. Suddenly
the ocean waters began to break through over the westward hills
and to pour in upon these primitive peoples the lake that
had been their home and friend became their enemy ; its waters
rose and never abated; their settlements were submerged; the
waters pursued them in their flight. Day by day and year by
*The Quaternary Ice Age.
NKOIJTHTC MAN IN EUROPE 91
year the waters spread up the valleys and drove mankind be-
fore them. Many must have been surrounded and caught by
the continually rising salt flood. It knew no check; it came
faster and faster ; it rose over the tree-tops, over the hills, until
it had filled the whole basin of the present Mediterranean and
until it lapped the mountain cliffs of Arabia and Africa. Far
away, long before the dawn of history, this catastrophe occurred.
XI
EARLY THOUGHT
1. Primitive Philosophy. 2. The Old Man in Religion.
3. Fear and Hope in Religion. 4. Stars and Seasons.
5. Story-telling and Myths-making. 6. Complex Ori-
gins of Religion.
BEFORE we go on to tell how 6,000 or 7,000 years ago
men began to gather into the first towns and to develop
something more than the loose-knit tribes that had
hitherto been their highest political association, something must
be said about the things that were going on inside these brains
of which we have traced the growth and development through
a period of 500,000 years from the ape-man stage.
What was man thinking about himself and about the world
in those remote days ?
At first he thought very little about anything but immedi-
ate things. At first he was busy thinking such things as : "Here
is a bear; what shall I do?" Or "There is a squirrel; how
can I get it V Until language had developed to some extent
there could have been little thinking beyond the range of actual
experience, for language is the instrument of thought as book-
keeping is the instrument of business. It records and fixes and
enables thought to get on to more and more complex ideas. It
is the hand of the mind to hold and keep. Primordial man, be-
fore he could talk, probably saw very vividly, mimicked very
cleverly, gestured, laughed, danced, and lived, without much
speculation about whence he came or why he lived. Hb feared
the dark, no doubt, and thunderstorms and big animals and
queer things and whatever he dreamt about, and no doubt he did
things to propitiate what he feared or to change his luck and
92
EARLY THOUGHT 93
please the imaginary powers in rock and beast and river. He
made no clear distinction between animate and inanimate
things ; if a stick hurt him, he kicked it ; if the river foamed
and flooded, he thought it was hostile. His thought was prob-
ably very much at the level of a bright little contemporary
boy of four or five. He had the same subtle unreasonableness
of transition and the same limitations. But since he had little
or no speech he would do little to pass on the fancies that came
to him, and develop any tradition or concerted acts about them.
The drawings even of Late Palaeolithic man do not suggest
that he paid any attention to sun or moon or stars or trees. He
was preoccupied only with animals and men. Probably he
took day and night, sun and stars, trees and mountains, as
being in the nature of things as a child takes its meal times
and its nursery staircase for granted. So far as we can judge,
he drew no fantasies, no ghosts or anything of that sort. The
Reindeer men's drawings are fearless familiar things, with no
hint about them of any religious or occult feelings. There is
scarcely anything that we can suppose to be a religious or mysti-
cal symbol at all in his productions. ~No doubt he had a cer-
tain amount of what is called fetishism in his life ; he did things
we should now think unreasonable to produce desired ends, for
that is all fetishism amounts to; it is only incorrect science
based on guess-work or false analogy, and entirely different in
its 'nature from religion. No doubt he was excited by his
dreams, and his dreams mixed up at times in his mind with his
waking impressions and puzzled him. Since he buried his dead,
and since even the later Neanderthal men seem to have buried
their dead, and apparently with food and weapons, it has been
argued that he had a belief in a future life. But it is just as
reasonable to suppose that early men buried their dead with f opd
and weapons because they doubted if they were dead, which is
not the same thing as believing them to have immortal spirits,
and that their belief in their continuing vitality was reinforced
by dreams of the departed. They may have ascribed a sort of
were-wolf existence to the dead, and wished to propitiate them.
The Reindeer man, we feel, was too intelligent and too like
ourselves not to have had some speech, but quite probably it
was not very serviceable for anything beyond direct statement
or matter-of-fact narrative. He lived in a larger community
than the Neanderthaler, but how large we do not know. Ex-
94 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
cept when game is swarming, hunting communities must not
keep together in large bodies or they will starve. The Indians
who depend upon the caribou in Labrador must be living under
circumstances rather like those of the Reindeer men. They
scatter in small family groups, as the caribou scatter in search
of food; but when the deer collect for the seasonal migration,
the Indians also collect. That is the time for trade and feasts
and marriages. The simplest American Indian is 10,000 years
more sophisticated than the Reindeer man, but probably that
sort of gathering and dispersal was also the way of Reindeer
men. At Solutre in France there are traces of v great camping
and feasting place. There was no doubt an exchange of news
there, but one may doubt if there was anything like an exchange
of ideas. One sees no scope in such a life for theology or philos-
ophy or superstition or speculation. Fears, yes; but unsystem-
atic fears ; fancies and freaks of the imagination, but personal
and transitory freaks and fancies.
Perhaps there was a certain power of suggestion in these en-
counters. A fear really felt needs few words for its transmis-
sion ; a value set upon something may be very simply conveyed.
In these questions of primitive thought and religion, we
must remember that the lowly and savage peoples of to-day prob-
ably throw very little light on the mental state of men before
the days of fully developed language. Primordial man could
have had little or no tradition before the development of speech.
All savage and primitive peoples of to-day, on the contrary, are
soaked in tradition the tradition of thousands of generations.
They may have weapons like their remote ancestors and methods
like them, but what were slight and shallow impressions on
the minds of their predecessors are now deep and intricate
grooves worn throughout the intervening centuries generation
by generation.
2
Certain very fundamental things there may have been in
men's minds long before the coming of speech. Chief among
these must have been fear of the Old Man of the tribe. The
young of the primitive squatt ing-place grew up under that fear.
Objects associated with him were probably forbidden. Every
one was forbidden to touch his spear or to sit in his place, just
EARLY THOUGHT 95
as to-day little boys must not touch father's pipe or sit in his
chair. He was probably the master of all the women. The
youths of the little community had to remember that. The idea
of something forbidden , the idea of things being, as it is called,
tabu, not to be touched, not to be looked at, may thus have got
well into the human mind at a very early stage indeed. J. J.
Atkinson, in his Primal Law, an ingenious analysis of these
primitive tabus which are found among savage peoples all over
the world, the tabus that separate brother and sister, the tabus
that make a man run and hide from his stepHnother, traces them
to such a fundamental cause as this. Only by respecting this
primal law could the young male hope to escape the Old Man's
wrath. And the Old Man must have been an actor in many
a primordial nightmare. A disposition to propitiate him even
after he was dead is quite understandable. One was not sure
that he was dead. He might only be asleep or shamming.
Long after an Old Man was dead, when there was nothing to
represent him but a mound and a megalith, the women would
convey to their children how awful and wonderful he was. And
being still a terror to his own little tribe, it was easy to go on
to hoping that he would be a terror to other and hostile people.
In his life he had fought for his tribe, even if he had bullied
it. Why not when he was dead ? One sees that the Old Man
idea was an idea very natural to the primitive mind and capable
of great development. And opposed to the Old Man, more
human and kindlier, was the Mother, who helped and sheltered
ad advised. The psycho-analysis of Freud and Jung has done
much to help us to realize how great a part Father fear and
Mother love still play in the adaptation of the human mind
to social needs. They have made an exhaustive study of child-
ish and youthful dreams and imaginations, a study which has
done much to help in the imaginative reconstruction of the soul
of primitive man. It was, as it were, the soul of a powerful
child. He saw the universe in terms of the family herd. His
fear of, his abjection before, the Old Man mingled with his
fear of the dangerous animals about him. But the women god-
desses were kindlier and more subtle. They helped, they pro-
tected, they gratified and consoled. Yet at the same time there
was something about them less comprehensible than the direct
brutality of the Old Man, a greater mystery. So that the
Woman also had her vestiture of fear for him.
96 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
3
Another idea probably arose early out of the mysterious visita-
tion of infectious diseases, and that was the idea of unclean-
ness and of being accurst. From that, too, there may have
come an idea of avoiding particular places and persons, and
persons in particular phases of health. Here was the root of
another set of tabus. Then man, from the very dawn of his
mental life, may have had a feeling of the sinister about places
and things. Animals who dread traps, have that feeling. A
tiger will abandon its usual jungle route at the sight of a few
threads of cotton. 1 Like most young animals, young human
beings are easily made fearful of this or that by their nurses
and seniors. Here is another set of ideas, ideas of repulsion and
avoidance, that sprang up almost inevitably in men.
As soon as speech began to develop, it must have got to work
upon such fundamental feelings and begun to systematize them,
and keep them in mind. By talking together men would re-
inforce each other's fears, and establish a common tradition of
tabus of things forbidden and of things unclean. With the
idea of uncleanness would come ideas of cleansing and of re-
moving a curse. The cleansing would be conducted through
the advice and with the aid of wise old men or wise old women,
and in such cleansing would lie the germ of the earliest priest-
craft and witchcraft.
Speech from the first would be a powerful supplement to
the merely imitative education and to the education of cuffs and
blows conducted by a speechless parent. Mothers would tell their
young and scold their young. As speech developed, men would
find they had experiences and persuasions that gave them or
seemed to give them power. They would make secrets of these
things. There is a double streak in the human mind, a streak of
cunning secretiveness and a streak perhaps of later origin that
makes us all anxious to tell and astonish and impress each other.
Many people make secrets in order to have secrets to tell. These
secrets of early men they would convey to younger, more im-
pressionable people, more or less honestly and impressively in
some process of initiation. Moreover, the pedagogic spirit
overflows in the human mind; most people like "telling other
people not to." Extensive arbitrary prohibitions for the boys,
'Glasfurd's Rifle and Romance in the Indian Jungle, 1915.
EARLY THOUGHT 97
for the girls, for the women, also probably came very early into
human history.
Then the idea of the sinister has for its correlative the idea
of the propitious, and from that to the idea of making things
propitious by ceremonies is an easy step*.
Out of such ideas and a jumble of kindred ones grew the
first quasi-religious elements in human life. With every de-
velopment of speech it became possible to intensify and de-
velop the tradition of tabus and restraints and ceremonies.
There is not a savage or barbaric race to-day that is not held
in a net of such tradition. And with the coming of the primi-
tive herdsman there would be a considerable broadening out
of all this sort of practice. Things hitherto unheeded would
be found of importance in human affairs. Neolithic man was
nomadic in a different spirit from the mere daylight drift after
food of the primordial hunter. He was a herdsman upon whose
mind a sense of direction and the lie of the land had been
forced. He watched his flock by night as well as by day. The
sun by day and presently the stars by night helped to guide
his migrations ; he began to find after many ages that the stars
are steadier guides than the sun. He would begin to note
particular stars and star groups, and to distinguish any in-
dividual thing was, for primitive man, to believe it individu-
alized and personal. He would begin to think of the chief
stars as persons, very shining and dignified and trustworthy
persons looking at him like bright eyes in the night. His primi-
tive tillage strengthened his sense of the seasons. Particular
stars ruled his heavens when seedtime was due. Up to a cer-
tain p'oint, a mountain peak or what not, a bright star moved,
night after night. It stopped there, and then night after night
receded. Surely this was a sign, a silent, marvellous warning
to the wise. The beginnings of agriculture, we must remember,
were in the sub-tropical zone, or even nearer the equator, where
stars of the first magnitude shine with a splendour unknown
in more temperate latitudes.
And Neolithic man was counting, and falling under the spell
of numbers. There are savage languages that have no word
for any number above five. Some peoples cannot go above
98
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
two. But Neolithic man in the lands of his origin in Asia and
Africa even more than in Europe was already counting his
accumulating possessions. He was beginning to use tallies,
and wondering at the triangularity of three and the squareness
of four, and why some quantities like twelve were easy to
divide in all sorts of ways, and ethers, like thirteen, impossible.
Twelve became a
aioble, generous, and
familiar number to
him, and thirteen
rather an outcast and
disreputable one.
Probably man be-
gan reckoning time
by the clock of the
full and new moons.
Moonlight is an im-
'portant thing to herds-
men who no longer
merely hunt their
herds, but watch and
guard them. Moon-
light, too, was, per-
haps, his time for
love-making, as in-
deed it may have been
for primordial man
and the ground ape
ancestor before him.
But from the phases
of the moon, as his
tillage increased,
man's attitude would
go on to the greater cycle of the seasons. Primordial man prob-
ably only drifted before the winter as the days grew cold. Neo-
lithic man knew surely that the winter would come, and stored
his fodder and presently his grain. He had to fix a seedtime,
a propitious seedtime, or his sowing was a failure. The earliest
recorded reckoning is by moons and by generations of men.
The former seems to be the case in the Book of Genesis, where,
if one reads the great ages of the patriarchs who lived before
A CARVED STATUE ("MENHIR") OF THE NEO-
LITHIC PEBIOD A CONTRAST TO THE FREEDOM
AND VIGOUR OF PALAEOLITHIC ART.
EARLY THOUGHT 99
the flood as lunar months instead of years, Methusaleh and the
others are reduced to a credible length of life. But with agri-
culture began the difficult task of squaring the lunar month
with the solar year; a task which has left its scars on our
calendar to-day. Easter shifts uneasily from year to year, to
the great discomfort of holiday-makers; it is now inconveni-
ently early and now late in the season because of this ancient
reference of time to the moon.
And when men began to move with set intention from place
to place with their animal and other possessions, then they
would begin to develop the idea of other places in which they
were not, and to think of what might be in those other places.
And in any valley where they lingered for a time, they would,
remembering how they got there, ask, "How did this or that
other thing get here ?" They would begin to wonder what was
beyond the mountains, and where the sun went when it set,
and what was above the clouds.
5
The capacity for telling things increased with their vocabu-
lary. The simple individual fancies, the unsystematic fetish
tricks and fundamental tabus of Palaeolithic man began to be
handed on and made into a more consistent system. Men be-
gan to tell stories about themselves, about the tribe, about its
tabus and why they had to be, about the world and the why
for the world. A tribal mind came into existence, a tradition.
Palaeolithic man was certainly more of a free individualist,
more of an artist, as well as more of a savage than Neolithic
man. Neolithic man was coming under prescription ; he could
be trained from his youth and told to do things and not to do
things; he was not so free to form independent ideas of his
own about things. He had thoughts given to him ; he was under
a new power of suggestion. And to have more words and to
attend more to words is not simply to increase mental power;
words themselves are powerful things and dangerous things.
Palaeolithic man's words, perhaps, were chiefly just names. He
used them for what they were. But Neolithic man was think-
ing about these words, he was thinking about a number of things
with a great deal of verbal confusion, and getting to some odd
conclusions. In speech he had woven a net to bind his race
100 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
together, but also it was a net about his feet. Man was bind-
ing himself into new and larger and more efficient combina-
tions indeed, but at a price. One of the most notable things
about the Neolithic Age is the total absence of that free, direct
artistic impulse which was the supreme quality of later Palaeo-
lithic man. We find much industry, much skill, polished im-
plements, pottery with conventional designs, co-operation upon
all sorts of things, but no evidence of personal creativeness. 1
Self-suppression is beginning for men. Man has entered upon
the long and tortuous and difficult path towards a life for the
common good, with all its sacrifice of personal impulse, which he
is still treading to-day.
Certain things appear in the mythology of mankind again
and again. Neolithic man was enormously impressed by ser-
pents and he no longer took the sun for granted. Nearly
everywhere that Neolithic culture went, there went a disposition
to associate the sun and the serpent in decoration and worship.
This primitive serpent worship spread ultimately far beyond
the regions where the snake is of serious practical importance in
human life.
With the beginnings of agriculture a fresh set of ideas arose
in men's minds. We have already indicated how easily and
naturally men may have come to associate the idea of sowing
with a burial. Sir J. G. Frazer has pursued the development
of this association in the human mind, linking up with it the
conception of special sacrificial persons who are killed at seed-
time, the conception of a specially purified class of people to
kill these sacrifices, the first priests, and the conception of a
sacrament, a ceremonial feast in which the tribe eats portions
of the body of the victim in order to share in the sacrificial
benefits.
Out of all these factors, out of the Old Man tradition, out of
the emotions that surround Women for men and Men for
1 Ludwig Hopf, in The Human Species, calls the later Palaeolithic art
"masculine" and the Neolithic "feminine." The pottery was made by
women, he says, and that accounts for it. But the arrow-heads were made
by men, and there was nothing to prevent Neolithic men from taking
scraps of bone or slabs of rock and carving them had they dared. We
suggest they did not dare to do so.
EARLY THOUGHT
101
women, out of the desire to escape infection? J >and
out of the desire for power and success tnrough' magic/ but* bf
the sacrificial tradition of seedtime, and out of a number of like
'Bnnu&e Acu
(S^
beliefs and mental experiments and misconceptions, a complex
something was growing up in the lives of men which was be-
ginning to bind them together mentally and emotionally in a
common life and action. This something we may call religion
102 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
(Lat. religw.e, to bino *). It was not a simple or logical some-
tiling, 'it was a ; cangle of ideas about commanding beings and
spirits, about gods, about all sorts of "musts" and "must-nots."
Like all other human matters, religion has grown. It must
be clear from what has gone before that primitive man much
less his ancestral apes and his ancestral Mesozoic mammals
could have had no idea of God or Religion; only very slowly
did his brain and his powers of comprehension become capable
of such general conceptions. Religion is something that has
grown up with and through human association, and God has
been and is still being discovered by man.
This book is not a theological book, and it is not for us to
embark upon theological discussion; but it is a part, a neces-
sary and central part, of the history of man to describe the
dawn and development of his religious ideas and their influ-
ence upon his activities. All these factors we have noted must
have contributed to this development, and various writers have
laid most stress upon one or other of them. Sir J. G. Erazer
has been the leading student of the derivation of sacraments
from magic sacrifices. Grant Allen, following Herbert Spencer,
in his Evolution of the Idea of God, laid stress chiefly on the
posthumous worship of the "Old Man." Sir E. B. Tylor
(Primitive Culture) gave his attention mainly to the disposi-
tion of primitive man to ascribe a soul to every object animate
and inanimate. Mr. A. E. Crawley, in The Tree of Life, has
called attention to other centres of impulse and emotion, and
particularly to sex as a source of deep excitement. The thing
we have to bear in mind is that Neolithic man was still mentally
undeveloped, he could be confused and illogical to a degree
quite impossible to an educated modern person. Conflicting
and contradictory ideas could lie in his mind without challeng-
ing one another; now one thing ruled his thoughts intensely
and vividly and now another; his fears, his acts, were still
disconnected as children's are.
Confusedly under the stimulus of the need and possibility of
co-operation and a combined life, Neolithic mankind was feel-
ing out for guidance and knowledge. Men were becoming aware
that personally they needed protection and direction, cleansing
1 But Cicero says relegere, "to read over," and the "binding" by those
who accept religare is often written of as being merely the binding of a
vow.
EARLY THOUGHT
103
from impurity, power beyond their own strength. Confusedly
in response to that demand, bold men, wise men, shrewd and
cunning men were arising to become magicians, priests, chiefs,
EUROPE
EGYPT [MESOPOTAMIA
15.000 Ee.-
Men crttfcrtrux upon "NcolitkLc
c4^/-r^
fera*
andxxc .
Agcurulfoire bccnnruna
rvcwixic^t* ttvcn
15.000 -
v 5$
.000 -
\ forest (transitum)
Period
Aiv&uv
10,000--
"Neolitklc m^n
yr > i *y^ <\vnct vrvti?
Eut-opc j^
olithic
8.000 --
T^uwa-^
culture
(levclopuT.
oumcrt^m CT^VIXZ*
3 atlon daxinvs'
6.000 -
5.ooo -
4.000 -
First- TXrruLstii
^. _ (7/ J7j
TKeRjramuLs-
"Mlopur & Et-ixlu
Firart Sxurvcrtan
urrvfcuux
3000
2.000 - -
1.000 - -
^wcamng oF Aruazv
Iron
TV I e x^k.t^<ie
;^ J u,liuj
f tke G t* c
Ca.e^.r
Oftntcoti. *
Irxm
& t-
<? hristiAtt S r^
19*9 "-
J
TIME DIAGRAM SHOWING THE GENEKAL DUBATION OF THE NEOLITHIC
PERIOD IN WHICH EARLY THOUGHT DEVELOPED.
By this scale, the diagram on p. 47 of the period since the earliest
subhuman traces would be 12 feet long, and the diagram of geological
time (ch. ii, 2) somewhere between 1,500 feet and three miles.
and kings. They are not to be thought of as cheats or usurpers
of power, nor the rest of mankind as their dupes. All men
are mixed in their motives; a hundred things move men to
104 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
seek ascendancy over other men, but not all such motives are
base or bad. The magicians usually believed more or less
in their own magic, the priests in their ceremonies, the chiefs
in their right. The history of mankind henceforth is a history
of more or less blind endeavours to conceive a common purpose
in relation to which all men may live happily, and to create and
develop a common consciousness and a common stock of knowl-
edge which may serve and illuminate that purpose. In a vast
variety of forms this appearance of kings and priests and magic
men was happening all over the world under Neolithic condi-
tions. Everywhere mankind was seeking where knowledge and
mastery and magic power might reside; everywhere individual
men were willing, honestly or dishonestly, to rule, to direct, or to
be the magic beings who would reconcile the confusions of the
community. Another queer development of the later Paleo-
lithic and Neolithic ages was the development of self -mutilation.
Men began to cut themselves about, to excise noses, ears, fingers,
teeth and the like, and to attach all sorts of superstitious ideas
to these acts. Many children to-day pass through a similar
phase in their mental development. There is a phase in the life
of most little girls when they are not to be left alone with a pair
of scissors for fear that they will cut off their hair. No ani-
mal does anything of this sort.
In many ways the simplicity, directness, and detachment of
a later Palaeolithic rock-painter appeal more to modern sympa-
thies than does the state of mind of these Neolithic men, full
of the fear of some ancient Old Man who had developed into
a tribal God obsessed by ideas of sacrificial propitiations, mutila-
tions, and magic murder. No doubt the reindeer hunter was
a ruthless hunter and a combative and passionate creature, but
he killed for reasons we can still understand; Neolithic man,
under the sway of talk and a confused thought process, killed
on theory, he killed for monstrous and now incredible ideas, he
killed those he loved through fear and under direction. Those
Neolithic men not only made human sacrifices at seedtime;
there is every reason to suppose they sacrificed wives and slaves
at the burial of their chieftains; they killed men, women, and
children whenever they were under adversity and thought the
'rods were athirst. They practised infanticide. All these things
passed on into the Bronze Age.
Hitherto a social consciousness had been asleep and not even
EARLY THOUGHT 105
dreaming in human history. Before it awakened it produced
nightmares.
Away beyond the dawn of history, 3,000 or 4,000 years ago,
one thinks of the Wiltshire uplands in the twilight of a mid-
summer day's morning. The torches pale in the growing light.
One has a dim apprehension of a procession through the avenue
of stone, of priests, perhaps fantastically dressed with skins
and horns and horrible painted masks not the robed and
bearded dignitaries our artists represent the Druids to have
been of chiefs in skins adorned with necklaces of teeth and
bearing spears and axes, their great heads of hair held up with
pins of bone, of women in skins or flaxen robes, of a great
peering crowd of shock-headed men and naked children. They
have assembled from many distant places; the ground between
the avenues and Silbury Hill is dotted with their encamp-
ments. A certain festive cheerfulness prevails. And amidst
the throng march the appointed human victims, submissive,
helpless, staring towards the distant smoking altar at which
they are to die that the harvests may be good and the tribe
increase. ... To that had life progressed 3,000 or 4,000 years
ago from its starting-place in the slime of the tidal beaches.
XII
THE RACES OF MANKIND
1. 7s Mankind Still Differentiating? 2. The Main Races
of Mankind. 3. The Brunei Peoples.
IT is necessary now to discuss plainly what is meant by a
phrase, used often very carelessly, "The Races of Man-
kind."
It must be evident from what has already been explained
in Chapter III that man, so widely spread and subjected there-
fore to great differences of climate, consuming very different
food in different regions, attacked by different enemies, must
always have been undergoing considerable local modification
and differentiation. Man, like every other species of living
thing, has constantly been tending to differentiate into several
species; wherever a body of men has been cut off, in islands
or oceans or by deserts or mountains, from the rest of humanity,
it must have begun very soon to develop special characteristics,
specially adapted to the local conditions. But, on the other
hand, man is usually a wandering and enterprising animal
for whom there exist few insurmountable barriers. Men imi-
tate men, fight and conquer them, interbreed, one people with
another. Concurrently for thousands of years there have been
two sets of forces at work, one tending to separate men into a
multitude of local varieties, and another to remix and blend
these varieties together before a separate series has been
established.
These two sets of forces may have fluctuated in this relative
effect in the past. Palaeolithic man, for instance, may have
been more of a wanderer, he may have drifted about over a
much greater area, than later Neolithic man ; he was less fixed
to any sort of home or lair, he was tied by fewer possessions.
Being a hunter, he was obliged to follow the migrations of his
106
THE RACES OF MANKIND 107
ordinary quarry. A few bad seasons may have shifted him
hundreds of miles. He may therefore have mixed very widely
and developed few varieties over the greater part of the world.
The appearance of agriculture tended to tie those com-
munities of mankind that took it up to the region in which it
was most conveniently carried on, and so to favour differentia-
tion. Mixing or differentiation is not dependent upon a higher
or lower stage of civilization; many savage tribes wander now
for hundreds of miles ; many English villagers in the eighteenth
century, on the other hand, had never been more than eight
or ten miles from their villages, neither they nor their fathers
nor grandfathers before them. Hunting peoples often have
enormous range. The Labrador country, for instance, is in-
habited by a few thousand Indians, who follow the one great
herd of caribou as it wanders yearly north and then south
again in pursuit of food. This mere handful of people covers
a territory as large as France. Nomad peoples also range very
widely. Some Kalmuck tribes are said to travel nearly a thou-
sand miles between summer and winter pasture.
It carries out this suggestion, that Palaeolithic man ranged
widely and was distributed thinly indeed but uniformly,
throughout the world, that the Palaeolithic remains we find are
everywhere astonishingly uniform. To quote Sir John Evans,
"The implements in distant lands are so identical in form and
character with the British specimens that they might have been
manufactured by the same hands. . . . On the banks of the
Nile, many hundreds of feet above its present level, implements
of the European types have been discovered; while in Soma-
liland, in an ancient river-valley at a great elevation above the
sea, Sir H. W. Seton-Karr has collected a large number of
implements formed of flint and quartzite, which, judging from
their form and character, might have been dug out of the drift-
deposits of the Somme and the Seine, the Thames or the ancient
Solent."
Phases of spreading and intermixture have probably alter-
nated with phases of settlement and specialization in the history
of mankind. But up to a few hundred years ago it is probable
that since the days of the Palaeolithic Age at least mankind has
on the whole been differentiating. The species has differentiated
in that period into a very great number of varieties, many of
which have reblended with others, which have spread and under-
108 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
gone further differentiation or become extinct. Wherever
there has been a strongly marked local difference of condi-
tions and a check upon intermixture, there one is almost obliged
to assume a variety of mankind must have appeared. Of such
local varieties there must have been a great multitude.
In one remote corner of the world, Tasmania, a little cut-
off population of people remained in the early Paleolithic
stage until the discovery of that island by the Dutch in 1642.
They are now, unhappily, extinct. The last Tasmanian died in
1877. They may have been cut off from the rest of mankind
for 15,000 or 20,000 or 25,000 years.
But among the numerous obstacles and interruptions to in-
termixture there have been certain main barriers, such as the
Atlantic Ocean, the highlands, once higher, and the now van-
ished seas of Central Asia and the like, which have cut off great
groups of varieties from other great groups of varieties over
long periods of time. These separated groups of varieties devel-
oped very early certain broad resemblances and differences.
Most of the varieties of men in eastern Asia and America,
but not all, have now this in common, that they have yellowish
buff skins, straight black hair, and often high cheek-bones.
Most of the native peoples of Africa south of the Sahara, but not
all, have black or blackish skins, flat noses, thick lips, and
frizzy hair. In north and western Europe a great number of
peoples have fair hair, blue eyes, and ruddy complexions; and
about the Mediterranean there is a prevalence of white-skinned
peoples with dark eyes and black hair. The black hair of many
of these dark whites is straight, but never so strong and wave-
less as the hair of the yellow peoples. It is straighter in
the east than in the west. In southern India we find brownish
and darker peoples with straight black hair, and these as we
pass eastward give place to more distinctly yellow peoples.
In scattered islands and in Papua and New Guinea we find
another series of black and brownish peoples of a more lowly
type with frizzy hair.
But it must be borne in mind that these are very loose-
fitting generalizations. Some of the areas and isolated pockets
of mankind in the Asiatic area may have been under conditions
more like those in the European area ; some of the African
areas are of a more Asiatic and less distinctively African type.
We find a wavy-haired, fairish, hairy-skinned race, the Ainu,
THE RACES OF MANKIND
109
in Japan. They are more like the Europeans in their facial
type than the surrounding yellow Japanese. They may be
a drifted patch of the whites or they may be a quite distinct
people. We find primitive black people in the Andaman Islands
far away from Australia and far away from Africa. There is
a streak of very negroid blood traceable in south Persia and
some parts of India. These are the "Asiatic" negroids. There
is little or no proof that all black people, the Australians, the
Asiatic negroids, and the negroes, derive from one origin, but
only that they have lived for vast periods under similar con-
ditions. We must not assume that human beings in the east-
ern Asiatic area were all differentiating in one direction and
all the human beings in Africa in another. There were great
currents of tendency, it is true, but there were also backwaters,
eddies, admixtures, readmixtures, and leakages from one main
area to the other. A coloured map of the world to show the
races would not present just four great areas of colour; it
would have to be dabbed over with a multitude of tints and
intermediate shades, simple here, mixed and overlapping there.
In the early Neolithic Period in Europe it may be 10,000
or 12,000 years ago or so man was differentiating all over the
world, and he had already differentiated into a number of
varieties, but he has never differentiated into different species.
A "species," we must remember, in biological language is dis-
110 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
tinguished from a "variety" by the fact that varieties can
interbreed, while species either do not do so or produce off-
spring which, like mules, are sterile. All mankind can inter-
breed freely, can learn to understand the same speech, can
adapt itself to co-operation. And in the present age, man is
probably no longer undergoing differentiation at all. Re-
admixture is now a far stronger force than differentiation. Men
mingle more and more. Mankind from the view of a biologist
is an animal species in a state of arrested differentiation and
possible readmixture.
2
It is only in the last fifty or sixty years that the varieties
of men came to be regarded in this light, as a tangle of differ-
entiations recently arrested or still in progress. Before that
time students of mankind, influenced, consciously or uncon-
sciously, by the story of Noah and the Ark and his three sons,
Shem, Ham, and Japhet, were inclined to classify men into
three or four great races and they were disposed to regard these
races as having always been separate things, descended from
originally separate ancestors. They ignored the great possi-
bilities of blended races and of special local isolations and varia-
tions. The classification has varied considerably, but there
has been rather too much readiness to assume that mankind
must be completely divisible into three or four main groups.
Ethnologists (students of race) have fallen into grievous dis-
putes about a multitude of minor peoples, as to whether they
were of this or that primary race or "mixed," or strayed early
forms, or what not. But all races are more or less mixed. There
are, no doubt, four main groups, but each is a miscellany, and
there are little groups that will not go into any of the four
main divisions.
Subject to these reservations, when it is clearly understood
that when we speak of these main divisions we mean not simple
and pure races, but groups of races, then they have a certain
convenience in discussion. Over the European and Mediter-
ranean area and western Asia there are, and have been for many
thousand years, white peoples, usually called the CAUCASIANS,
subdivided into two or three subdivisions, the northern blonds
or Nordic race, an alleged intermediate race about which many
authorities are doubtful, the so-called A 1 pi no raop. and the
THE RACES OF MANKIND
111
southern dark whites, the Mediterranean or Iberian race; over
eastern Asia and America a second group of races prevails, the
MONGOLIANS, generally with yellow skins, straight black hair,
and sturdy bodies ; over Africa the NEGROES, and in the region
of Australia and New Guinea the black, primitive Aus-
TEALOIDS. These are convenient terms, provided the student
bears in mind that they are not exactly defined terms. They
represent only the common characteristics of certain main
groups of races ; they leave out a number of little peoples who
belong properly to none of these divisions, and they disregard
the perpetual mixing where the main groups overlap.
3
The Mediterranean or
Iberian division of the
Caucasian race had a
wider range in early
times, and was a less spe-
cialized and distinctive
type than the Nordic. It
is very hard to define its
southward boundaries
from the Negro, or to
mark off its early traces
in Central Asia from
those of early Mongolians.
Wilfred Scawen Blunt 1 says that Huxley "had long suspected
a common origin of the Egyptians and the Dravidians of India,
perhaps a long belt of brown-skinned men from India to Spain
in very early days."
It is possible that this "belt" of Huxley's of dark-white and
brown-skinned men, this race of brunet-brown folk, ultimately
spread even farther than India ; that they reached to the shores
of the Pacific, and that they were everywhere the original
possessors of the Neolithic culture and the beginners of what
we call civilization. It is possible that these Brunet peoples
are so to speak the basic peoples of our modern world. The
Nordic and the Mongolian peoples may have been but north-
western and north-eastern branches from this more fundft-
*My Diaries, under date of July 25, 1894,
112
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
mental stem. Or the Nordic race may have been a branch,
while the Mongolian, like the Negro, may have been another
equal and distinct stem with which the brunet-browns met and
mingled in South China. Or the Nordic peoples also may
have developed separately from a paleolithic stage.
At some period in human history (see Elliot Smith's Migra-
tions of Early Culture) there seems to have been a special type
of Neolithic culture widely distributed in the world which had
a group of features so curious and so unlikely to have been
independently developed in different Regions of the earth,
as to compel us to believe that it was in effect one culture. It
reached through all the regions inhabited by the brunet Medi-
terranean race, and beyond through India, Further India, up
the Pacific coast of China, and it spread at last across the
Pacific and to Mexico and Peru. It was a coastal culture not
reaching deeply inland.
This peculiar development of the Neolithic culture, which
Elliot Smith called the heliolithic 1 culture, included many or
all of the following odd practices: (1) circumcision, (2) the
very queer custom of sending the father to bed when a child
1 "Sunstone" culture became of the sun worship and the megaliths.
This is not a very happily chosen term. It suggests a division equivalent
to paleolithic (old stone) and neolithic (new stone), whereas it is a sub-
division of the neolithic culture.
THE RACES OF MANKIND
113
is born, known as the couvade, (3) the practice of massage,
(4) the making of mummies, (5) megalithic monuments l (e.g.
Stonehenge), (6) artificial deformation of the heads of the
Kalmuck
Ameruuliaiv
woman.
young by bandages, (7) tattooing, (8) religious association of
the sun and the serpent, and (9) the use of the symbol known
as the swastika (see figure) for good luck. This odd little
(Jew of Algiers)
"Nordic
(Englishman)
symbol spins gaily round the world; it seems incredible that
men would have invented and made a pet of it twice over.
Elliot Smith traces these associated practices in a sort of
1 Megalithic monuments have been made quite recently by primitive
Indian peoples.
114.
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
THE RACES OF MANKIND 115
constellation all over this great Mediterranean-India Ocean-Pa-
cific area. Where one occurs, most of the others occur. They
link Brittany with Borneo and Peru. But this constellation
of practices does not crop up in the primitive homes of Nordic
or Mongolian peoples, nor does it extend southward much be-
yond equatorial Africa.
For thousands of years, from 15,000 to 1,000 B.C., such a
heliolithic Neolithic culture and its brownish possessors may
have been oozing round the world through
the warmer regions of the world, drifting by
canoes often across wide stretches of sea.
It was then the highest culture in the world ;
it sustained the largest, most highly de-
veloped communities. And its region of
origin may have been, as Elliot Smith sug-
gests, the Mediterranean and North African
region. It migrated slowly age by age. It
must have been spreading up the Pacific Coast and across the
island stepping-stones to America, long after it had passed
on into other developments in its areas of origin. Many of
the peoples of the East Indies, Melanesia and Polynesia were
etill in this heliolithic stage of development when they were
discovered by European navigators in the eighteenth century.
The first civilizations in Egypt and the Euphrates-Tigris val-
ley probably developed directly out of this widespread culture.
We will discuss later whether the Chinese civilization had a
different origin. The Semitic nomads of the Arabian desert
seem also to have had a heliolithic stage.
116
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
XIII
THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND
1. No One Primitive Language. 2. The Aryan Lan-
guages. 3. The Semitic Languages. 4. The Hamitic
Languages. 5. The Ural-Altaic Languages. 6. The
Chinese Languages. 7. Other Language Groups. 8. A
Possible Primitive Language Group. 9. Some Isolated
Languages.
IT is improbable that there was ever such a thing as a com-
mon human language. We know nothing of the language
of Palaeolithic man ; we do not even know whether Palaeo-
lithic man talked freely.
We know that Paleolithic man had a keen sense of form
and attitude, because of his drawings ; and it has been sug-
gested that he communicated his ideas very largely by gesture.
Probably such words as the earlier men used were mainly cries
of alarm or passion or names for concrete things, and in many
cases they were probably imitative sounds made by or associ-
ated with the things named. 1
The first languages were probably small collections of such
words ; they consisted of interjections and nouns. Probably the
nouns were said in different intonations to convey different
meanings. If Palaeolithic man had a word for "horse" or
"bear," he probably showed by tone or gesture whether he
meant "bear is coming," "bear is going," "bear is to be hunted,"
"dead bear," "bear has been here," "bear did this," and so
on. Only very slowly did the human mind develop methods
of indicating action and relationship in a formal manner.
*Sir Arthur Evans suggests that in America sign-language arose before
speech, because the sign-language is common to all Indians in North
America, whereas the languages are different. See his Anthropology and
the Classics. G. M.
117
118 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Modern languages contain many thousands of words, but the
earlier languages could have consisted only of a lew hundred.
It is said that even modern European peasants can get along
with something less than a thousand words, and it is quite
conceivable that so late as the Early Neolithic Period that was
the limit of the available vocabulary. Probably men did not
indulge in those days in conversation or description. For nar-
rative purposes they danced and acted rather than told. They
had no method of counting beyond a method of indicating two
by a dual number, and some way of expressing many. The
growth of speech was at first a very slow process indeed, and
grammatical forms and the expression of abstract ideas may
have come very late in human history, perhaps only 400 or
500 generations ago.
2
The students of languages (philologists) tell us that they are
unable to trace with certainty any common features in all the
languages of mankind. They cannot even find any elements
common to all the Caucasian languages. They find over great
areas groups of languages which have similar root words and
similar ways of expressing the same idea, but then they find
in other areas languages which appear to be dissimilar down
to their fundamental structure, which express action and rela-
tion by entirely dissimilar devices, and have an altogether dif-
ferent grammatical scheme. One great group of languages,
for example, now covers nearly all Europe and stretches out to
India; it includes English, French, German, Spanish, Italian,
Greek, Russian, Armenian, Persian, and various Indian tongues.
It is called the Indo-European or ARYAN family. The same
fundamental roots, the same grammatical ideas, are traceable
through all this family. Compare, for example, English father,
mother, German vater, mutter, Latin pater, mater, Greek pater,
meter, French pere, mere, Armenian hair, mair, Sanscrit pitar,
matar, etc., etc. In a similar manner the Aryan languages ring
the changes on a great number of fundamental words, / in the
Germanic languages becoming p in Latin, and so on. They
follow a law of variation called Grimm's Law. These languages
are not different things, they are variations of one thing. The
people who use these languages think in the same way.
THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 119
At one time in the remote past, in the Neolithic Age, that is
to say 6,000 years or more ago, there may have been one simple
original speech from which all these Aryan languages have
differentiated. Somewhere between Central Europe and West-
ern Asia there must have wandered a number of tribes suffi-
ciently intermingled to develop and use one tongue. It is
convenient here to call them the Aryan peoples. Sir H. H.
Johnston has called them "Aryan Russians/ 5 They belonged
mostly to the Caucasian group of races and to the blond
and northern subdivision of the group, to the Nordic race
that is.
Here one must sound a note of warning. There was a time
when the philologists were disposed to confuse languages and
races, and to suppose that people who once all spoke the same
tongue must be all of the same blood. That, however, is not
the case, as the reader will understand if he will think of the
negroes of the United States who now all speak English, or of
the Irish, who except for purposes of political demonstration
no longer speak the old Erse language but English, or of
the Cornish people, who have lost their ancient Keltic speech.
But what a common language does do, is to show that a com-
mon intercourse has existed, and the possibility of intermix-
ture; and if it does not point to a common origin, it points
at least to a common future.
But even this original Aryan language, which was a spoken
speech perhaps 4,000 or 3,000 B.C., was by no means a
primordial language or the language of a savage race. Its
earliest speakers were in or past the Neolithic stage of civiliza-
tion. It had grammatical forms and verbal devices of some com-
plexity. The vanished methods of expression of the later Palaeo-
lithic peoples, of the Azilians, or of the early Neolithic kitchen-
midden people for instance, were probably much cruder than
the most elementary form of Aryan.
Probably the Aryan group of languages became distinct in
a wide region of which the Danube, Dnieper, Don, and Volga
were the main rivers, a region that extended eastward beyond
the Ural mountains north of the Caspian Sea. The area over
which the Aryan speakers roamed probably did not for a long
time reach to the Atlantic or to the south of the Black Sea be-
yond Asia Minor. There was no effectual separation of Europe
from Asia then at the Bosporus. The Danube flowed east-
120 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
ward to a great sea that extended across the Volga region of
south-eastern Russia right into Turkestan, and included the
Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas of to-day. Perhaps it sent out
arms to the Arctic Ocean. It must have been a pretty effec-
tive barrier between the Aryan speakers and the people in north-
eastern Asia. South of this sea stretched a continuous shore
from the Balkans to Afghanistan. North-west of it a region
of swamps and lagoons reached to the Baltic.
3
Next to Aryan, philologists distinguish another group of
languages which seem to have been made quite separately from
the Aryan languages, the Semitic. Hebrew and Arabic are
kindred, but they seem to have even a different set of root
words from the Aryan tongues ; they express their ideas of rela-
tionship in a different way; the fundamental ideas of their
grammars are generally different. They were in all probability
made by human communities quite out of touch with the Aryans,
separately and independently. Hebrew, Arabic, Abyssinian,
ancient Assyrian, ancient Phoenician, and a number of associated
tongues are put together, therefore, as being derived from a sec-
ond primary language, which is called the SEMITIC. In the
very beginnings of recorded history we find Aryan-speaking
peoples and Semitic-speaking peoples carrying on the liveliest
intercourse of war and trade round and about the eastern end
of the Mediterranean, but the fundamental differences of the
primary Aryan and primary Semitic languages oblige us to
believe that in early Neolithic times, before the historical
period, there must for thousands of years have been an almost
complete separation of the Aryan-speaking and the Semitic-
speaking peoples. The latter seem to have lived either in south
Arabia or in north-east Africa. In the opening centuries of the
Neolithic Age the original Aryan speakers and the original
Semitic speakers were probably living, so to speak, in different
worlds with a minimum of intercourse. Racially, it would
seem, they had a remote common origin ; both Aryan speakers
and Semites are classed as Caucasians,; but while the original
Aryan speakers seem to have been of Nordic race, the original
Semites were rather of the Mediterranean type.
THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 121
Philologists speak with less unanimity of a third group of
languages, the HAMITIC, which some declare to be distinct from,
and others allied to, the Semitic. The weight of opinion in-
clines now towards the idea of some primordial connection of
these two groups. The Hamitic group is certainly a much
wider and more various language group than the Semitic or the
Aryan, and the Semitic tongues are more of a family, have
more of a common likeness, than the Aryan. The Semitic
languages may have arisen as some specialized proto-Hamitic
group, just as the birds arose from a special group of reptiles
(Chap. IV). It is a tempting speculation, but one for which
there is really no basis of justifying fact, to suppose that the
rude primordial ancestor group of the Aryan tongues branched
off from the proto-Hamitic speech forms at some still earlier
date than the separation and specialization of Semitic. The
Hamitic speakers to-day, like the Semitic speakers, are mainly
of the Mediterranean Caucasian race. Among the Hamitic
languages are the ancient Egyptian and Coptic, the Berber
languages (of the mountain people of North Africa, the Masked
Tuaregs, and other such peoples), and what are called the
Ethiopic group of African languages in eastern Africa, includ-
ing the speech of the Gallas and the Somalis. The general
grouping of these various tongues suggests that they originated
over some great area to the west, as the primitive Semitic may
have arisen to the east, of the Red Sea divide. That divide was
probably much more effective in Pleistocene times ; the sea ex-
tended across to the west of the Isthmus of Suez, and a great
part of lower Egypt was under water. Long before the dawn
of history, however, Asia and Africa had joined at Suez, and
these two language systems were in contact in that region. And
if Asia and Africa were separated then at Suez, they may,
on fhe other hand, have been joined by way of Arabia and
Abyssinia.
These Hamitic languages may have radiated from a centre
on the African coast of the Mediterranean, and they may have
extended over the then existing land connections very widely
into western Europe.
All these three great groups of languages, it may be noted,
the Aryan, Semitic, and Hlarnitic, have one feature in common
122
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
yr ^o~^ V
"UlTT^Clllt*^ ^Oyt^UV'-^"^'
THE LANGUAGES OP MANKIND 123
which they do not share with any other language, and that
is grammatical gender; but whether that has much weight
as evidence of a remote common origin of Aryan, Semitic, and
H'amitic, is a question for the philologist rather than for the
general student. It does not affect the clear evidence of a very
long and very ancient prehistoric separation of the speakers of
these three diverse groups of tongues.
The hulk of the Semitic and Hamitic-speaking peoples are
put hy ethnologists with the Aryans among the Caucasian group
of races. They are "white." The Semitic and Nordic "races"
have a much more distinctive physiognomy; they seem, like
their characteristic languages, to be more marked and specialized
than the Hamitic-speaking peoples.
5
Across to the north-east of the Aryan and Semitic areas there
must once have spread a further distinct language system which
is now represented by a group of languages known as the
TuEAisriAN, or UKAL-ALTAIC group. This includes the Lappish
of Lapland and the Samoyed speech of Siberia, the Finnish lan-
guage, Magyar, Turkish or Tartar, Manchu and Mongol; it
has not as a group been so exhaustively studied by European
philologists, and there is insufficient evidence yet whether it does
or does not include the Korean and Japanese languages. H. B.
Hulbert has issued a comparative grammar of Korean and cer-
tain of the Dravidian languages of India to demonstrate the
close affinity he finds between them.
6
A fifth region of language formation was south-eastern Asia,
where there still prevails a group of languages consisting of
monosyllables without any inflections, in which the tone used
in uttering a word determines its meaning. This may be called
the Chinese or MONOSYLLABIC group, and it includes Chinese,
Burmese, Siamese, and Tibetan. The difference between any
of these Chinese tongues and the more western languages is pro-
found. In the Pekinese form of Chinese there are only about
420 primaiy monosyllables, and consequently each of these has
to do duty for a great number of things, and the different mean-
124 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
ings are indicated either by the context or by saying the word
in a distinctive tone. The relations of these words to each other
are expressed by quite different methods from the Aryan
methods ; Chinese grammar is a thing different in nature from
English grammar; it is a separate and different invention.
Many writers declare there is no Chinese grammar at all, and
that is true if we mean by grammar anything in the European
sense of inflections and concords. Consequently any such thing
as a literal translation from Chinese into English is an impossi-
bility. The very method of the thought is different. 1 Their
philosophy remains still largely a sealed book to the European
on this account and vice versa, because of the different nature
of the expressions.
In addition, the following other great language families are
distinguished by the philologist. All the American-Indian lan-
guages, which vary widely among themselves, are separable
from any Old World group. Here we may lump them together
not so much as a family as a miscellany. There is one great
group of languages in Africa, from a little way north of the
equator to its southern extremity, the BANTU, and in addition
a complex of other languages across the centre of the continent
about which we will not trouble here. There are also two prob-
ably separate groups, the DRAVIDIAN in South India, and the
MALAY-POLYNESIAN stretched over Polynesia, and also now in-
cluding Indian tongues.
Now it seems reasonable to conclude irom these fundamental
differences that about the time when men were beginning to
form rather larger communities than the family tribe, when
they were beginning to tell each other long stories and argue
and exchange ideas, human beings were distributed about the
*The four characters indicating "Affairs, query, imperative, old," placed
in that order, for example, represent "Why walk in the ancient ways?"
The Chinaman gives the bare cores of his meaning; the Englishman gets
to it by a bold metaphor. He may be talking of conservatism in cooking
or in book-binding, but he will say: "Why walk in the ancient ways?"
Mr. Arthur Waley, in the interesting essay on Chinese thought and
poetry which precedes his book, 110 Chinese Poems (Constable, 1918),
makes it clear how in these fields Chinese thought is kept practical and
restricted by the limitations upon metaphor the contracted structure of
Chinese imposes.
THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 125
world in a number of areas which communicated very little
with each other. They were separated by oceans, seas, thick
forests, deserts or mountains from one another. There may
have been in that remote time, it may be 15,000 years ago or
more, Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, Turanian, American and
Chinese-speaking tribes and families, wandering over their sev-
eral areas of hunting and pasture, all at very much the same
stage of culture, and each developing its linguistic instrument
in its own way. Probably each of these original tribes was not
more numerous altogether than the Indians in Hudson Bay
Territory to-day. Systematic agriculture was barely beginning
then, and until agriculture made a denser population possible
men may have been almost as rare as the great apes have always
been. If agriculture was becoming at all important in human
life at that time, and if population was anywhere denser, it
was probably in the Mediterranean region and possibly in areas
now submerged.
In addition to these Neolithic tribes, there must have been
various still more primitive forest folks in Africa and in India.
Central Africa, from the Upper Nile, was then a vast forest, im-
penetrable to ordinary human life, a forest of which the Congo
forests of to-day are the last shrunken remains.
Possibly the spread of men of a race higher than primitive
Australoids into the East Indies, 1 and the development of the
languages of the Malay-Polynesian type came later in time than
the origination of these other language groups.
The language divisions of the philologist do tally, it is mani-
fest, in a broad sort of way with the main race classes of the
ethnologist, and they carry out the same idea of age-long sepa-
rations between great divisions of mankind. In the Glacial
Age, ice, or at least a climate too severe for the free spreading
of peoples, extended from the north pole into Central Europe
and across Russia and Siberia to the great tablelands of Central
Asia. After the last Glacial Age, this cold north mitigated its
severities very slowly, and was for long without any other popu-
lation than the wandering hunters who spread eastward and
across Bering Strait. North and Central Europe and Asia did
not become sufficiently temperate for agriculture until quite
recent times, times that is within the limit of 12,000 or possibly
J The Polynesians appear to be a later eastward extension of the dark
whites or brown peoples.
126 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
even 10,000 years, and a dense forest period intervened between
the age of the hunter and the agricultural clearings.
This forest period was also a very wet period. It has been
called the Pluvial or Lacustrine Age, the rain or pond period.
It has to be remembered that the outlines of the land of the
world have changed greatly even in the last hundred centuries.
Across European Russia, from the Baltic to the Caspian Sea,
as the ice receded there certainly spread much water and many
impassable swamps ; the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral and
parts of the Desert of Turkestan, are the vestiges of a great
extent of sea that reached far up to the Volga valley and sent
an arm westward to join the Black Sea. Mountain barriers
much higher than they are now, and the arm of the sea that is
now the region of the Indus, completed the separation of the
early Nordic races from the Mongolians and the Dravidians,
and made the broad racial differentiation of those groups
possible.
Again the blown-sand Desert of Sahara it is not a dried-up
sea, but a wind desert, and was once fertile and rich in life
becoming more and more dry and sandy, cut the Caucasians off
from the sparse primitive Negro population in the central forest
region of Africa.
The Persian Gulf extended very far to the north of its pres-
ent head, and combined with the Syrian desert to cut off the
Semitic peoples from the eastern areas, while on the other hand
the south of Arabia, much more fertile than it is to-day, may
have reached across what is now the Gulf of Aden towards
Abyssinia and Somaliland. The Mediterranean and Red Sea
may even have been fertile valleys containing a string of fresh-
water lakes during the Pluvial Age. The Himalayas and the
higher and vaster massif of Central Asia and the northward
extension of the Bay of Bengal up to the present Ganges valley
divided off the Dravidians from the Mongolians, the canoe was
the chief link between Dravidian and Southern Mongol, and
the Gobi system of seas and lakes which presently became the
Gobi desert, and the great system of mountain chains which
follow one another across Asia from the centre to the north-
east, split the Mongolian races into the Chinese and the Ural-
Altaic language groups.
Bering Strait, when this came into existence, before or after
the Pluvial Period, isolated the Amerindians.
THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 127
We are not suggesting here, be it noted, that these ancient
separations were absolute separations, but that they were
effectual enough at least to prevent any great intermixture of
blood or any great intermixture of speech in those days of
man's social beginnings. There was, nevertheless, some amount
of meeting and exchange even then, some drift of knowledge
that spread the crude patterns and use of various implements,
and the seeds of a primitive agriculture about the world.
The fundamental tongues of these nine main language groups
we have noted were not by any means all the human speech
beginnings of the Neolithic Age. They are the latest languages,
the survivors, which have ousted their more primitive predeces-
sors. There may have been other, and possibly many other,
ineffective centres of speech which were afterwards overrun
by the speakers of still surviving tongues, and of elementary
languages which faded out. We find strange little patches of
speech still in the world which do not seem to be connected
with any other language about them. Sometimes, however, an
exhaustive inquiry seems to affiliate these disconnected patches,
seems to open out to us tantalizing glimpses of some simpler,
wider, and more fundamental and universal form of human
speech. One language group that has been keenly discussed is
the Basque group of dialects. The Basques live now on the
north and south slopes of the Pyrenees; they number perhaps
600,000 altogether in Europe, and to this day they are a very
sturdy and independent-spirited people. Their language, as
it exists to-day, is a fully developed one. But it is developed
upon lines absolutely different from those of the Aryan lan-
guages about it. Basque newspapers have been published in
the Argentine and in the United States to supply groups of
prosperous emigrants. The earliest "French" settlers in Canada
were Basque, and Basque names are frequent among the
French Canadians to this day. Ancient remains point to a
much wider distribution of the Basque speech and people over
Spain. For a long time this Basque language was a profound
perplexity to scholars, and its structural character led to the
suggestion that it might be related to some Amerindian tongue.
A. H. Keane, in Man, Past and Present, assembles reasons for
128
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
linking it though remotely with the Berber language of
North Africa, and through the Berber with the general body
of Hamitic languages, but
this relationship is ques-
tioned by other philolo-
gists. They find Basque
more akin to certain
similarly stranded ves-
tiges of speech found in
the Caucasian Mountains,
and they are disposed to
regard it as a last surviv-
ing member, much
changed and specialized,
of a once very widely ex-
tended group of pre-
Hamitic languages, other-
wise extinet, spoken chief-
ly by peoples of that
brunet Mediterranean race
which once occupied most
of western and southern
Europe and western Asia,
and which may have been
very closely related to the
Dravidians of India and
the peoples with a helio-
lithic culture who spread
eastward, thence through
the East Indies to Poly-
nesia and beyond.
It is quite possible that
over western and southern
Europe language groups
extended eight or ten thou-
sand years ago that have
completely vanished be-
fore Aryan tongues. Later on we shall note, in passing, the
possibility of three lost language groups represented by (1)
Ancient Cretan, Lydian, and the like (though these may have
THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 129
belonged, says Sir H. H. Johnston, to the "Basque Caucasian
Dravidian [ !] group"), (2) Sumerian, and (3) Elamite.
The suggestion has been made it is a mere guess that an-
cient Sumerian may have been a linking language between the
early Basque-Caucasian and early Mongolian groups. If this
is true, then we have in this "Basque-Caucasian-Dravidian-
Sumerian-proto-Mongolian" group a still more ancient and
more ancestral system of speech than the fundamental Hamitic.
We have something more like the linguistic a missing link,"
more like an ancestral language than anything else we can
imagine at the present time. It may have been related to the
Aryan and Semitic and Hamitic languages much as the primi-
tive lizards of later Palaeozoic times were related to the mam-
mals, birds, and dinosaurs respectively.
The Hottentot language is said to have affinities with the
Hamitic tongues, from which it is separated by the whole
breadth of Bantu-speaking Central Africa. A Hottentot-like
language with Bushman affinities is still spoken in equatorial
East Africa, and this strengthens the idea that the whole of
East Africa was once Hamitic-speaking. The Bantu languages
and peoples spread, in comparatively recent times, from some
centre of origin in West Central Africa and cut off the Hotten-
tots from the other Hamitic peoples. But it is at least equally
probable that the Hottentot is a separate language group.
Among other remote and isolated little patches of language
are the Papuan speech of New Guinea and the native Aus-
tralian. The now extinct Tasmanian language is but little
known. What we do know of it is in support of what we have
guessed about the comparative speechlessness of Palaeolithic
man.
We may quote a passage from Hutchinson's Living Races of
Mankind upon this matter :
"The language of the natives is irretrievably lost, only im-
perfect indications of its structure and a small proportion of
its words having been preserved. In the absence of sibilants
and some other features, their dialects resembled the Australian,
but were of ruder, of less developed structure, and so imperfect
that, according to Joseph Milligan, our best authority on the
130 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
subject, they observed no settled order or arrangement of words
in the construction of their sentences, but conveyed in a supple-
mentary fashion by tone, manner, and gesture those modifica-
tions of meaning which we express by mood, tense, number, etc.
Abstract terms were rare; for every variety of gum-tree or
wattle-tree there was a name, but no word for 'tree' in general,
nor for qualities such as hard, soft, warm, cold, long, short,
round, etc. Anything hard was 'like a stone, 7 anything round
'like the moon/ and so on, usually suiting the action to the
word and confirming by some sign the meaning to be
understood."
XIV
THE FIKST CIVILIZATIONS
1. Early Cities and Early Nomads. 2A. The Sumerians.
2s. The Empire of Sargon the First. 2c. The Empire
of Hammurabi. 2D. The Assyrians and their Empire.
2E. The Chaldean Empire. 3. The Early History of
Egypt. 4. The Early Civilization of India. 5. The
Early History of China. 6. While the Civilizations were
Growing.
IT was out Of the so-called heliolithic culture we have
described in Chapter XII that the first beginnings of any-
thing that we can call a civilization arose. It is still doubt-
ful whether we are to consider Mesopotamia or Egypt the earlier
scene of the two parallel beginnings of settled communities liv-
ing in towns. By 4,000 B.C., in both these regions of the earth,
such communities existed, and had been going on for a very
considerable time. The excavations of the American expedition
at Nippur have unearthed evidence of a city community ex-
isting there at least as early as 5,000 B.C., and probably as early
as 6,000 B.C., an earlier date than anything we know of in,
Egypt. The late Mr. Aaron Aaronson found a real wild wheat
upon the slopes of Mt, Hermon, and it must be that somewhere
in that part of the world its cultivation began. It may be that
from the western end of the Mediteranean, possibly in some
region now submerged, as a centre that the cultivation of wheat
spread over the entire eastern hemisphere. But cultivation is
not civilization ; the growing of wheat had spread from the At-
lantic to the Pacific coast with the distribution of the Neolithic
culture by perhaps 15,000 or 10,000 B.C., before the beginnings
of civilization. Civilization is something more than the occa-
sional seasonal growing of wheat. It is the settlement of men
upon an area continuously cultivated and possessed, who live in
131
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
buildings continuously inhabited with a common rule and a com-
mon city or citadel. For a long time civilization may quite pos-
sibly have developed in Mesopotamia without any relations with
the parallel beginnings in Egypt. The two settlements may
have been quite independent, arising separately out of the
widely diffused Heliolithic Neolithic culture. Or they may
have had a common origin in the region of the Mediterranean,
the Red Sea, and southern Arabia.
The first condition necessary to a real settling down of Neo-
lithic men, as distinguished from a mere temporary settlement
among abundant food, was of course a trustworthy all-the-year-
round supply of water, fodder for the animals, food for them-
selves, and building material for their homes. There had to
be everything they could need at any season, and no want that
would tempt them to wander further. This was a possible state
of affairs, no doubt, in many European and Asiatic valleys;
and in many such valleys, as in the case of the Swiss lake dwell-
ings, men settled from a very early date indeed ; but nowhere,
of any countries now known to us, were these favourable con-
ditions found upon such a scale, and nowhere did they hold
good so surely year in and year out as in Egypt and in the
country between the upper waters of the Euphrates and Tigris
and the Persian Gulf. 1 Here was a constant water supply un-
der enduring sunlight; trustworthy harvests year by year; in
Mesopotamia wheat yielded, says Herodotus, two hundredfold
to the sower; Pliny says that it was cut twice and afterwards
yielded good fodder for sheep; there were abundant palrns and
many sorts of fruits; and as for building material, in Egypt
there was clay and easily worked stone, and in Mesopotamia a
clay that becomes a brick in the sunshine. In such countries
men would cease to wander and settle down almost unawares ;
they would multiply and discover themselves numerous and by
their numbers safe from any casual assailant. They multiplied,
producing a denser human population than the earth had ever
known before ; their houses became more substantial, wild beasts
1 We shall use " Mesopotamia" here loosely for the Euphrates-Tigris
country generally. Strictly, of course, as its name indicates, Mesopotamia
(mid-rivers) means only the country between those two great rivers. That
country in the fork was probably very marshy arid unhealthy in early
times (Sayce), until it was drained by man, and the early cities grew
up west of the Euphrates and east of the Tigris. Probably these rivers
then flowed separately into the Persian Gulf.
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS
133
were exterminated over great areas, the security of life in-
creased so that ordinary men went about in the towns and fields
without encumbering themselves with weapons, and among
themselves, at least, they became peaceful peoples. Men took
root as man had never taken root before.
Fertile LMtd:..^jjjj^ Forest
. a
Water....
. '..:*-
&Vv,* fe
WESTERN
CIVILIZATION
6,000 to 4.000 B.C.
$
* ji
But in the less fertile and more seasonal lands outside these
favoured areas, in the forests of Europe, the Arabian deserts,
and the seasonal pastures of Central Asia, there developed on
the other hand a thinner, more active population of peoples,
the primitive nomadic peoples. In contrast with the settled folk,
the agriculturists, these nomads lived freely and dangerously.
134 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
They were in comparison lean and hungry men. Their herding
was still blended with hunting ; they fought constantly for their
pastures against hostile families. The discoveries in the elabora-
tion of implements and the use of metals made by the settled
peoples spread to them and improved their weapons. They
followed the settled folk from Neolithic phase to Bronze phase.
It is possible that in the case of iron, the first users were no-
madic. They became more warlike with better arms, and more
capable of rapid movements with the improvement of their
transport. One must not think of a nomadic stage as a pre-
decessor of a settled stage in human affairs. To begin with,
man was a slow drifter, following food. Then one sort of men
began to settle down, and another sort became more distinctly
nomadic. The settled sort began to rely more and more upon
grain for food ; the nomad began to make a greater use of milk
for food. He bred his cows for milk. The two ways of life
specialized in opposite directions. It was inevitable that nomad
folk and the settled folk should clash, that the nomads should
seem hard barbarians to the settled peoples, and the settled
peoples soft and effeminate and very good plunder to the nomad
peoples. Along the fringes of the developing civilizations there
must have been a constant raiding and bickering between hardy
nomad tribes and mountain tribes and the more numerous and
less warlike peoples in the towns and villages.
For the most part this was a mere raiding of. the borders.
The settled folk had the weight of numbers on their side ; the
herdsmen might raid and loot, but they could not stay. That
sort of mutual friction might go on for many generations. But
ever and again we find some leader or some tribe amidst the
disorder of free and independent nomads, powerful enough to
force a sort of unity upon its kindred tribes, and then woe be-
tide the nearest civilization. Down pour the united nomads on
the unwarlike, unarmed plains, and there ensues a war of con-
quest. Instead of carrying off the booty, the conquerors settle
down on the conquered land, which becomes all booty for them ;
the villagers and townsmen are reduced to servitude and tribute-
paying, they become hewers of wood and drawers of water, and
the leaders" of the nomads become kings and princes, masters
and aristocrats. They, too, settle down, they learn many of the
arts and refinements of the conquered, they cease to be lean and
hungry, but for many generations they retain traces of their
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 135
old nomadic habits, they hunt and indulge in open-air sports,
they drive and race chariots, they regard work, especially agri-
cultural work, as the lot of an inferior race and class.
This in a thousand variations has been one of the main stories
in history for the last seventy centuries or more. In the first
history that we can clearly decipher we find already in all the
civilized regions a distinction between a non-working ruler class
and the working mass of the population. And we find, too, that
after some generations, the aristocrat, having settled down, be-
gins to respect the arts and refinements and lawabidingness of
settlement, and to lose something of his original hardihood. He
intermarries, he patches up a sort of toleration between con-
queror and conquered; he exchanges religious ideas and learns
the lessons upon which soil and climate insist. He becomes a
part of the civilization he has captured. And as he does so,
events gather towards a fresh invasion by the free adventurers
of the outer world.
2A
This alternation of settlement, conquest, refinement, fresh
conquest, refinement, is particularly to be noted in the region of
the Euphrates and Tigris, which lay open in every direction to
great areas which are not arid enough to be complete deserts,
but which were not fertile enough to support civilized popula-
tions. Perhaps the earliest people to form real cities in this part
of the world, or indeed in any part of the world, were a people
of mysterious origin called the Sumerians. They were probably
brunets of Iberian or Dravidian affinities. They used a kind of
writing which they scratched upon clay, and their language has
been deciphered. 1 It was a language more like the unclassified
Caucasic language groups than any others that now exist. These
languages may be connected with Basque, and may represent
what was once a widespread primitive language group extend-
ing from Spain and western Europe to eastern India, and reach-
1 Excavations conducted at Eridu by Capt. R. Campbell Thompson during
the recent war have revealed an early Neolithic agricultural stage, before
the invention of writing or the use of bronze beneath the earliest Sumerian
foundations. The crops were cut by sickles of earthenware. Capt. Thomp-
son thinks that these pre-Sumerian people were not of Sumerian race,
but proto-Elamites. Entirely similar Neolithic remains have been
found at Susa, once the chief city of Elam.
136
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
ing southwards to Central Africa. These people shaved their
heads and wore simple tunic-like garments of wool. They set-
tled first on the lower courses of the great river and not very
far from the Persian Gulf, which in those days ran up for a
hundred and thirty miles l and more beyond its present head.
They fertilized their fields by letting water run through irriga-
tion trenches, and they gradually became very skilful hydraulic
engineers ; they had cattle, asses, sheep, and goats, but no horses ;
their collections of mud huts grew into towns, and their religion
raised up tower-like temple buildings.
Clay, dried in the sun, was a very great fact in the lives of
these people. This lower country of the Euphrates-Tigris val-
A very earfy Swneriaxi stana carving showing Sumeriati warriors' in, phalanx
leys had little or no stone. They built of brick, they made pot-
tery and earthenware images, and they drew and presently wrote
upon thin tile-like cakes of clay. They do not seem to have
had paper or to have used parchment. Their books and mem-
oranda, even their letters, were potsherds.
At Nippur they built a great tower of brick to their chief
god, El-lil (Enlil), the memory of which is supposed to be pre-
served in the story of the Tower of Babel. They seem to have
been divided up into city states, which warred among them-
selves and maintained for many centuries their military ca-
pacity. Their soldiers carried long spears and shields, and
fought in close formation. Sumerians conquered Sumerians.
Sumeria remained unconquered by any stranger race for a very
1 Sayce, in Babylonian and Assyrian Life, estimates that in 6,500 B.C.
Eridu was on the sea-coast.
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 137
long period of time indeed. They developed their civilization,
their writing, and their shipping, through a period that may he
twice as long as the whole period from the Christian era to the
present time.
The first of all known empires was that founded by the high
priest of the god of the Sumerian city of Erech. It reached,
says an inscription at Nippur, from the Lower (Persian Gulf)
to the Upper (Mediterranean or Red?) Sea. Among the mud
heaps of the Euphrates-Tigris valley the record of that vast
period of history, that first half of the Age of Cultivation, is
huried. There flourished the first temples and the first priest-
rulers that we know of among mankind.
2B
Upon the western edge of this country appeared nomadic
tribes of Semitic-speaking peoples who traded, raided, and
fought with the Sumerians for many generations. Then arose
it last a great leader among these Semites, Sargon (2,750 B.C),
who united them, and not only conquered the Sumerians, but
extended his rule from beyond the Persian Gulf on the east
to the Mediterranean on the west. His own people were called
the Akkadians and his empire is called the Sumerian Akkadian
empire. It endured for over two hundred years.
But though the Semites conquered and gave a king to the
Sumerian cities, it was the Sumerian civilization which pre-
vailed Over the simpler Semitic culture. The newcomers learnt
the Sumerian writing (the "cuneiform" writing) and the
Sumerian language; they set up no Semitic writing of their
own. The Sumerian language became for these barbarians the
language of knowledge and power, as Latin was the language
of knowledge and power among the barbaric peoples of the mid-
dle ages in Europe. This Sumerian learning had a very great
vitality. It was destined to survive through a long series of
conquests and changes that now began in the valley of the two
rivers.
2c
As the people of the Sumerian Akkadian empire lost their
political and military vigour, fresh inundations of a warlike
138 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
people began from the east, the Elamites, 1 while from the west
came the Semitic Amorites, pinching the Sumerian Akkadian
empire between them. The Amorites settled in what was at
first a small up-river town, named Babylon ; and after a hundred
years of warfare became masters of all Mesopotamia under a
great king, Hammurabi (2,100 B.C.), who founded the first
Babylonian empire.
Again came peace and security and a decline in aggressive
prowess, and in another hundred years fresh nomads from the
east were invading Babylonia, bringing with them the horse and
the war chariot, and setting up their own king in Babylon. . . .
2o
Higher up the Tigris, above the clay lands and with easy
supplies of workable stone, a Semitic people, the Assyrians,
while the Sumerians were still unconquered by the Semites, were
settling about a number of cities of which Assur and Nineveh
were the chief. Their peculiar physiognomy, the long nose and
thick lips, was very like that of the commoner type of Polish
Jew to-day. They wore great beards and ringletted long hair,
tall caps and long robes. They were constantly engaged in
mutual raiding with the Hittites to the west; they were con-
quered by Sargon I and became free again ; a certain Tushratta,
King of Mitanni, to the north-west, captured and held their
capital, Nineveh, for a time ; they intrigued with Egypt against
Babylon and were in the pay of Egypt ; they developed the mili-
tary art to a very high pitch, and became mighty raiders and
exacters of tribute; and at last, adopting the horse and the
war chariot, they settled accounts for a time with the Hittites,
and then, under Tiglath Pileser I, conquered Babylon for them-
selves (about 1,100 B.C.). But their hold on the lower, older,
and more civilized land was not secure, and Nineveh, the stone
city, as distinguished from Babylon, the brick city, remained
their capital. For many centuries power swayed between Nine-
veh and Babylon, and sometimes it was an Assyrian and some-
times a Babylonian who claimed to be "king of the world."
*Of unknown language and race, "neither Sumerians nor Semites,"
says Sayce. Their central city was Suaa. Their archaeology is still largely
an unworked mine. They are believed by some, says Sir H. H. Johnston,
to have been negroid in type. There is a strong negroid strain in the mod-
ern people of Elam.
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS
139
For four centuries Assyria was restrained from expansion
towards Egypt by a fresh northward thrust and settlement of
another group of Semitic peoples, the Arameans, whose chief
city was Damascus, and whose descendants are the Syrians of
to-day. (There is, we may note, no connection whatever be-
tween the words Assyrian and Syrian. It is an accidental
similarity.) Across these Syrians the Assyrian kings fought
for power and expansion south-westward. In 745 B.C.
arose another Tiglath Pileser,
Tiglath Pileser III, the Tiglath
Pileser of the Bible. 1 He not
only directed the transfer of the
Israelites to Media (the "Lost
Ten Tribes" whose ultimate fate
has exercised so many curious
minds) but he conquered and
ruled Babylon, so founding what
historians know as the New
Assyrian Empire. His son, Shal-
maneser IV, 2 died during the
siege of Samaria, and was suc-
ceeded by a usurper, who, no
doubt to flatter Babylonian sus-
ceptibilities, took the ancient
Akkadian Sumerian name of Sar-
gon, Sargon II. He seems to have
armed the Assyrian forces for the
first time with iron weapons. It
was probably Sargon II who
actually carried out the deporta-
tion of the Ten Tribes.
Such shiftings about of popula-
d .Sargon H
tion became a very distinctive part of the political methods
of the Assyrian new empire. Whole nations who were difficult
to control in their native country would be shifted en masse
to unaccustomed regions and amidst strange neighbours, where
their only hope of survival would lie in obedience to the
supreme power.
Sargon's son, Sennacherib, led the Assyrian hosts to the
borders of Egypt. There Sennacherib's army was smitten by
*II. Kings, xv. 29, and xvi. 7 et seq. 'II. Kings xvii. 3.
140 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
a pestilence, a disaster described in the nineteenth chapter of the
Second Book of Kings.
"And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord
went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred
fourscore and five thousand : and when they arose early in the
morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. So Sennacherib
king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt
at Nineveh." l
Sennacherib's grandson, Assurbanipal (called by the Greeks
Sardanapalus), did succeed in conquering and for a time hold-
ing lower Egypt.
2E
The Assyrian empire lasted only a hundred and fifty years
after Sargon II. Fresh nomadic Semites coming from the
south-east, the Chaldeans, assisted by two Aryan-speaking peo-
ples from the north, the Medes and Persians, combined against
it, and took Nineveh in 606 B.C.
The Chaldean Empire, with its capital at Babylon (Second
Babylonian Empire), lasted under Nebuchadnezzar the Great
(Nebuchadnezzar II) and his successors until 539 B.C., when it
collapsed before the attack of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian
power. . . .
So the story goes on. In 330 B.C., as we shall tell later in
some detail, a Greek conqueror, Alexander the Great, is looking
on the murdered body of the last of the Persian rulers.
The story of the Tigris and Euphrates civilizations, of which
we have given as yet only the bare outline, is a story of con-
quest following after conquest, and each conquest replaces old
rulers and ruling classes by new ; races like the Sumerian and
the Elamite are swallowed up, their languages vanish, they
interbreed and are lost, the Assyrian melts away into Chaldean
and Syrian, the Hittites become Aryanized and lose distinc-
tion, the Semites who swallowed up the Sumerians give place to
Aryan rulers, Medes and Persians appear in the place of the
Elamites, the Aryan Persian language dominates the empire
until the Aryan Greek ousts it from official life. Meanwhile
s To be murdered by his sons.
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 141
the plough does its work year by year, the harvests are gathered,
the builders build as they are told, the tradesmen work and
acquire fresh devices; the knowledge of writing spreads, novel
things, the horse and wheeled vehicles and iron, are introduced
and become part of the permanent inheritance of mankind ; the
volume of trade upon sea and desert increases, men's ideas
widen, and knowledge grows. There are set-backs, massacres,
pestilence; but the story is, on the whole, one of enlargement.
For four thousand years this new thing, civilization, which
had set its root into the soil of the two rivers, grew as a tree
grows ; now losing a limb, now stripped by a storm, but always
growing and resuming its growth. After four thousand years
the warriors and conquerors were still going to and fro over
this growing thing they did not understand, but men had now
(330 B.C.) got iron, horses, writing and computation, money, a
greater variety of foods and textiles, a wider knowledge of their
world.
The time that elapsed between the empire of Sargon I and
the conquest of Babylon by Alexander the Great was as long,
be it noted, at the least estimate, as the time from Alexander
the Great to the present day. And before the time of Sargon,
men had been settled in the Sumerian land, living in towns,
worshipping in temples, following an orderly Neolithic agri-
cultural life in an organized community for at least as long
again. "Eridu, Lagash, Ur, Uruk, Larsa, have already an im-
memorial past when first they appear in history." l
One of the most difficult things for both the writer and stu-
dent of history is to sustain the sense of these time-intervals
and prevent these ages becoming shortened by perspective in his
imagination. Half the duration of human civilization and the
keys to all its chief institutions are to be found before Sargon
I. Moreover, the reader cannot too often compare the scale
of the dates in these latter fuller pages of man's history with
the succession of countless generations to which the time dia-
grams given on pages 11 and 47, bear witness.
Parallel with the ancient beginnings of civilization in
Sumeria, a parallel process was going on in Egypt. It is still
1 Winckler (Craig), History of Babylonia and Assyria.
142
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS
a matter of discussion which was the most ancient of these two
beginnings, or how far they had a common origin or derived
one from the other.
The story of the Nile valley from the dawn of its trace-
able history until the time of Alexander the Great is not very
dissimilar from that of Babylonia; but while Babylonia lay
open on every side to invasion, Egypt was protected by desert
to the west and by desert and sea to
the east, while to the south she had
only negro peoples. Consequently
her history is less broken by the in-
vasions of strange races than is the
history of Assyria and Babylon, and
until towards the eighth century
B. c., when she fell under an Ethio-
pian dynasty, whenever a conqueror
did come into her story, he came in
from Asia by way of the Isthmus of
Suez.
The Stone Age remains in Egypt
are of very uncertain date ; there are
Paleolithic and then Neolithic re-
mains. It is not certain whether the
Neolithic pastoral people who left
those remains were the direct ances-
tors of the later Egyptians. In many
respects they differed entirely from
their successors. They buried their
dead, but before they buried them
they cut up the bodies and appar-
ently ate portions of the flesh. They
seem to have done this out of a feel-
ing of reverence for the departed;
the dead were "eaten with honour"
according to the phrase of Mr. Flinders Petrie. It may have
been that the survivors hoped to retain thereby some vestige
of the strength and virtue that had died. Traces of similar
savage customs have been found in the long barrows that were
scattered over western Europe before the spreading of the
Aryan peoples, and they have pervaded negro Africa, where
they are only dying out at the present time.
Tarfc iiure oC&e. JZuvtian
luoofaxtws o3des?
144 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
About 5,000 B.C., or earlier, the traces of these primitive
peoples cease, and the true Egyptians appear on the scene. The
former people were hut builders and at a comparatively low
stage of Neolithic culture, the latter were already a civilized
Neolithic people; they used brick and wood buildings instead
of their predecessors 7 hovels, and they were working stone.
Very soon they passed into the Bronze Age. They possessed a
system of picture writing almost as developed as the con-
temporary writing of the Sumerians, but quite different in char-
acter. Possibly there was an irruption from southern Arabia
by way of Aden, of a fresh people, who came into upper Egypt
and descended slowly towards the delta of the Nile. Dr. Wallis
Budge writes of them as "conquerors from the East." But
their gods and their ways, like their picture writing, were very
different indeed from the Sumerian. One of the earliest known
figures of a deity is that of a hippopotamus goddess, and so very
distinctively African.
The clay of the Nile is not so fine and plastic as the Sumerian
clay, and the Egyptians made no use of it for writing. But they
early resorted to strips of the papyrus reed fastened together,
from whose name comes our word "paper."
The broad outline of the history of Egypt is simpler than
the history of Mesopotamia. It has long been the custom to
divide the rulers of Egypt into a succession of Dynasties, and
in speaking of the periods of Egyptian history it is usual to
speak of the first, fourth, fourteenth, and so on, Dynasty. The
Egyptians were ultimately conquered by the Persians after
their establishment in Babylon, and when finally Egypt fell to
Alexander the Great in 332 B.C., it was Dynasty XXXI that
came to an end. In that long history of over 4,000 years, a
much longer period than that between the career of Alexander
the Great and the present day, certain broad phases of de-
velopment may be noted here. There was a phase known as
the "old kingdom," which culminated in the IVth Dynasty;
this Dynasty marks a period of wealth and splendour, and its
monarchs were obsessed by such a passion for making monu-
ments for themselves as no men have ever before or since had
a chance to display and gratify. It was Cheops l and Chephren
and Mycerinus of this I\ r th Dynasty who raised the vast piles
of the great and the second and the third pyramids at Gizeh,
1 3,733 B.C., Wallis Budge.
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 145
These unmeaning sepulchral piles, of an almost incredible vast-
ness, 1 erected in an age when engineering science had scarcely
begun, exhausted the resources of Egypt through three long
reigns, and left her wasted as if by a war.
The story of Egypt from the IVth to the XVth Dynasty is a
story of conflicts between alternative capitals and competing
religions, of separations into several kingdoms and reunions.
It is, so to speak, an internal history. Here we can name only
one of that long series of Pharaohs, Pepi II, who reigned ninety
years, the longest reign in history, and left a great abundance
of inscriptions and buildings. At last there happened to Egypt
what happened so frequently to the civilizations of Mesopo-
tamia. Egypt was conquered by nomadic Semites, who founded
a "shepherd" dynasty, the Hyksos (XVIth), which was finally
expelled by native Egyptians. This invasion probably hap-
pened while that first Babylonian Empire which Hammurabi
founded was flourishing, but the exact correspondences of dates
between early Egypt and Babylonia are still very . doubtful.
Only after a long period of servitude did a popular uprising
expel these foreigners again.
After the war of liberation (circa 1,600 B.C.) there followed a
period of great prosperity in Egypt, the New Empire. Egypt
became a great and united military state, and pushed her expedi-
tions at last as far as the Euphrates, and so the age-long struggle
between the Egyptian and Babylonian- Assyrian power began.
For a time Egypt was the ascendant power. Thothmes III 2
*The great pyramid is 450 feet high and its side 700 feet long. It is
calculated (says Wallis Budge) to weigh 4,883,000 tons. All this stone
was lugged into place chiefly by human muscle.
'There are variants to these names, and to most Egyptian names, for
few self-respecting Egyptologists will tolerate the spelling of their col-
leagues. One may find, for instance, Thethmosis, Thoutmosis, Tahutmes,
Thutmose, or Tet^mosis; Amunothph, Amenhotep or Amenothes. A pleas-
ing variation is to break up the name, as, for instance, Amen Hetep.
This particular little constellation of variants is given here not only be-
cause it is amusing, but because it is desirable that the reader should
know such variations exist. For most names the rule of this book has
been to follow whatever usage has established itself in English literature,
regardless of the possible contemporary pronunciation. Amenophis, for
example, has been so written in English books for two centuries. It
came into the language by indirect routes, but it is now as fairly estab-
lished as is Damascus as the English name of a Syrian town. Neverthe-
less, there are limits to this classicism. The writer, after some vacilla-
tion, has abandoned Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson in the case of
"Peisistratus" and "Keltic," which were formerly spelt "Pisistratus" and
"Celtic."
146 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
and Amenophis III (XVIIIth Dynasty) ruled from Ethiopia
to the Euphrates in the fifteenth century B.C. For various
reasons these names stand out with unusual distinctness in the
Egyptian record. They were great builders, and left many
monuments and inscriptions. Amenophis III founded Luxor,
and added greatly to Karnak. At Tel-el-Amarna a mass of
letters has been found, the royal correspondence with Babylonian
and Hittite and other monarchs, including that Tushratta who
took Nineveh, throwing a flood of light upon the political and
social affairs of this particular age. Of Amenophis IV we
shall have more to tell later, but of one, the most extraordinary
and able of Egyptian monarchs, Queen Hatasu, we have no
space to tell. She is represented upon her monuments in mas-
culine garb, and with a long beard as a symbol of wisdom.
Thereafter there was a brief Syrian conquest of Egypt, a
series of changing dynasties, among which we may note the
XlXth, which included Rameses II, a great builder of temples,
who reigned seventy-seven years (about 1,317 to 1,250 B.C.),
and who is supposed by some to have been the Pharaoh of
Moses, and the XXIInd, which included Shishak, who
plundered Solomon's temple (circa 930 B.C.). An Ethiopian
conqueror from the Upper Nile founded the XXVth Dynasty,
a foreign dynasty, which went down (670 B.C.) before the new
Assyrian Empire created by Tiglath Pileser III, Sargon II,
and Sennacherib, of which we have already made mention.
The days of any Egyptian predominance over foreign nations
were drawing to an end. For a time under Psammetichus I
of the XXVIth Dynasty (664-610 B.C.) native rule was re-
stored, and Necho II recovered for a time the old Egyptian
possessions in Syria up to the Euphrates while the Medes and
Chaldeans were attacking Nineveh. From those gains Necho II
was routed out again after the fall of Nineveh and the Assyrians
by Nebuchadnezzar II, the great Chaldean king, the Nebuchad-
nezzar of the Bible. The Jews, who had been the allies of
Necho II, were taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar to
Babylon.
When, in the sixth century B.C., Chaldea fell to the Persians,
Egypt followed suit, a rebellion later made Egypt independent
once more for sixty years, and in 332 B.C. she welcomed Alex-
ander the Great as her conqueror, to be ruled thereafter by for-
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 147
eigners, first by Greeks, then by Romans, then in succession
by Arabs, Turks, and British, until the present day.
Such briefly is the history of Egypt from its beginnings;
a history first of isolation and then pf increasing entanglement
with the affairs of other nations, as increasing facilities of
communication drew the peoples of the world into closer and
closer interaction.
The history we need to tell here of India is simpler even
than this brief record of Egypt. The Dravidian peoples in
the Ganges valley developed upon parallel lines to the Sumerian
and Egyptian societies. But it is doubtful if they ever got to
so high a stage of social development ; they have left few monu-
ments, and they never achieved any form of writing.
Somewhere about the time of Hammurabi or later, a branch
of the Aryan-speaking people who then occupied North Persia
and Afghanistan pushed down the north-west passes into India.
They conquered their way until they prevailed over all the
darker populations of North India, and spread their rule or
influence over the whole peninsula. They never achieved any
unity in India ; their history is a history of warring kings and
republics.
The Persian empire, in the days of its expansion after the
capture of Babylon, pushed its boundaries beyond the Indus,
and later Alexander the Great marched as far as the border of
the desert that separates the Punjab from the Ganges valley.
But with this bare statement we will for a time leave the history
of India.
5
Meanwhile, as this triple system of White Man civilization
developed in India and in the lands about the meeting-places
of Asia, Africa, and Europe, another and quite distinct civiliza-
tion was developing and spreading out from the then fertile
but now dry and desolate valley of the Tarim and from the
slopes of the Eoien-lun mountains in two directions down the
course of the Hwang-ho, and later into the valley of the Yang-
tse-kiang. We know practically nothing as yet of the archaeol-
148 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
ogy of China, we do not know anything of the Stone Age in
that part of the world, and at present our ideas of this early
civilization are derived from the still very imperfectly ex-
plored Chinese literature. It has evidently been from the first
and throughout a Mongolian civilization. Until after the time
of Alexander the Great there are few traces of any Aryan
or Semitic, much less of Hamitic influence. All such influ-
ences were still in another world, separated by mountains,
deserts, and wild nomadic tribes until that time. The Chinese
seem to have made their civilization spontaneously and un-
assisted. Some recent writers suppose indeed a connection with
ancient Sumeria. Of course both China and Sumeria arose
on the basis of the almost world-wide early Neolithic culture,
but the Tarim valley and the lower Euphrates are separated by
such vast obstacles of mountain and desert as to forbid the idea
of any migration or interchange of peoples who had once settled
down. Perhaps the movement from the north met another
movement of culture coming from the south.
Though the civilization of China is wholly Mongolian (as
we have defined Mongolian), it does not follow that the north-
ern roots are the only ones from which it grew. If it grew
first in the Tarim valley, then unlike all other civilization.^
(including the Mexican and Peruvian) it did not grow out
of the heliolithic culture. We Europeans know very little as
yet of the ethnology and pre-history of southern China. There
the Chinese mingle with such kindred peoples as the Siamese
and Burmese, and seem to bridge over towards the darker
Dravidian peoples and towards the Malays. It ii quite clear
from the Chinese records that there were southern as well as
northern beginnings of a civilization, and that the Chinese civ-
ilization that comes into history 2,000 years B.C. is the result of
a long process of conflicts, minglings and interchanges between
a southern and a northern culture of which the southern may
have been the earlier and more highly developed. The southern
Chinese perhaps played the role towards the northern Chinese
that the Hamites or Sumerians played to the Aryan and Semitic
peoples in the west, or that the settled Dravidians played to-
wards the Aryans in India. They may have been the first
agriculturists and the first temple builders. But so little is
known as yet of this attractive chapter in pre-history, that
We cannot dwell upon it further here.
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS
149
150 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
The chief foreigners mentioned in the early annals of China
were a Ural-Altaic people on the north-east frontier, the Huns,
against whom certain of the earlier emperors made war.
Chinese history is still very little known to European stu-
dents, and our accounts of the eaily records ave partieu'arly un-
satisfactory. Ahout 2,700 to 2,400 B.C. reigned five emperors,
who seem to have been almost incredibly exemplary beings.
There follows upon these first five emperors a series of
dynasties, of which the accounts become more and more exact
and convincing as they become more recent. China has to
tell a long history of border warfare and of graver struggles
between the settled and nomad peoples. To begin with, China,
like Sumer and like Egypt, was a land of city states. The
government was at first a government of numerous kings ; they
became loosely feudal under an emperor, as the Egyptians did ;
and then later, as with the Egyptians, came a centralizing
empire. Shang (1,750 to 1,125 B.C.) and Chow (1,125 to
250 B.C.) are named as being the two great dynasties of the
feudal period. Bronze vessels of these earlier dynasties, beau-
tiful, splendid, and with a distinctive style of their own, still
exist, and there can be no doubt of the existence of a high state
of culture even before the days of Shang.
It is perhaps a sense of symmetry that made the later his-
torians of Egypt and China talk of the earlier phases of their
national history as being under dynasties comparable to the
dynasties of the later empires, and of such early "Emperors"
as Menes (in Egypt) or the First Five Emperors (in China).
The early dynasties exercised far less centralized powers than
the later ones. Such unity as China possessed under the Shang
Dynasty was a religious rather than an effective political union.
The "Son of Heaven" offered sacrifices for all the Chinese.
There was a common script, a common civilization, and a com-
mon enemy in the Huns of the north-western borders.
The last of the Shang Dynasty was a cruel and foolish mon-
arch who burnt himself alive (1,125 B.C.) in his palace after a
decisive defeat by Wu Wang, the founder of the Chow Dynasty.
Wu Wang seems to have been helped by allies from among
the south-western tribes as well as by a popular revolt.
For a time China remained loosely united under the Chow
emperors, as loosely united as was Christendom under the popes
in the Middle Ages ; the Chow emperors had become the tradi-
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 151
tional high priests of the land in the place of the Shang
Dynasty and claimed a sort of overlordship in Chinese affairs,
but gradually the loose ties of usage and sentiment that held
the empire together lost their hold upon men's minds. Hunnish
peoples to the north and west took on the Chinese civilization
without acquiring a sense of its unity. Feudal princes began
to regard themselves as independent. Mr. Liang-Chi-Chao, 1
one of the Chinese representatives at the Paris Conference of
1919, states that between the eighth and fourth centuries B.C.
"there were in the Hwang-ho and Yang-tse valleys no less than
five or six thousand small states with about a dozen powerful
states dominating over them." The land was subjected to per-
petual warfare ("Age of Confusion"). In the sixth century
B.C. the great powers in conflict were Ts'i and Ts'in, which
were northern Hwang-ho states, and Ch'u, which was a vigorous,
aggressive power in the Yang-tse valley. A confederation
against Ch'u laid the foundation for a league that kept the
peace for a hundred years ; the league subdued and incorporated
Ch'u and made a general treaty of disarmament. It became
the foundation of a new pacific empire.
The knowledge of iron entered China at some unknown date,
but iron weapons began to be commonly used only about 500
B.C., that is to say two or three hundred years or more after
this had become customary in Assyria, Egypt, and Europe.
Iron was probably introduced from the north into China by the
Huns.
The last rulers of the Chow Dynasty were ousted by the
kings of Ts'in, the latter seized upon the sacred sacrificial
bronze tripods, and so were able to take over the imperial duty
of offering sacrifices to Heaven. In this manner was the Ts'in
Dynasty established. It ruled with far more vigour and effect
than any previous family. The reign of Shi Hwang-ti (mean-
ing "first universal emperor") of this dynasty is usually taken
to mark the end of feudal and divided China. He seems to
have played the unifying role in the east that Alexander the
Great might have played in the west, but he lived longer, and
the unity he made (or restored) was comparatively permanent,
while the empire of Alexander the Great fell to pieces, as we
shall tell, at his death. Shi Hwang-ti, among other feats in the
1 China and the League of Nations, a pamphlet by Mr. Liang-Chi-Chao.
(Pekin Leader Office.)
152 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
direction of common effort, organized the building of the Great
Wall of China against the Huns. A civil war followed close
upon his reign, and ended in the establishment of the Han
Dynasty. Under this Han Dynasty the empire grew greatly
beyond its original two river valleys, the Huns were effectively
restrained, and the Chinese penetrated westwarcj until they
began to learn at last of civilized races and civilisations other
than their own.
By 100 B.C. the Chinese had heard of India, their power
had spread across Tibet and into Western Turkestan, and they
were trading by camel caravans with Persia and the western
world. So much for the present must suffice for our account of
China. We shall return to the distinctive characters of its
civilization later.
6
And in these thousands of years during which man was
making his way step by step from the barbarism of the helio-
lithic culture to civilization at these old-world centres, what was
happening in the rest of the world? To the north of these
centres, from the Rhine to the Pacific, the Nordic and Mon-
golian peoples, as we have told, were also learning the use
of metals ; but while the civilizations were settling down these
men of the great plains were becoming migratory and de-
veloping from a slow wandering life towards a complete seasonal
nomadism. To the south of the civilized zone, in central and
southern Africa, the negro was making a slower progress, and
that, it would seem, under the stimulus of invasion by whiter
tribes from the Mediterranean regions, bringing with them
in succession cultivation and the use of metals. These white
men came to the black by two routes : across the Sahara to the
west as Berbers and Tuaregs and the like, to mix with the negro
and create such quasi-white races as the Fulas; and also by
way of the Nile, where the Baganda ( Gandafolk) of Uganda,
for example, may possibly be of remote white origin. The
African forests were denser then, and spread eastward and
northward from the Upper Nile.
The islands of the East Indies, three thousand years ago,
were probably still only inhabited here and there by stranded
patches of Palaeolithic Australoids, who had wandered thither
THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 153
in those immemorial ages when there was a nearly complete
land hridge by way of the East Indies to Australia. The
islands of Oceania were uninhabited. The spreading of the
heliolithic peoples by sea-going canoes into the islands of the
Pacific came much later in the history of man, at earliest a
thousand years B.C. Still later did they reach Madagascar.
The beautiy of New Zealand also was as yet wasted upon man-
kind ; its highest living creatures were a great ostrich-like bird,
the moa, now extinct, and the little kiwi which has feathers
like coarse hair and the merest rudiments of wings.
In North America a group of Mongoloid tribes were now
cut off altogether from the old world. They were spreading
slowly southward, hunting the innumerable bison of the
plains. They had still to learn for themselves the secrets of a
separate agriculture based on maize, and in South America
to tame the lama to their service, and so build up in Mexico
and Peru two civilizations roughly parallel in their nature tc
that of Sumer, but different in many respects, and later by six
or seven thousand years. . . .
When men reached the southern extremity of America, the
Megatherium, the giant sloth, and the Glypiodon, the giant
armadillo, were still living.
There is a considerable imaginative appeal in the obscure
story of the early American civilizations. It was largely a
separate development. Somewhen at last the southward drift
of the Amerindians must have met and mingled with the east-
ward, canoe-borne drift of the heliolithic culture. But it was
the heliolithic culture still at a very lowly stage and probably
before the use of metals. It has to be noted as evidence of
this canoe-borne origin of American culture, that elephant-
headed figures are found in Central American drawings. Amer-
ican metallurgy may have arisen independently of the old-
world use of metal, or it may have been brought by these ele-
phant carvers. These American peoples got to the use of
bronze and copper, but not to the use of iron; they had gold
and silver; and their stonework, their pottery, weaving, and
dyeing were carried to a very high level. In all these things
the American product resembles the old-world product generally,
but always it has characteristics that are distinctive. The
American civilizations had picture-writing of a primitive sort,
but it never developed even to the pitch of the earliest Egyptian
154 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
hieroglyphics. In Yucatan only was there a kind of script,
the Maya writing, but it was used simply for keeping a cal-
endar. In Peru the beginnings of writing were superseded
by a curious and complicated method of keeping records by
means of knots tied upon strings of various colours and shapes.
It is said that even laws and orders could be conveyed by this
code. These string bundles were called qmpus, but though
quipus are still to be found in collections, the art of reading
them is altogether lost. The Chinese histories, Mr. L. Y. Chen
informs us, state that a similar method of record by knots was
used in China before the invention of writing there. The
Peruvians also got to making maps and the use of counting-
frames. "But with all this there was no means of handing
on knowledge and experience from one generation to another,
nor was anything done to fix and summarize these intellectual
possessions, which are the basis of literature and science." 1
When the Spaniards came to America, the Mexicans knew
nothing of the Peruvians nor the Peruvians of the Mexicans.
Intercourse there was none. Whatever links had ever existed
were lost and forgotten. The Mexicans had never heard of
the potato which was a principal article of Peruvian diet. In
5,000 B.C. the Sumerians and Egyptians probably knew as
little of one another. American was 6,000 years behind the
Old World.
*F. Ratzel, History of Mankind.
XV
SEA PEOPLES AND TKADING PEOPLES
1. The Earliest Ships and Sailors. 2. The ^Egean Cities
before History. 3. The First Voyages of Exploration.
4. Early Traders. 5. Early Travellers.
1
THE first boats were made very early indeed in the Neo-
lithic stage of culture by riverside and lakeside peoples.
They were no more than trees and floating wood, used
to assist the imperfect natural swimming powers of men. Then
came the hollowing out of the trees, and then, with the de-
velopment of tools and a primitive carpentry, the building of
boats. Men in Egypt and Mesopotamia also developed a primi-
tive type of basketwork boat, caulked with bitumen. Such
was the "ark of bulrushes" in which Moses was hidden by his
mother. A kindred sort of vessel grew up by the use of
skins and hides expanded upon a wicker framework. To this
day cow-hide wicker boats (coracles) are used upon the west
coast of Ireland where there is plenty of cattle and a poverty
of big trees. They are also still used on the Euphrates, and
on the Towy in South Wales. Inflated skins may have preceded
the coracle, and are still used on the Euphrates and upper
Ganges. In the valleys of the great rivers, boats must early
have become an important means of communication; and it
seems natural to suppose that it was from the mouths of the
great rivers that man, already in a reasonably seaworthy vessel,
first ventured out upon what must have seemed to him then
the trackless and homeless sea.
No doubt he ventured at first as a fisherman, having learnt
the elements of seacraft in creeks and lagoons. Men may have
navigated boats upon the Levantine lake before the refilling
of the Mediterranean by the Atlantic waters. The canoe was
an integral part of the heliolithic culture, it drifted with the
155
156 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
culture upon the warm waters of the earth from the Mediter-
ranean to (at last) America. There were not only canoes, but
Sumerian boats and ships upon the Euphrates and Tigris, when
these rivers in 7,000 B.C. fell by separate mouths into the
Persian Gulf. The Sumerian city of Eridu, which stood at the
head of the Persian Gulf (from which it is now separated by a
hundred and thirty miles of alluvium *), had ships upon the sea
then. We also find evidence of a fully developed sea life six
thousand years ago at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and
possibly at that time there were already canoes on the seas
among the islands of the nearer East Indies. There are pre-
dynastic Neolithic Egyptian representations of Nile ships of a
fair size, capable of carrying elephants. 2
Very soon the seafaring men must have realized the peculiar
freedom and opportunities the ship gave them. They could
get away to islands ; no chief nor king could pursue a boat or
ship with any certainty; every captain was a king. The sea-
men would find it easy to make nests upon islands and in strong
positions on the mainland. There they could harbour, there
they could carry on a certain agriculture and fishery ; but their
specialty and their main business was, of course, the expedition
across the sea. That was not usually a trading expedition;
it was much more frequently a piratical raid. From what
we know of mankind, we are bound to conclude that the first
sailors plundered when they could, and traded when they had to.
Because it developed in the comparatively warm and tran-
quil waters of the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the
Persian Gulf, and the western horn of the Indian Ocean, the
shipping of the ancient world retained throughout certain char-
acteristics that make it .differ very widely from the ocean-going
sailing shipping, with its vast spread of canvas, of the last four
hundred years. "The Mediterranean," says Mr. Torr, 3 "is a
sea where a vessel with sails may lie becalmed for days to-
gether, while a vessel with oars would easily be traversing the
smooth waters, with coasts and islands everywhere at hand
to give her shelter in case of storm. In that sea, therefore, oars
became the characteristic instruments of navigation, and the
arrangement of oars the chief problem in shipbuilding. And
1 Sayce.
2 Mosso, The Dami of Mediterranean Civilization. R. L. C.
"Cecil Torr. Ancient Ships.
SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES
157
so long as the Mediterranean nations dominated Western Eu-
rope, vessels of the southern type were built upon the northern
coasts, though there generally was wind
enough here for sails and too much wave
for oars. . . . The art of rowing can
first he discerned upon the Nile. Boats
with oars are represented in the earliest
pictorial monuments of Egypt, dating
from about 2,500 B.C. ; and although
some crews are paddling with their
faces towards the bow, others are row-
ing with their faces towards the stern.
The paddling is certainly the older
practice, for the hieroglyph chen depicts
two arms grasping an oar in the attitude
of paddling, and the hieroglyphs were
invented in the earliest ages. And that
practice may really have ceased before
2,500 B.C., despite the testimony of
monuments of that date; for in monu-
ments dating from about 1,250 B.C.,
crews are represented unmistakably
rowing with their faces towards the
stern and yet grasping their oars in the
attitude of paddling, so that even then
Egyptian artists mechanically followed
the turn of the hieroglyph to which
their hands were accustomed. In these
reliefs there are twenty rowers on the
boats on the Nile, and thirty on the
ships on the Red Sea ; but in the earliest
reliefs the number varies considerably,
and seems dependent on the amount of
space at the sculptor's disposal."
The Aryan peoples came late to the
sea. The earliest ships on the sea were
either Sumerian or Hamitic; the
Semitic peoples followed close upon
these pioneers. Along the eastern end
of the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians, a Semitic people, set
up a string of indep"endent harbour towns of which Acre,
158
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Tyre, and Sidon were the chief; and later they pushed their
voyages westward and founded Carthage and IJtica in North
Africa Possibly
Phoenician keels
, were already in
the Mediterra-
|1 nean by 2,000 B.C.
bc|p Both Tyre and
c % Sidon were origi-
fe nally on islands,
*| and so easily de-
g fensible against a
is ^ land raid. But be-
te ^ fore we go on to
=3.3 the marine ex-
,2 g ploits of this great
^ sea-going race, we
2 g must note a very
p remarkable and
"2 curious nest of
,'g early sea people
^ g whose remains
K* have been discov-
^ ered in Crete.
+> <4H
|i 2
|-g These early
05 S Cretans were of a
= J race akin to the
"o Iberians of Spain
o^ and Western Eu-
l . rope and the dark
S2 whites of Asia
Minor and North
Africa, and their
g* language is un-
known. This race
lived not only in
Crete, but in Cyprus, Greece, Asia Minor, Sicily, and South
Italy. It was a civilized people for long ages before the
fair Nordic Greeks spread southward through Macedonia. At
SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 159
Cnossos, in Crete, there have been found the most astonishing
ruins and remains, and Cnossos, therefore, is apt to overshadow
the rest of these settlements in people's imaginations, but it is
well to bear in mind that though Cnossos was no doubt a chief
city of this ^Egean civilization, these "JEgeans" had in the full-
ness of their time many cities and a wide range. Possibly, all
that we know of them now are but the vestiges of the far more
extensive heliolithic Neolithic civilization which is now sub-
merged under the waters of the Mediterranean.
At Cnossos there are Neolithic remains as old or older than
any of the pre-dynastic remains of Egypt. The Bronze Age
began in Crete as soon as it did in Egypt, and there have been
vases found by Elinders Petrie in Egypt and referred by
him to the 1st Dynasty, which he declared to be importations
from Crete. Stone vessels have been found in Crete of forms
characteristic of the IVth (pyramid-building) Dynasty, and
there can be no doubt that there was a vigorous trade between
Crete and Egypt in the time of the Xllth Dynasty. This con-
tinued until about 1,000 B.C. It is clear that this island civiliza-
tion arising upon the soil of Crete is at least as old as the
Egyptian, and that it was already launched upon the sea as
early as 4,000 B.C.
The great days of Crete were not so early as this. It was
only about 2,500 B.C. that the island appears to have been
unified under one ruler. Then began an age of peace and pros-
perity unexampled in the history of the ancient world. Secure
from invasion, living in a delightful climate, trading with every
civilized community in the world, the Cretans were free to de-
velop all the arts and amenities of life. This Cnossos was not
so much a town as the vast palace of the king and his people.
It was not even fortified. The kings, it would seem, were called
Minos always, as the kings of Egypt were all called Pharaoh ;
the king of Cnossos figures in the early legends of the Greeks
as King Minos, who lived in the Labyrinth and kept there a
horrible monster, half man, half bull, the Minotaur, to feed
which he levied a tribute of youths and maidens from the
Athenians. Those stories are a part of Greek literature, and
have always been known, but it is only in the last few decades
that the excavations at Cnossos have revealed how close these
legends were to the reality. The Cretan labyrinth was a build-
ing as stately, complex, and luxurious as any in the ancient
160
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
world. Among other details we find water-pipes, bathrooms,
and the like conveniences, such as have hitherto been regarded
as the latest refinements of modern life. The pottery, the textile
manufactures, the sculpture and painting of these people, their
gem and ivory work, their metal and inlaid work, is as ad-
mirable as any that mankind has produced. They were much
given to festivals and shows, and, in particular, they were
addicted to bull-fights and gymnastic entertainments. Their
female costume became astonishingly "modern" in style; their
women wore corsets and flounced dresses. They had a system
of writing which has not yet been deciphered.
It is the custom nowadays to make a sort of wonder of these
achievements of the Cretans, as though they were a people
of incredible artistic ability living in the dawn of civilization.
But their great time was long past that dawn ; as late as 2,000
B.C. It took them many centuries to reach their best in art
and skill, and their art and luxury are by no means so great
a wonder if we reflect that for 3,000 years they were immune
from invasion, that for a thousand years they were at peace.
Century after century their artizans could perfect their skill,
and their men and women refine upon refinement. Wherever
men of almost any race have been comparatively safe in this
fashion for such a length of time, they have developed much
artistic beauty. Given the opportunity, all races are artistic.
Greek legend has it that it was in Crete that Dsedalus at-
tempted to make the first flying machine. Daedalus ( = cunning
artificer) was a sort of personified summary of mechanical
SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES
161
skill. It is curious to speculate what germ of fact lies behind
him and those waxen w r ings that, according to the legend, melted
and plunged his son Icarus in the sea.
There came at last a change in the condition of the lives of
these Cretans, for other peoples, the Greeks and the Phosnicians,
were also coming out with powerful fleets upon the seas. We
do not know what led to the disaster nor who inflicted it; but
somewhen about 1,400 B.C. Cnossos was sacked and burnt, and
though the Cretan life
struggled on there
rather lamely for an-
other four centuries,
there came at last a
final blow about 1,000
B.C. (that is to say, in
the days of the As-
syrian ascendancy in
the East). The palace
at Cnossos was de-
stroyed, and never re-
built nor reinhabited.
Possibly this was done
by the ships of those
new-comers into the
Mediterranean, the
barbaric Greeks, a
group of Aryan-speak-
ing tribes from the Jauousz figure from. GIOSSOS..... ~fr
north, who may have votary oTt^ Sn&* God***......
wiped out Cnossos as they wiped out the city of Troy. The
legend of Theseus tells of such a raid. He entered the Laby-
rinth (which may have been the Cnossos Palace) by the aid of
Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, and slew the Minotaur.
The Iliad makes it clear that destruction came upon Troy
because the Trojans stole Greek women. Modern writers, with
modern ideas in their heads, have tried to make out that the
Greeks assailed Troy in order to secure a trade route or some
such fine-spun commercial advantage. If so, the authors of
the Iliad hid the motives of their characters very skilfully.
It would be about as reasonable to say that the Homeric Greeks
went to war with the Trojans in order to be well ahead with
T.FI H. "from photos, by
Britfs
162 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
a station on the Berlin to Bagdad railway. The Homeric
Greeks were a healthy barbaric Aryan people, with very poor
ideas about trade and "trade routes" ; they went to war with
the Trojans because they were thoroughly annoyed about this
stealing of women. It is fairly clear from the Minos legend
and from the evidence of the Cnossos remains, that the Cretans
kidnapped or stole youths and maidens to be slaves, bull-fighters,
athletes, and perhaps sacrifices. They traded fairly with the
Egyptians, but it may be they did not realize the gathering
strength of the Greek barbarians ; they "traded 5 '* violently with
them, and so brought sword and flame upon themselves.
Another great sea people were the Phoenicians. They were
great seamen because they were great traders. Their colony
of Carthage (founded before 800 B. c. by Tyre) became at last
greater than any of the older Phoenician cities, but already
before 1,500 B.C. both Sidon and Tyre had settlements upon
the African coast. Carthage was comparatively inaccessible
to the Assyrian and Babylonian hosts, and, profiting greatly
by the long siege of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar II, became the
greatest maritime power the world had hitherto seen. She
claimed the Western Mediterranean as her own, and seized
every ship she could catch west of Sardinia. Roman writers
accuse her of great cruelties. She fought the Greeks for Sicily,
and later (in the second century B.C.) she fought the Romans.
Alexander the Great formed plans for her conquest; but he
died, as we shall tell later, before he could carry them out.
3
At her zenith Carthage probably had the hitherto unheard-of
population of a million. This population was largely indus-
trial, and her woven goods were universally famous. As well
as a coasting trade, she had a considerable land trade with
Central Africa, 1 and she sold negro slaves, ivory, metals,
precious stones and the like, to all the Mediterranean people ; she
worked Spanish copper mines, and her ships went out into
1 There were no domesticated camels in Africa until after the Persian
conquest of Egypt. This must have greatly restricted the desert routes.
(See Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, note to Chap. VIII.) But
the Sahara desert of 3,000 or 2,000 years ago was less parched and
sterile than it is to-day. From rock engravings we may deduce the theory
that the desert was crossed from oasis to oasis by riding oxen and by
SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 163
the Atlantic and coasted along Portugal and France northward
as far as the Cassiterides (the Scilly Isles, or Cornwall, in
England) to get tin. About 520 B.C. a certain Hanno made a
voyage that is still one of the most notable in the world. This
Hanno, if we may trust the Periplus of Hanno, the Greek trans-
lation of his account which still survives, followed the African
coast southward from the Straits of Gibraltar as far as the
confines of Liberia. He had sixty big ships, and his main
task was to found or reinforce certain Carthaginian stations
upon the Morocco coast. Then he pushed southward. He
founded a settlement in the Rio de Oro (on Kerne or Herne
Island), and sailed, on past the Senegal River. The voyagers
passed on for seven days beyond the Gambia, and landed at
last upon some island. This they left in a panic, because, al-
though the day was silent with the silence of the tropical for-
ests, at night they heard the sound of flutes, drums, and gongs,
and the sky was red with the blaze of the bush fires. The
coast country for the rest of the voyage was one blaze of fire,
from the burning of the bush. Streams of fire ran down the
hills into the sea, and at length a blaze arose so loftily that it
touched the skies. Three days further brought them to an
island containing a lake ( ?Sherbro Island). In this lake was
another island ( ?Macaulay Island), and on this were wild,
hairy men and women, "whom the interpreters called gorilla."
The Carthaginians, having caught some of the females of these
"gorillas" they were probably chimpanzees turned back and
eventually deposited the skins of their captives who had proved
impossibly violent guests to entertain on board ship in the
Temple of Juno.
A still more wonderful Phoenician sea voyage, long doubted,
but now supported by some archasological evidence, is related
by Herodotus, who declares that the Pharaoh Necho of the
XXVIth Dynasty commissioned some Phoenicians to attempt
the circumnavigation of Africa, and that starting from the
Gulf of Suez southward, they did finally come back through
ox-carts: perhaps, also, on horses and asses. The camel as a beast of
transport was seemingly not introduced into North Africa till the Arab
invasions of the seventh century A.D. The fossil remains of camels are
found in Algeria, and wild camels may have lingered in the wastes of the
Sahara and Somaliland till the domesticated camel was introduced. The
Nubian wild ass also seems to have extended its range to the Sahara.
H. H. J.
164 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the Mediterranean to the Nile delta. They took nearly three
years to complete their voyage. Each year they landed, and
sowed and harvested a crop of wheat before going on.
The great trading cities of the Phoenicians are the most strik-
ing of the early manifestations of the peculiar and character-
istic gift of the Semitic peoples to mankind, trade and exchange. 1
While the Semitic Phoenician peoples were spreading them-
selves upon the seas, another kindred Semitic people, the
Arameans, whose occupation of Damascus we have already
noted, were developing the caravan routes of the Arabian and
Persian deserts, and becoming the chief trading people of
Western Asia. The Semitic peoples, earlier civilized than the
Aryan, have always shown, and still show to-day, a far greater
sense of quality and quantity in marketable goods than the
latter; it is to their need of account-keeping that the develop-
ment of alphabetical writing is to be ascribed, and it is to them
that most of the great advances in computation are due. Our
modern numerals are Arabic; our arithmetic and algebra are
essentially Semitic sciences.
The Semitic peoples, we may point out here, are to this
day counting peoples strong in their sense of equivalents and
reparation. The moral teaching of the Hebrews was saturated
by such ideas. "With what measure ye mete, the same shall
be meted unto you." Other races and peoples have imagined
diverse and fitful and marvellous gods, but it was the trad-
ing Semites who first began to think of God as a Righteous
Dealer, whose promises were kept, who failed not the humblest
creditor, and called to account every spurious act.
The trade that was going on in the ancient world before the
sixth or seventh century B.C. was almost entirely a barter
trade. There was little or no credit or coined money. The
ordinary standard of value with the early Aryans was cattle,
as it still is with the Zulus and Kaffirs to-day. In the Iliad,
the respective values of two shields are stated in head of cattle,
and the Roman word for moneys, pecunia, is derived from
1 There was Sumerian trade organized round the temples before the
Semites got into Babylonia. See Hall and King, Archceologioal Discoveries
in Western Asia. E. B.
SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 165
pecus, cattle. Cattle as money had this advantage; it did not
need to be carried from one owner to another, and if it needed
attention and food, at any rate it bred. But it was incon-
venient for ship or caravan transit. Many other substances
have at various times been found convenient as a standard;
tobacco was once legal tender in the colonial days in North
America, and in West Africa fines are paid and bargains made
in bottles of trade gin. The early Asiatic trade included
metals; and weighed lumps of metal, since they were in gen-
eral demand and were convenient for hoarding and storage,
costing nothing for fodder and needing small houseroom, soon
asserted their superiority over cattle and sheep. Iron, which
seems to have been first reduced from its ores by the Hittites,
was, to begin with, a rare and much-desired substance. 1 It is
stated by Aristotle to have supplied the first currency. In
the collection of letters found at Tel-el- Amarna, addressed to
and from Amenophis III (already mentioned) and his succes-
sor Amenophis IV, one from a Hittite king promises iron as
an extremely valuable gift. Gold, then as now, was the most
precious, and therefore most portable, security. In early Egypt
silver was almost as rare as gold until after the XVIIIth
Dynasty. Later the general standard of value in the Eastern
world became silver, measured by weight.
To begin with, metals were handed about in ingots and
weighed at each transaction. Then they were stamped to
indicate their fineness and guarantee their purity. The first
recorded coins were minted about 600 B.C. in Lydia, a gold-
producing country in the west of Asia Minor. The first-known
gold coins were minted in Lydia by Cro3sus, whose name has
become a proverb for wealth; he was conquered, as we shall
tell later, by that same Cyrus the Persian who took Babylon in
539 B.C. But very probably coined money had been used in
Babylonia before that time. The "sealed shekel," a stamped
piece of silver, came very near to being a coin. The promise
to pay so much silver or gold on "leather" (= parchment) with
the seal of some established firm is probably as old or older
than coinage. The Carthaginians used such "leather money."
We know very little of the way in which small traffic was con-
ducted. Common people, who in those ancient times were in
1 Iron bars of fixed weight were used for coin in Britain. Csesar, De
Bello Gallico.G. Wh.
166 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
dependent positions, seem to have had no money at all; they
did their business by barter. Early Egyptian paintings show
this going on. 1
5
When one realizes the absence of small money or of any
conveniently portable means of exchange in the pre- Alexandrian
world, one perceives how impossible was private travel in those
days. 2 The first "inns" no doubt a sort of caravanserai are
commonly said to have come into existence in Lydia in the third
or fourth century B.C. That, however, is too late a date. They
are certainly older than that. There is good evidence of them
at least as early as the sixth century. ^Eschylus twice mentions
inns. His word is "all-receiver," or "all-receiving house." 3
Private travellers must have been fairly common in the Greek
world, including its colonies, by this time. But such private
travel was a comparatively new thing then. The early histo-
rians Hecataeus and Herodotus travelled widely. "I suspect,"
says Professor Gilbert Murray, "that this sort of travel 'for
Historic' or 'for discovery' was rather a Greek invention. Solon
is supposed to have practised it; and even Lycurgus." . . .
The earlier travellers were traders travelling in a caravan or in
a shipload, and carrying their goods and their minas and
shekels of metal or gems or bales of fine stuff with them, or
government officials travelling with letters of introduction and
a proper retinue. Possibly there were a few mendicants, and,
in some restricted regions, religious pilgrims.
That earlier world before 600 B.C. was one in which a lonely
"stranger" was a rare and suspected and endangered being.
He might suffer horrible cruelties, for there was little law to
protect such as he. Few individuals strayed therefore. One
ir The earliest coinage of the west coast of Asia Minor was in electrum,
a mixture of gold and silver, and there is an interesting controversy as to
whether the first issues were stamped by cities, temples, or private bank-
ers. P. G.
'Small change was in existence before the time of Alexander. The
Athenians had a range of exceedingly small silver coins running almost
down to the size of a pinhead which were generally carried in the mouth;
a character in Aristophanes was suddenly assaulted, and swallowed his
change in consequence. P. G.
'There is an inn-keeper in Aristophanes, but it may be inferred from
the circumstance that she is represented as letting lodgings in hell, that
the early inn left much to be desired. P. G.
SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 167
lived and died attached and tied to some patriarchal tribe,
if one was a nomad, or to some great household if one was
civilized or to one of the big temple establishments which we
will presently discuss. Or one was a herded slave. One knew
nothing, except for a few monstrous legends, of the rest of the
world in which one lived. We know more to-day, indeed, of
the world of 600 B.C. than any single living being knew
at that time. We map it out, see it as a whole in relation to
past and future. We begin to learn precisely what was going
on at the same time in Egypt and Spain and Media and India
and China. We can share in imagination, not only the won-
der of Hanno's sailors, but of the men who lit the warning
beacons on the shore. We know that those "mountains flam-
ing to the sky" were only the customary burning of the dry
grass at that season of the year. Year by year, more and more
rapidly, our common knowledge increases. In the years to
come men will understand still more of those lives in the past,
until peihaps they will understand them altogether.
XVI
WHITING
1. Picture-Writing. 2. Syllable-Writing. 3. Alpha-
bet-Writing. 4. T/ze Place of Writing in Human Life.
IN the four preceding chapters (XII to XV) we have
sketched in broad outline the development of the chief
human communities from the primitive beginnings of the
heliolith,ic culture to the great historical kingdoms and empires
in the sixth century B.C. We must now study a little more closely
the general process of social change, the growth of human ideas,
and the elaboration of human relationships that was going on
during these ages between 10,000 B.C. and 500 B.C. What we
have done so far is to draw the map and name the chief kings
and empires, to define the relations in time and space of
Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Phoenicia, Cnossos, and the like;
we come now to the real business of history, which is to get down
below these outer forms to the thoughts and' lives of individual
men.
By far the most important thing that was going on during
those fifty or sixty centuries of social development was the
invention of writing and its gradual progress to importance in
human affairs. It was a new instrument for the human mind,
an enormous enlargement of its range of action, a new means
of continuity. We have seen how in later Palaeolithic and early
Neolithic times the elaboration of articulate speech gave men
a mental handhold for consecutive thought, and a vast en-
largement of their powers of co-operation. For a time this new
acquirement seems te have overshadowed their earlier achieve-
ment of drawing, and possibly it checked the use of gesture.
But drawing presently reappeared again, for record, for signs,
for the joy of drawing. Before real writing came picture-
writing, such as is still practised by the Amerindians, the Bush-
168
WRITING 169
men, and savage and barbaric people in all parts of the world.
It is essentially a drawing of things and acts, helped out by
heraldic indications of proper names, and by strokes and dots
to represent days and distances and such-like quantitative ideas.
Quite kindred to such picture-writing is the pictograph that
one finds still in use to-day in international railway time-tables
upon the continent of Europe, where a little black sign of a
cup indicates a stand-up buffet for light refreshments ; a crossed
knife and fork, a restaurant; a little steamboat, a transfer to
a steamboat; and a postilion's horn, a diligence. Similar signs
are used in the well-known Michelin guides for automobilists
in Europe, to show a post office (envelope) or a telephone (tele-
phone receiver). The quality of hotels is shown by an inn
with one, two, three, or four gables, and so forth. Similarly,
the roads of Europe are marked with wayside signs represent-
ing a gate, to indicate a level crossing ahead, a sinuous bend
for a dangerous curve, and the like. From such pictographic
signs to the first elements of Chinese writing is not a very long
stretch.
In Chinese writing there are still traceable a number of picto-
graphs. Most are now difficult to recognize. A mouth was
originally written as a mouth-shaped hole, and is now, for
convenience of brushwork, squared ; a child, originally a rec-
ognizable little mannikin, is now a hasty wriggle and a cross;
the sun, originally a large circle with a dot in the centre, has
been converted, for the sake of convenience of combination, into
a crossed oblong, which is easier to make with a brush. By
combining these pictographs, a second order of ideas is ex-
pressed. For example, the pictograph for mouth combined
with pictograph for vapour expressed "words." 1
From such combinations one passes to what are called ideo-
grams: the sign for "words" and the sign for "tongue" combine
to make "speech" ; the sign for "roof" and the sign for "pig"
make "home" for in the early domestic economy of China the
pig was as important as it used to be in Ireland. But, as we
have already noted earlier, the Chinese language consists of a
comparatively few elementary monosyllabic sounds, which are
all used in a great variety of meanings, and the Chinese soon
discovered that a number of these pictographs and ideographs
could be used also to express other ideas, not so conveniently
'See the Encyclopaedia Brit., Article China, p. 218.
170 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
pictured, but having the same sound. Characters so used are
called phonograms. For example, the sound fang meant not
only "boat," but a a place," "spinning," "fragrant," "inquire,"
and several other meanings according to the context. But while
a boat is easy to draw, most of the other meanings are undraw-
able. How can one draw "fragrant" or "inquire" ? The
Chinese, therefore, took the same sign for all these meanings
of "fang," but added to each of them another distinctive sign,
the determinative, to show what sort of fang was intended. A
"place" was indicated by the same sign as for "boat" (fang}
and the determinative sign for "earth" ; "spinning" by the sign
for fang and the sign for "silk" ; "inquire" by the sign for fang,
and the sign for "words," and so on.
One may perhaps make this development of pictographs, ideo-
grams, and phonograms a little clearer by taking an analogous
case in English. Suppose we were making up a sort of picture-
writing in English, then it would be very natural to use a square
with a slanting line to suggest a lid, for the word and thing
box. That would be a pictograph. But now suppose we had a
round sign for money, and suppose we put this sign inside the
box sign, that would do for "cash-box" or "treasury." That
would be an ideogram. But the word "box" is used for other
things than boxes. There is the box shrub which gives us box-
wood. It would be hard to draw a recognizable box-tree dis-
tinct from other trees, but it is quite easy to put our sign "box,"
and add our sign for shrub as a determinative to determine that
it is that sort of box and not a common box that we want to
express. And then there is "box," the verb, meaning to fight
with fists. Here, again, we need a determinative; we might
add the two crossed swords, a sign which is used very often
upon maps to denote a battle. A box at a theatre needs yet an-
other determinative, and so we go on, through a long series of
phonograms.
Now it is manifest that here in the Chinese writing is a very
peculiar and complex system of sign-writing. A very great
number of characters have to be learnt and the mind habituated
to their use. The power it possesses to carry ideas and discus-
sion is still ungauged by western standards, but we may doubt
whether with this instrument it will ever be possible to establish
such a wide, common mentality as the simpler and swifter
alphabets of the western civilizations permit. In China it
WRITING
171
created a special reading-class, the mandarins, who were also
the ruling and official class. Their necessary concentration
upon words and classical forms, rather than upon ideas and
realities, seems, in
spite of her com-
parative peaceful-
ness and the very
high individual in-
tellectual quality
of her people, to
have greatly ham-
pered the social
and economic de-
velopment of
China. Probably
it is the complex-
ity of her speech
and writing, more
than any other
imaginable cause,
that has made
China to-day po-
litically, socially,
and individually a
Specimens oC Tkmericari Indian,
vast pool of back-
ward people rather
than the foremost
power in the whole
world. 1
2
But while the
Chinese mind thus
made for itself an
instrument which
No. 1, painted on a rock on the shore of Lake
Superior, records an expedition across the lake, in
which five canoes took part. The upright strokes
in each indicate the number of the crew, and the
bird represents a chief, "The Kingfisher." The
three circles (suns) under the arch (of heaven)
indicate that the voyage lasted three days, and the
tortoise, a symbol of land, denotes a safe arrival.
No. 2 is a petition sent to the United States Con-
gress by a group of Indian tribes, asking for fish-
ing rights in certain small lakes. The tribes are
represented by their totems, martens, bear, man-
fish, and catfish, led by the crane. Lines running
from the heart and eye of each animal to the heart
and eye of the crane denote that they are all of
one mind; and a line runs from the eye of the
crane to the lakes, shown in the crude little "map"
in the lower left-hand corner.
1 The writer's friend, Mr. L. Y. Chen, thinks that this is only partially
true. He thinks that the emperors insisted upon a minute and rigorous
study of the set classics in order to check intellectual innovation. This
was especially the case with the Ming emperors, the first of whom, when
reorganizing the examination system on a narrower basis, said definitely,
"This will bring all the intellectuals of the world into my trap." The
Five Classics and the Four Books have imprisoned the mind of China.
172 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
is probably too elaborate in structure, too laborious in use, and
too inflexible in its form to meet the modern need for simple,
swift, exact, and lucid communications, the growing civiliza-
tions of the west were working out the problem of a
written record upon rather different and, on the whole, more
advantageous lines. They did not seek to improve their scrip*-
to make it swift and easy, but circumstances conspired to make
it so. The Sumerian picture writing, which had to be done
upon clay and with little styles, which made curved marks
with difficulty and inaccurately, rapidly degenerated by a con-
ventionalized dabbing down of wedged-shaped marks (cunei-
form = wedge-shaped) into almost unrecognizable hints of the
shapes intended. It helped the Sumerians greatly to learn to
write, that they had to draw so badly. They got very soon
to the Chinese pictographs, ideographs, and phonograms, and
beyond them.
Most people know a sort of puzzle called a rebus. It is a way
of representing words by pictures, not of the things the words
represent, but by the pictures of other things having a similar
sound. For example, two gates and a head is a rebus for Gates-
head; a little streamlet (beck), a crowned monarch, and a ham,
Beckingham. The Sumerian language was a language well
adapted to this sort of representation. It was apparently a
language of often quite vast polysyllables, made up of very dis-
tinct inalterable syllables; and many of the syllables taken
separately were the names of concrete things. So that this
cuneiform writing developed very readily into a syllabic way
of writing, in which each sign conveys a syllable just as each
act in a charade conveys a syllable. When presently the Semites
conquered Sumeria, they adapted the syllabic system to their
own speech, and so this writing became entirely a sign-for-a-
sound writing. It was so used by the Assyrians and by the
Chaldeans, But it was not a letter-writing, it was a syllable-
writing. This cuneiform script prevailed for long ages over
Assyria, Babylonia, and the Near East generally; there are
vestiges of it in some of the letters of our alphabet to-day.
3
But, meanwhile, in Egypt and upon the Mediterranean coast
yet another system of writing grew up. Its beginnings are
WRITING 178
probably to be found in the priestly picture- writing (hiero-
glyphics) of the Egyptians, which also in the usual way became
partly a sound-sign system. As we see it on the Egyptian
monuments, the hieroglyphic writing consists of decorative but
stiff and elaborate forms, but for such purpose as letter-writing
and the keeping of recipes and the like, the Egyptian priests
used a much simplified and flowing form of these characters,
the hieratic script. Side by side with this hieratic script rose
another, probably also derivative from the hieroglyphs, a script
now lost to use, which was taken over by various non-Egyptian
peoples in the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians, Libyans,
Lydians, Cretans, and Celt-Iberians, and used for business pur-
poses. Possibly a few letters were borrowed from the later
cuneiform. In the hands of these foreigners this writing was,
so to speak, cut off from its roots; it lost all but a few traces
of its early pictorial character. It ceased to be pictographic
or ideographic ; it became simply a pure sound-sign system, an
alphabet.
There were a number of such alphabets in the Mediterranean
differing widely from each other. It may be noted that the
Phoenician alphabet (and perhaps others) omitted vowels.
Possibly they pronounced their consonants very hard and had
rather indeterminate vowels, as is said to be still the case with
tribes of South Arabia. Quite probably, too, the Phoenicians
used their alphabet at first not so much for writing as for single
initial letters in their business accounts and tallies. One of
these Mediterranean alphabets reached the Greeks, long after
the time of the Iliad, who presently set to work to make it
express the clear and beautiful sounds of their own highly
developed Aryan speech. It consisted at first of consonants,
and the Greeks added the vowels. They began to write for
record, to help and fix their bardic tradition. . . .
4
So it was by a series of very natural steps that writing grew
out of the life of man. At first and for long ages it was the
interest and the secret of only a few people in a special class,
a mere accessory to the record of pictures. But there were cer-
tain very manifest advantages, quite apart from the increased
expressiveness of mood and qualification, to be gained by making
174 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
writing a little less plain than straightforward pictures, and in
conventionalizing and codifying it. One of these was that so
messages might be sent understandable by the sender and re-
ceiver, but not plain to the uninitiated. Another was that so
one might put down various matters and help one's memory and
the memory of one's friends, without giving away too much
to the common herd. Among some of the earliest Egyptian
writings, for example, are medical recipes and magic formula.
Accounts, letters, recipes, name lists, itineraries; these were
the earliest of written documents. Then, as the art of writing
and reading spread, came that odd desire, that pathetic desire
so common among human beings, to astonish some strange and
remote person by writing down something striking, some secret
one knew, some strange thought, or even one's name, so that
long after one had gone one's way, it might strike upon the
sight and mind of another reader. Even in Sumeria men
scratched on walls, and all that remains to us of the ancient
world, its rocks, its buildings, is plastered thickly with the
names and the boasting of those foremost among human adver-
tisers, its kings. Perhaps half the early inscriptions in that
ancient world are of this nature, if, that is, we group with the
name-writing and boasting the epitaphs, which were probably
in many cases pre-arranged by the deceased.
For long the desire for crude self-assertion of the name-
scrawling sort and the love of secret understandings kept writ-
ing within a narrow scope; but that other, more truly social
desire in men, the desire to tell, was also at work. The pro-
founder possibilities of writing, the possibilities of a vast exten-
sion and definition and settlement of knowledge and tradition,
only grew apparent after long ages. But it will be interesting
at this point and in this connection to recapitulate certain ele-
mental facts about life, upon which we laid stress in our earlier
chapters, because they illuminate not only the huge value of
writing in the whole field of man's history, but also the role
it is likely to play in his future.
1. Life had at first, it must be remembered, only a discon-
tinuous repetition of consciousness, as the old died and the
young were born.
Such a creature as a reptile has in its brain a capacity for
experience, but when the individual dies, its experience dies
with it. Most of its motives are purely instinctive, and all
WRITING 175
the mental life that it has is the result of heredity (birth
inheritance) .
2. But ordinary mammals have added to pure instinct tradi-
tion, a tradition of .experience imparted hy the imitated ex-
ample of the mother, and in the case of such mentally developed
animals as dogs, cats, or apes, by a sort of mute precept also.
For example, the mother cat chastises her young for misbe-
haviour. So do mother apes and baboons.
3. Primitive man added to his powers of transmitting ex-
perience, representative art and speech. Pictorial and sculp-
tured record and verbal tradition began.
Verbal tradition was developed to its highest possibility by
the bards. They did much to make language what it is to the
world to-day.
4. With the invention of writing, which developed out of
pictorial record, human tradition was able to become fuller and
much more exact. Verbal tradition, which had hitherto
changed from age to age, began to be fixed. Men separated by
hundreds of miles could now communicate their thoughts. An
increasing number of human beings began to share a common
written knowledge and a common sense of a past and a future.
Human thinking became a larger operation in which hundreds
of minds in different places and in different ages could react
upon one another; it became a process constantly more con-
tinuous and sustained. . . .
5. For hundreds of generations the full power of writing
was not revealed to the world, because for a long time the idea
of multiplying writings by taking prints of a first copy did not
become effective. The only way of multiplying writings was
by copying one copy at a time, and this made books costly and
rare. Moreover, the tendency to keep things secret, to make a
cult and mystery of them, and so to gain an advantage over the
generality of men, has always been very strong in men's minds.
It is only nowadays that the great masses of mankind are learn-
ing to read, and reaching out towards the treasures of knowledge
and thought already stored in books.
Nevertheless, from the first writings onward a new sort of
tradition, an enduring and immortal tradition, began in the
minds of men. Life, through mankind, grew thereafter more
and more distinctly conscious of itself and its world. It is a
thin streak of intellectual growth we trace in history, at first in
176 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
a world of tumultuous ignorance and forgetfulness ; it is like a
mere line of light coming through the chink of an opening door
into a darkened room; but slowly it widens, it grows. At last
came a time in the history of Europe when. the door, at the push
of the printer, began to open more rapidly. Knowledge flared
up, and as it flared it ceased to be the privilege of a favoured
minority. For us now that door swings wider, and the light
behind grows brighter. Misty it is still, glowing through clouds
of dust and reek.
The door is not half open; the light is but a light new lit.
Our world to-day is only in the beginning of knowledge.
XVII
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS
1. The Priest Comes into History. 2. Priests and the
Stars. 3. Priests and the Dawn of Learning. 4. King
against Priest. 5. How Bel-Marduk Struggled against the
Kings. 6. The God^Kings of Egypt. 7. Shi Hwang-ti
Destroys the Boolcs.
i.
WHEN we direct our attention to these new accumula-
tions of human beings that were beginning in Egypt
and Mesopotamia, we find that one of the most con-
spicuous and constant objects in all these cities is a temple or
a group of temples. In some cases there arises beside it in
these regions a royal palace, but as often the temple towers over
the palace. This presence of the temple is equally true of the
Phoenician cities and of the Greek and Roman as they arise.
The palace of Cnossos, with its signs of comfort and pleasure-
seeking, and the kindred cities of the ^Egean peoples, include
religious shrines, but in Crete there are also temples standing
apart from the palatial city-households. All over the ancient
civilized world we find them; wherever primitive civilization
set its foot in Africa, Europe, or western Asia, a temple arose,
and where the civilization is most ancient, in Egypt and in
Sumer, there the temple is most in evidence. When Hanno
reached what he thought was the most westerly point of Africa,
he set up a temple to Hercules. The beginnings of civilization
and the appearance of temples is simultaneous in history. The
two things belong together. The beginning of cities is the
temple stage of history.
In all these temples there was a shrine; dominating the
shrine there was commonly a great figure usually of some
monstrous half-animal form, before which stood an altar for
sacrifices. In the Greek and Roman temples however the image
was generally that of a divinity in human form. This figure
177
178 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
was either regarded as the god or as the image or symbol of the
god, for whose worship the temple existed. And connected
with the temple there were a number, and often a considerable
number, of priests or priestesses, and temple servants, generally
wearing a distinctive costume and forming an important part
of the city population. They belong to no household; they
made up a new kind of household of their own. They were
a caste and a class apart, attracting intelligent recruits from
the general population.
The primary duty of this priesthood was concerned with the
worship of and the sacrifices to the god of the temple. And
these things were done, not at any time, but at particular times
and seasons. There had come into the life of man with his
herding and agriculture a sense of a difference between the
parts of the year and of a difference between day and day. Men
were beginning to work and to need days of rest. The temple,
by its festivals, kept count. The temple in the ancient city was
like the clock and calendar upon a writing-desk.
But it was a centre of other functions. It was in the early
temples that the records and tallies of events were kept and
that writing began. And there was knowledge there. The
people went to the temple not only en masse for festivals, but
individually for help. The early priests were also doctors and
magicians. In the earliest temples we already find those little
offerings for some private and particular end, which are still
made in the chapels of Catholic churches to-day, ex votos, little
models of hearts relieved and limbs restored, acknowledgment
of prayers answered and accepted vows.
It is clear that here we have that comparatively unimportant
element in the life of the early nomad, the medicine-man, the
shrine-keeper, and the memorist, developed, with the develop-
ment of the community and as a part of the development of the
community from barbarism to civilized settlement, into some-
thing of very much greater importance. And it is equally evi-
dent that those primitive fears of (and hopes of help from)
strange beings, the desire to propitiate unknown forces, the
primitive desire for cleansing and the primitive craving for
power and knowledge have all contributed to crystallize out this
new social fact of the temple.
The temple was accumulated by complex necessities, it grew
from many roots and needs, and the god or goddess that domi-
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 179
180 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
nated the temple was the creation of many imaginations and
made up of all sorts of impulses, ideas, and half ideas. Here
there was a god in which one sort of ideas predominated, and
there another. It is necessary to lay some stress upon this
confusion and variety of origin in gods, because there is a very
abundant literature now in existence upon religious origins,
in which a number of writers insist, some on this leading idea
and some on that we have noted several in our chapter on
"Early Thought" as though it were the only idea. Professor
Max Miiller in his time, for example, harped perpetually on
the idea of sun stories and sun worship. He would have had
us think that early man never had lusts or fears, cravings for
power, nightmares or fantasies, but that he meditated per-
petually on the beneficent source of light and life in the sky.
Now dawn and sunset are very moving facts in the daily life,
but they are only two among many. Early men, three or four
hundred generations ago, had brains very like our own. The
fancies of our childhood and youth are perhaps the best clue
we have to the ground-stuff of early religion, and anyone who
can recall those early mental experiences will understand very
easily the vagueness, the monstrosity, and the incoherent variety
of the first gods. There were sun gods, no doubt, early in the
history of temples, but there were also hippopotamus gods and
hawk gods ; there were cow deities, there were monstrous male
and female gods, there were gods of terror and gods of an ador-
able quaintness, there were gods who were nothing but lumps
of meteoric stone that had fallen amazingly out of the sky, and
gods who were mere natural stones that had chanced to have
a queer and impressive shape. Some gods, like Marduk of
Babylon and the Baal (= the Lord) of the Phoenicians,
Canaanit.es, and the like, were quite probably at bottom just
legendary wonder beings, such as little boys will invent for
themselves to-day. The settled peoples, it is said, as soon as
they thought of a god, invented a wife for him; most of the
Egyptian and Babylonian gods were married. But the gods
of the nomadic Semites had not this marrying disposition.
Children were less eagerly sought by the inhabitants of the food-
grudging steppes.
Even more natural than to provide a wife for a god is to
give him a house to live in to which offerings can be brought.
Of this house the knowing man, the magician, would naturally
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 181
become the custodian. A certain seclusion, a certain aloofness,
would add greatly to the prestige of the god. The steps by
which the early temple and the early priesthood developed so
soon as an agricultural population settled and increased are all
quite natural and understandable, up to the stage of the long
temple with the image, shrine and altar at one end and the
long nave in which the worshippers stood. And this temple,
because it had records and secrets, because it was a centre of
power, advice, and instruction, because it sought and attracted
imaginative and clever people for its service, naturally became
a kind of brain in the growing community. The attitude of
the common people who tilled the fields and herded the beasts
towards the temple would remain simple and credulous. There,
rarely seen and so imaginatively enhanced, lived the god whost?
approval gave prosperity, whose anger meant misfortune ; he
could be propitiated by little presents and the help of his
servants could be obtained. He was wonderful, and of such
power and knowledge that it did not do to be disrespectful to
him even in one's thoughts. Within the priesthood, however, a
certain amount of thinking went on at a rather higher level
than that.
2
We may note here a very interesting fact about the chief
temples of Egypt and, so far as we know because the ruins are
not so distinct of Babylonia, and that is that they were
"oriented" that is to say, that the same sort of temple was
built so that the shrine and entrance always faced in the same
direction. In Babylonian temples this was most often due
east, facing the sunrise on March 21st and September 21st,
the equinoxes; and it is to be noted that it was at the spring
equinox that the Euphrates and Tigris came down in flood.
The Pyramids of Gizeh are also oriented east and west, and
the Sphinx faces due east, but very many of the Egyptian
temples to the south of the delta of the Nile do not point due
east, but to the point where the sun rises at the longest day
and in Egypt the inundation comes close to that date. Others,
however, pointed nearly northward, and others again pointed
to the rising of the star Sirius or to* the rising-point of other
conspicuous stars. The fact of orientation links up with the
182
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 183
fact that there early arose a close association between various
gods and the sun and various fixed stars. Whatever the mass
of people outside were thinking, the priests of the temples were
beginning to link the movements of those heavenly bodies with
the power in the shrine. They were thinking about the gods
they served and thinking new meanings into them. They were
brooding upon the mystery of the stars. It was very natural
for them to suppose that these shining bodies, so irregularly
distributed and circling so solemnly and silently, must, be
charged with portents to mankind.
Among other things, this orientation of the temples served
to fix and help the great annual festival of the New Year. On
one morning in the year, and one morning alone, in a temple
oriented to the rising-place of the sun at Midsummer Day, the
sun's first rays would smite down through the gloom of the
temple and the long alley of the temple pillars, and light up
the god above the altar ^and irradiate him with glory. The
narrow, darkened structure of the ancient temples seems to
be deliberately planned for such an effect. No doubt the people
were gathered in the darkness before the dawn ; in the darkness
there was chanting and perhaps the offering of sacrifices; the
god alone stood mute and invisible. Prayers and invocations
would be made. Then upon the eyes of the worshippers,
sensitized by the darkness, as the sun rose behind them, the
god would suddenly shine.
So, at least, one explanation of orientation is found by such
students of orientation as Sir Norman Lockyer. 1 Not only is
orientation apparent in most of the temples of Egypt, Assyria,
Babylonia, and the east, it, is found in the Greek temples;
Stonehenge is oriented to the midsummer sunrise, and so are
most of the megalithic circles of Europe ; the Altar of Heaven
in Peking is oriented to midwinter. In the days of the Chinese
Empire, up to a few years ago one of the most important of
all the duties of the Emperor of China was to sacrifice and pray
in this temple upon midwinter's day for a propitious year.
The Egyptian priests had mapped out the stars into the
constellations, and divided up the zodiac into twelve signs by
3,000 B.C. . . .
*In his Daivn of Astronomy.
184 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
3
This clear evidence of astronomical inquiry and of a develop-
ment of astronomical ideas is the most obvious, hut only the
most obvious evidence of the very considerable intellectual
activities that went on within the temple precincts in ancient
times. There is a curious disposition among many modern
writers to deprecate priesthoods and to speak of priests as though
they had always been impostors and tricksters, preying upon the
simplicity of mankind. But, indeed, they were for long the
only writing class, the only reading public, the only learned
and the only thinkers ; they were all the professional classes of
the time. You could have no intellectual life at all, you could
not get access to literature or any knowledge except through
the priesthood. The temples were not only observatories and
libraries and clinics, they were museums and treasure-houses.
The original Periplus of Hanno hung in one temple in Car-
thage, skins of his "gorillas" were hung and treasured in an-
other. Whatever there was of abicTing worth in the life of
the community sheltered there. Herodotus, the early Greek
historian (485-425 B.C.), collected most of his material from
the priests of the countries in which he travelled, and it is
evident they met him generously and put their very considerable
resources completely at his disposal. Outside the temples the
world was still a world of blankly illiterate and unspeculative
human beings, living from day to day entirely for themselves.
Moreover, there is little evidence that the commonalty felt
cheated by the priests, or had anything but trust and affection
for the early priesthoods. Even the great conquerors of later
times were anxious to keep themselves upon the right side of
the priests of the nations and cities whose obedience they de-
sired, because of the immense popular influence of these priests.
No doubt there were great differences between temple and
temple and cult and cult in the spirit and quality of the priest-
hood. Some probably were cruel, some vicious and greedy,
many dull and doctrinaire, stupid with tradition, but it has to
be kept in mind that there were distinct limits to the degeneracy
or inefficiency of a priesthood. It had to keep its grip upon
the general mind. It could not go beyond what people would
stand either towards the darkness or towards the light. ^ Its
authority rested, in the end, on the persuasion that its activities
were propitious.
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 185
4
The earliest civilized governments were essentially priestly
governments. It was not kings and captains who first set men
to the plough and a settled life. It was the ideas of the gods
and plenty, working with the acquiescence of common men.
The early rulers of Sumer we know were all priests, kings
only because they were chief priests. And priestly government
had its own weaknesses as well as its peculiar deep-rooted
strength. The power of a priesthood is a power over their own
people alone. It is a subjugation through mysterious fears and
hopes. The priesthood can gather its people together for war,
but its traditionalism and all its methods unfit it for military
control. Against the enemy without, a priest-led people is feeble.
Moreover, a priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated,
a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an
intense esprit de corps. He has given up his life to his temple
and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal
vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives or dies
for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or
village is another temple with another god. It is his constant
preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults
and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they
will overcome, but they will never coalesce. Our first percep-
tions of events in Sumer, in the dim uncertain light before
history began, is of priests and gods in conflict; until the
Sumerians were conquered by the Semites they were never
united; and the same incurable conflict of priesthoods scars all
the temple ruins of Egypt. It was impossible that it could
have been otherwise, having regard to the elements out of which
religion arose.
It was out of those two main weaknesses of all priesthoods,
namely, the incapacity for efficient military leadership and their
inevitable jealousy of all other religious cults, that the power
of secular kingship arose. The foreign enemy either prevailed
and set up a king over the people, or the priesthoods who would
not give way to each other set up a common fighting captain,
who retained more or less power in peace time. This secular
king developed a group of officials about him and began, in
relation to military organization, to take a share in the priestly
administration of the people's affairs. So, growing out of
priestcraft and beside the priest, the king, the protagonist of
186
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the priest, appears upon the stage of human history, and a
very large amount of the subsequent experiences of mankind
is only to be understood as an elaboration, complication, and
'An R&sifrian King & Ids Chief Minister
distortion of the struggle, unconscious or deliberate, between
these two systems of human control, the temple and the palace.
And it was in the original centres of civilization that this
antagonism was most completely developed. The barbaric
Aryan peoples, who became ultimately the masters of all the
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 187
ancient civilizations of the Orient and of the western world,
never passed through a phase of temple rule on their way to
civilization; they came to civilization late; they found that
drama already half-played. They took over the ideas of both
temple and kingship, when those ideas were already elaborately
developed, from the more civilized Hamitic or Semitic people
they conquered.
The greater importance of the gods and the priests in the
earlier history of the Mesopotamian civilization is very appar-
ent, but gradually the palace won its way until it was at last
in a position to struggle definitely for the supreme power. At
first, in the story, the palace is ignorant and friendless in the
face of the temple ; the priests alone read, the priests alone know
the people are afraid of them. But in the dissensions of the
various cults comes the opportunity of the palace. From other
cities, from among captives, from defeated or suppressed re-
ligious cults, the palace gets men who also can read and who
can do magic things. 1 The court also becomes a centre of
writing and record; the king thinks for himself and becomes
politic. Traders and foreigners drift to the court, and if the
king has not the full records and the finished scholarship of the
priests, he has a wider and fresher first-hand knowledge of
many things. The priest comes into the temple when he is
very young; he passes many years as a neophyte; the path of
learning the clumsy letters of primitive times is slow and toil-
some; he becomes erudite and prejudiced rather than a man of
the world. Some of the more active-minded young priests may
even cast envious eyes at the king's service. There are many
complications and variations in this ages-long drama of the
struggle going on beneath the outward conflicts of priest and
king, between the made man and the born man, between learn-
ing and originality, between established knowledge and settled
usage on the one hand, and creative will and imagination on
the other. It is not always, as we shall find later, the priest
who is the conservative and unimaginative antagonist. Some-
times a king struggles against narrow and obstructive priest-
hoods; sometimes priesthoods uphold the standards of civiliza-
tion against savage, egotistical, or reactionary kings.
1 Cp. Moses and the Egyptian Magicians.
188 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
One or two outstanding facts and incidents of the early stages
of this fundamental struggle in political affairs are all that we
can note here between 4,000 B.C. and the days of Alexander.
5
In the early days of Sumeria and Akkadia the city-kings
were priests and medicine-men rather than kings, and it was
only when foreign conquerors sought to establish their hold in
relation to existing institutions that the distinction of priest and
king became definite. But the god of the priests remained as
the real overlord of the land and of priest and king alike. He
was the universal landlord; the wealth and authority of his
temples and establishments outshone those of the king. Espe-
cially was this the case within the city walls. Hammurabi, the
founder of the first Babylonian empire, is one of the earlier
monarchs whom we find taking a firm grip upon the affairs of
the community. He does it with the utmost politeness to the
gods. In an inscription recording his irrigation work in
Sumeria and Akkadia, he begins: "When Anu and Bel en-
trusted me with the rule of Sumer and Akkad ." We
possess a code of laws made by this same Hammurabi it is
the earliest known code of law and at the head of this code
we see the figure of Hammurabi receiving the law from its
nominal promulgator, the god Shamash.
An act of great political importance in the conquest of any
city was the carrying off of its god to become a subordinate in
the temple of its conqueror. This was far more important than
the subjugation of king by king. Merodach, the Babylonian
Jupiter, was carried off by the Elamites, and Babylon
did not feel independent until its return. But sometimes a
conqueror was afraid of the god he had conquered. In the col-
lection of letters addressed to Amenophis III and IV at Tel-
Amarna in Egypt, to which allusion has already been made,
is one from a certain king, Tushratta, King of Mitanni, who
has conquered Assyria and taken the statue of the goddess
Ishtar. Apparently he has sent this statue into Egypt, partly
to acknowledge the overlordship of Amenophis, but partly be-
cause he fears her anger. (Winckler.) In the Bible is related
(Sam. i. v. 1) how the Ark of the Covenant of the God of the
Hebrews was carried off by the Philistines, as a token of con-
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 189
quest, into the temple of the fish god, Dagon, at Ashdod, and
how Dagon fell down and was broken, and how the people of
Ashdod were smitten with disease. In the latter story par
ticularly, the gods and priests fill the scene; there is no king in
evidence at all.
Right through the history of the Babylonian and Assyrian
empires no monarch seems to have felt his tenure of power
secure in Babylon until he had "taken the hand of Bel"
that is to say, that he had been adopted by the priesthood of
"Bel" as the god's son and representative. As our knowledge
of Assyrian and Babylonian history grows clearer, it becomes
plainer that the politics of that world, the revolutions, usurpa-
tions, changes of dynasty, intrigues with foreign powers, turned
largely upon issues between the great wealthy priesthoods and
the growing but still inadequate power of the monarchy. The
king relied on his army, and this was usually a mercenary army
of foreigners, speedily mutinous if there was no pay or plunder,
and easily bribed. We have already noted the name of Sen-
nacherib, the son of Sargon II, among the monarchs of the
Assyrian empire. Sennacherib was involved in a violent quar-
rel with the priesthood of Babylon ; he never "took the hand of
Bel" ; and finally struck at that power by destroying altogether
the holy part of the city of Babylon (691 B.C.) and removing
the statue of Bel-Marduk to Assyria. He was assassinated by
one of his sons, and his successor, Esar-haddon (his son, but
not the son who was his assassin), found it expedient to restore
Bal-Marduk and rebuild his temple, and make his peace with
the god.
Assurbanipal (Greek, Sardanapalus), the son of this Esar-
haddon, is a particularly interesting figure from this point of
view of the relationship of priesthood and king. His father's
reconciliation with the priests of Bel-Marduk went so far that
Sardanapalus was given a Babylonian instead of a military
Assyrian education. He became a great collector of the -clay
documents of the past, and his library, which has been un-
earthed, is now the most precious source of historical material
in the world. But for all his learning he kept his grip on the
Assyrian army ; he made a temporary conquest of Egypt, sup-
pressed a rebellion in Babylon, and carried out a number of
successful expeditions. As we have already told in Chapter
XIV, he was almost the last of the Assvrian monarchs. The
190
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Aryan tribes, who knew more of war than of priestcraft, and
particularly the Scythians, the Medes and Persians, had long
been pressing upon Assyria from the north and north-east.
The Medes and Persians formed an alliance with the nomadic
Semitic Chaldeans of the south for the joint undoing of Assyria.
Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, fell to these Aryans in 606 B.C.
Sixty-seven years after the taking of Nineveh by the Aryans,
which left Babylonia to the Semitic Chaldeans, the last mon-
arch of the Chal-
dean Empire (the
Second Babylonian
Empire) , Naboni-
dus, the father of
Belshazzar, was
overthrown by Cy-
rus, the Persian.
This Nabonidus,
again, was a highly
educated monarch,
who brought far too
much intelligence
and imagination
and not enough of
the short range wis-
dom of this world to
affairs of state. He
conducted antiqua-
rian researches, and
to his researches it
is that we owe the date of 3,750 B.C., assigned to Sargon I
and still accepted by many authorities. He was proud of this
determination, and left inscriptions to record it. It is clear he
was a religious innovator ; he built and rearranged temples and
attempted to centralize religion in Babylon by bringing a num-
ber of local gods to the temple of Bel-Mar duk. No doubt he
realized the weakness and disunion of his empire due to these
conflicting cults, and had some conception of unification in
his mind.
Events were marching too rapidly for any such development.
His innovation had manifestly raised the suspicion and hos-
tility of the priesthood of Bel. They sided with the Persians.
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 191
''The soldiers of Cyrus entered Babylon without fighting."
Nabonidus was taken prisoner, and Persian sentinels were set
at the gates of the temple of Bel, "where the services continued
without intermission."
Cyrus did, in fact, set up the Persian Empire in Babylon
with the blessing of Bel-Marduk. He gratified the conservative
instincts of the priests by packing off the local gods back to
their ancestral temples. He also restored the Jews to Jerusa-
lem. 1 These were merely matters of immediate policy to him.
But in bringing in the irreligious Aryans, the ancient priest-
hood was paying too highly for the continuation of its temple
services. It would have been wiser to have dealt with the inno-
vations of Nabonidus, that earnest heretic, to have listened
to his ideas, and to have met the needs of a changing world.
Cyrus entered Babylon 539 B.C.; by 521 B.C. Babylon was in
insurrection again, and in 520 B.C. another Persian monarch,
Darius, was pulling down her walls. Within two hundred
years the life had altogether gone out of those venerable rituals
of Bel-Marduk, and the temple of Bel-Marduk was being used
by builders as a quarry.
6
The story of priest and king in Egypt is similar to, but by
no means parallel with, that of Babylonia. The kings of
Sumeria and Assyria were priests who had become kings ; they
were secularized priests. The Pharaoh of Egypt does not ap-
pear to have followed precisely that line. Already in the very
oldest records the Pharaoh has a power, and importance ex-
ceeding that of any priest. He is, in fact, a god, and more
than either priest or king. We do not know how he got to
that position. No monarch of Sumeria or Babylonia or Assyria
could have induced his people to do for him what the great
pyramid-building Pharaohs of the IVth Dynasty made their
people do in those vast erections. The earlier Pharaohs were
not improbably regarded as incarnations of the dominant god.
The falcon god Horus sits behind the head of the great statue of
Chephren. So late a monarch as Rameses III (XlXth
Dynasty) is represented upon his sarcophagus (now at Cam-
l See the last two verses of the Second Book of Chronicles, and Ezra,
ih. i.
192
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
bridge) bearing the distinctive symbols of the three great gods
of the Egyptian system. He carries the two sceptres of Osiris,
the god of Day and Resurrection ; upon his head are the horns
of the cow goddess Hathor, and also the sun ball and feathers
of Ammon Ha. He
is not merely
wearing the sym-
bols of these gods
as a devout Baby-
lonian might wear
the symbols of Bei-
M a r d u k ; he is
these three gods in
one.
We find also a
number of sculp-
tures and paintings
to enforce the idea
that the Pharaohs
were the actual
sons of gods. The
divine fathering
and birth of Ame-
nophis III, for in-
stance(ofthe
XVIIIth Dynas-
ty), is displayed
i n extraordinary
detail in a series
of sculptures at
Luxor. Moreover,
it was held that
~RelieF cm, -die. cover oC -die,
Inscription (round the edges of cover) as far as
decipherable :
"Osiri
siris, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, lord
of the two countries . . . son of the Sun, beloved
of the gods, lord of diadems, Rameses, prince of
Heliopolis, triumphant! Thou art in the condi-
tion of a god, thou ahalt arise as Usr, there is no
enemy to thee, I give to thee triumph among
them. . . ." BUDGE, Catalogue, Egyptian Collec-
tion, Fitzicilliam Museum, Cambridge.
the Pharaohs, be-
ing of so divine a
strain, could not
marry common
clay, and consequently they were accustomed to marry blood
relations within the degrees of consanguinity now prohibited,
even marrying their sisters.
The struggle between palace and temple came into Egyptian
history, therefore, at a different angle from that at which it came
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 193
into Babylonia. Nevertheless, it came in. Professor Maspero
(in his New Light on Ancient Egypt) gives a very interesting
account of the struggle of Amenophis IV with the priesthoods,
and particularly with priests of the great god, Ammon Ha, Lord
of Karnak. The mother of Amenophis IV was not of the race
of Pharaoh; it would seem that his father, Amenophis III,
made a love match with a subject, a beautiful Syrian named
Tii, and Professor Maspero finds in the possible opposition to
and annoyance of this queen by the priests of Ammon Ra the
beginnings of the quarrel. She may, he thinks, have inspired
her son with a fanatical hatred of Ammon Ra. But. Amenophis
IV may have had a wider view. Like the Babylonian Nabo-
nidus, who lived a thousand years later, he may have had in
mind the problem of moral unity in his empire. We have al-
ready noted that Amenophis III ruled from Ethiopia to the
Euphrates, and that the store of letters to himself and his
son found at Tel-Amarna show a very wide range of interest and
influence. At any rate, Amenophis IV set himself to close all
the Egyptian and Syrian temples, to put an end to all sectarian
worship throughout his dominions, and to establish everywhere
the worship of one god, Aton, the solar disk. He left his capital,
Thebes, which was even more the city of Ammon Ra than later
Babylon was the city of Bel-Marduk, and set up his capital
at Tel-Amarna ; he altered his name from "Amenophis," which
consecrated him to Ammon (Amen) to "Akhnaton," the Sun's
Glory; and he held his own against all the priesthoods of his
empire for eighteen years and died a Pharaoh.
Opinions upon Amenophis IV, or Akhnaton, differ very
widely. There are those who regard him as the creature of his
mother's hatred of Ammon and the uxorious spouse of a beauti-
ful wife. Certainly he loved his wife very passionately; he
showed her great honour Egypt honoured women, and was
ruled at different times by several queens and he was sculp-
tured in one instance with his wife seated upon his knees, and
in another in the act of kissing her in a chariot; but men who
live under the sway of their womenkind do not sustain great
empires in the face of the bitter hostility of the most influential
organized bodies in their realm. Others write of him as a
"gloomy fanatic." Matrimonial bliss is rare in the cases of
gloomy fanatics. It is much more reasonable to regard him
as the Pharaoh who refused to be a god. It is not simply his
194
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
religious policy and his frank display of natural affection that
seem to mark a strong and very original personality. His
aesthetic ideas were his own. He refused to have his portrait
conventionalized into the customary smooth beauty of the
Pharaoh god, and his face looks out at us across an interval of
thirty-four centu-
ries, a man amidst
ranks of divine in-
sipidities.
A reign of eigh-
teen years was not
long enough for
the revolution he
contemplated, and
his son-in-law who
succeeded him
went back to
Thebes and made
his peace with
Ammon Ra.
To the very end
of the story the di-
vinity of kings
haunted the Egyp-
tian mind, and in-
fected the thoughts
of intellectually
healthier races.
When Alexander
the Great reached
Babylon, the pres-
tige of Bel-Marduk
was already far gone in decay, but in Egypt, Ammon Ra was
still god enough to make a snob of the conquering Grecian.
The priests of Ammon Ra, about the time of the XVIIIth or
XlXth Dynasty (circa 1,400 B.C.), had set up in an oasis of
the desert a temple and oracle. Here was an image of the god
which could speak, move its head, and accept or reject scrolls
of inquiry. This oracle was still flourishing in 332 B.C. The
young master of the world, it is related, made a special journey
to visit it ; he came into the sanctuary, and the image advanced
[based on,-he cast at Cairo, & the reliefs ui the
Berlin Museum. J
GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 195
out of the darkness at the hack to meet him. There was an
impressive exchange of salutations. Some such formula as this
must have been used (says Professor Maspero) : "Come, son
of my loins, who loves me so that I give thee the royalty of
Ra and the royalty of Horus! I give thee valiance, I give
thee to hold all countries and all religions under thy feet ; I give
thee to strike all the peoples united together with thy arm!"
So it was that the priests of Egypt conquered their conqueror,
and an Aryan monarch first hecame a god.
7
The struggle of priest and king in China cannot he discussed
here at any length. It was different again, as in Egypt it was
different from Babylonia, but we find the same effort on the
part of the ruler to break up tradition because it divides up the
people. The Chinese Emperor, the "Son of Heaven," was
himself a high-priest, and his chief duty was sacrificial; in the
more disorderly phases of Chinese history he ceases to rule and
continues only to sacrifice. The literary class was detached
from the priestly class at an early date. It became a bureau-
cratic body serving the local kings and rulers. That is a funda-
mental difference between the history of China and any Western
history. While Alexander was overrunning Western Asia,
China, under the last priest-emperors of the Chow Dynasty, was
sinking into a state of great disorder. Each province clung to
its separate nationality and traditions, and the Huns spread
from province to province. The King of T'sin (who lived about
eighty years after Alexander the Great) , impressed by the mis-
chief tradition was doing in the land, resolved to destroy the
entire Chinese literature, and his son, Shi Hwang-ti, the "first
universal Emperor," made a strenuous attempt to seek out and
destroy all the existing classics. They vanished while he ruled,
and he ruled without tradition, and welded China into a unity
that endured for some centuries; but when he had passed, the
hidden books crept out again. China remained united, though
not under his descendants, but after a civil war under a fresh
dynasty, the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.). The first Han mon-
arch did not sustain this campaign of Shi Hwang-ti against the
literati, and his successor made his peace with them and restored
the texts of the classics.
XVIII
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES, AND FREE
INDIVIDUALS
1. The Common Man in Ancient Times. 2. The Earliest
Slaves. 3. The First "Independent" Persons. 4. So-
cial Classes Three Thousand Years Ago. 5. Classes Hard-
ening into Castes. 6. Caste in India. 7. The System
of the Mandarins. 8. A Summary of Five Thousand
Years.
WE have been sketching in the last four chapters the
growth of civilized states out. of the primitive Neolithic
agriculture that began in Mesopotamia perhaps 15,000
years ago. It was at first horticulture rather than agriculture ;
it was done with the hoe before the plough, and at first it was
quite supplementary to the sheep, goat, and cattle tending that
made the "living" of the family tribe. We have traced the broad
outlines of the development in regions of exceptional fruitful-
ness of the first settled village communities into more populous
towns and cities, and the growth of the village shrine and the
village medicine-man into the city temple and the city priest-
hood. We have noted the beginnings of organized war, first as
a flickering between villages, and then as a more disciplined
struggle between the priest-king and god of one city and those
of another. Our story has passed on rapidly from the first
indications of conquest and empire in Sumer, 6,000 or 7,000
B.C., to the spectacle of great empires growing up, with roads
and armies, with inscriptions and written documents, with edu-
cated priesthoods and kings and rulers sustained by a tradition
already ancient. We have traced in broad outline the appear-
ance and conflicts and replacements of these empires of the
great rivers. We have directed attention, in particular, to the
evidence of a development of still wider political ideas as we
196
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 197
find it betrayed by the actions and utterances of such men as
Nabonidus and Amenophis IV. It has been an outline of the
accumulations of human experience for ten or fifteen thousand
years, a vast space of time in comparison with all subsequent
history, but a brief period when we measure it against the suc-
cession of endless generations that intervenes between us and the
first rude flint-using human creatures of the Pleistocene dawn.
But for these last four chapters we have been writing almost
entirely not about mankind generally, but only about the men
who thought, the men who could draw and read and write, the
men who were altering their world. Beneath their activities
what was the life of the mute multitude ?
The life of the common man was, of course, affected and
changed by these things, just as the lives of the domestic animals
and the face of the cultivated country were changed ; but for the
most part it was a change suffered and not a change in which
the common man upon the land had any voice or will. Reading
and writing were not yet for the likes of him. He went on
cultivating his patch, loving his wife and children, beating his
dog and tending his beasts, grumbling at hard times, fearing
the magic of the priests and the power of the gods, desiring
little more except to be left alone by the powers above him. So
he was in 10,000 B.C. ; so he was, unchanged in nature and out-
look, in the time of Alexander the Great; so over the greater
part of the world he remains to-day. He got rather better tools,
better seeds, better methods, a slightly sounder house, he sold
his produce in a more organized market as civilization pro-
gressed. A certain freedom and a certain equality passed out
of human life when men ceased to wander. Men paid in liberty
for safety, shelter, and regular meals. By imperceptible de-
grees the common man found the patch he cultivated was not
his own ; it belonged to the god ; and he had to pay a fraction
of his produce to the god. Or the god had given it to the king,
who exacted his rent and tax. Or the king had given it to an
official, who was the lord of the common man. And sometimes
the god or the king or the noble had work to be done, and then
the common man had to leave his patch and work for his master.
How far the patch he cultivated was his own was never very
clear to him. In ancient Assyria the land seems to have been
held as a sort of freehold and the occupier paid taxes ; in Baby-
lonia the land was the god's, and he permitted the cultivator to
198 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
work thereon. In Egypt the temples or Pharaoh-the-god or the
nobles under Pharaoh were the owners and rent receivers. But
the cultivator was not a slave ; he was a peasant, and only bound
to the land in so far that there was nothing else for him to do
but cultivate, and nowhere else for him to go. He lived in a
'village or town, and went out to his work. The village, to begin
with, was often merely a big household of related people under
a patriarch headman, the early town a group of householders
under its elders. There was no process of enslavement as
civilization grew, but the headmen and leaderly men grew
in power and authority, and the common men did not keep
pace with them, and fell into a tradition of dependence and
subordination.
On the whole, the common men were probably well content
to live under lord or king or god and obey their bidding. It
was safer. It was easier. All animals and man is no excep-
tion begin life as dependents. Most men never shake them-
selves loose from the desire for leading and protection. 1
2
The earlier wars did not involve remote or prolonged cam-
paigns, and they were waged by levies of the common people.
But war brought in a new source of possessions, plunder, and a
new social factor, the captive. In the earlier, simpler days of
war, the captive man was kept only to be tortured or sacrificed
to the victorious god; the captive women and children were
assimilated into the tribe. But later many captives were spared
to be slaves because they had exceptional gifts or peculiar arts.
It would be the kings and captains who would take these slaves
at first, and it would speedily become apparent to them that
these men were much more their own than were the peasant
cultivators and common men of their own race. The slave could
be commanded to do all sorts of things for his master that the
quasi-free common man would not do so willingly because of
his attachment to his own patch of cultivation. From a very
early period the artificer was often a household slave, and the
1 There were literary expressions of social discontent in Egypt before
2,000 B.C. See "Social Forces and Religion" in Breasted's Religion and
Thought in Ancient Egypt for some of the earliest complaints of the com-
mon man under the ancient civilizations.
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 199
manufacture of trade goods, pottery, textiles, metal ware, and
go forth, such as went on vigorously in the household city of the
Minos of Cnossos, was probably a slave industry from the be-
ginning. Sayce, in his Babylonians and Assyrians, quotes
Babylonian agreements for the teaching of trades to slaves, and
dealing with the exploitation of slave products. Slaves pro-
duced slave children, enslavement in discharge of debts added
to the slave population; it is probable that as the cities grew
larger, a larger part of the new population consisted of these
slave artificers and slave servants in the large households. They
were by no means abject slaves; in later Babylon their lives
and property were protected by elaborate laws. Nor were
peasants- seized, for non-payment: of taxes' . . . (PijratnicL Age)
they all outlanders. Parents might sell their children into
slavery, and brothers their orphan sisters. Free men who had
no means of livelihood would even sell themselves into slavery.
And slavery was the fate of the insolvent debtor. Craft ap-
prenticeship, again, was a sort of fixed-term slavery. Out of
the slave population, by a converse process, arose the freed-man
and freed-woman, who worked for wages and had still more
definite individual rights. Since in Babylon slaves could them-
selves own property, many slaves saved up and bought
themselves. Probably the town slave was often better off and
practically as free as the cultivator of the soil, and as the rural
population increased, its sons and daughters came to mix with
and swell the growing ranks of artificers, some bound, some
free.
As the extent and complexity of government increased, the
number of households multiplied. Under the king's household
grew up the households of his great ministers and officials, under
200 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the temple grew up the personal households of temple func-
tionaries; it is not difficult to realize how houses and patches
of land would become more and more distinctly the property
of the occupiers, and more and more definitely alienated from
the original owner-god. The earlier empires in Egypt and
China both passed into a feudal stage, in which families, origi-
nally official, became for a time independent noble families. In
the later stages of Babylonian civilization we find an increasing
propertied class of people appearing in the social structure,
neither slaves nor peasants nor priests nor officials, but widows
and descendants of such people, or successful traders and the
like, and all masierless folk. Traders came in from the out-
side. Babylon was full of Aramean traders, who had great
establishments, with slaves, f reed-men, employees of all sorts.
Their book-keeping was a serious undertaking. It involved
storing a great multitude of earthenware tablets in huge earthen-
ware jars.) Upon this gathering mixture of more or less free
and detached people would live other people, traders, merchants,
small dealers, catering for their needs. Sayce (op. cit.) gives
the particulars of an agreement for the setting up and stocking
of a tavern and beerhouse, for example. The passer-by, the man
who happened to be about, had come into existence.
But another and far less kindly sort of slavery also arose in
the old civilization, and that was gang slavery. If it did not
figure very largely in the cities, it was very much in evidence
elsewhere. The king was, to begin with, the chief entrepreneur.
He made the canals and organized the irrigation (e.g. Ham-
murabi's enterprises noted in the previous chapter). He ex-
ploited mines. He seems (at Cnossos, e.g.) to have organized
manufactures for export. The Pharaohs of the 1st Dynasty
were already working the copper and turquoise mines in the
peninsula of Sinai. For many such purposes gangs of captives
were cheaper and far more controllable than levies of the king's
own people. From an early period, too, captives may have
tugged the oars of the galleys, though Torr (Ancient Ships)
notes that up to the age of Pericles (450 B.C.) the free Athenians
were not above this task. And the monarch also found slaves
convenient for his military expeditions. They were uprooted
men ; they did not fret to go home, because they had no homes
to go to. The Pharaohs hunted slaves in Nubia, in order to
have black troops for their Syrian expeditions. Closely allied
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 201
to such slave troops were the mercenary barbaric troops the
monarchs caught into their service, not by positive compulsion,
but by the bribes of food and plunder and under the pressure
of need. As the old civilization developed, these mercenary
armies replaced the national levies of the old order more and
more, and servile gang labour became a more and more impor-
tant and significant factor in the economic system. From mines
and canal and wall building, the servile gang spread into culti-
ErMvl axnomg "boatmen,... (Fnntv -tomb of Ptah-hctp Pvjva*ni<i Ags )
vation. Nobles and temples adopted the gang-slave system for
their works. Plantation gangs began to oust the patch cultiva-
tion of the labourer-serf in the case of some staple products. . . .
So, in a few paragraphs, we trace the development of the
simple social structure of the early Sumerian cities to the com-
plex city crowds, the multitude of individuals varying in race,
tradition, education, and function, varying in wealth, free-
dom, authority, and usefulness, in the great cities of the last
thousand years B.C. The most notable thing of all is the gradual
increase amidst this heterogeneous multitude of what we may
call free individuals, detached persons who are neither priests,
nor kings, nor officials, nor serfs, nor slaves, who are under
no great pressure to work, who have time to read and inquire.
They appear side by side with the development of social security
and private property. Coined money and monetary reckoning
developed. The operations of the Arameans and such-like
Semitic trading people led to the organization of credit and
monetary security. In the earlier days almost the only prop
erty ? except a few movables, consisted of rights in land and in
202 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
houses ; later, one could deposit and lend securities, could go
away and return to find one's property faithfully held and
secure. Towards the middle of the period of the Persian Em-
pire there lived one free individual, Herodotus, who has a great
interest for us because he was among the first writers of critical
and intelligent history, as distinguished from a mere priestly
or court chronicle. It is worth while to glance here very briefly
at the circumstances of his life. Later on we shall quote from
his history.
We have already noted the conquest of Babylonia by the
Aryan Persians under Cyrus in 539 B.C. We have noted,
further, that the Persian Empire spread into Egypt, where its
hold was precarious; and it extended also over Asia Minor.
Herodotus was born about 484 B.C. in a Greek city of Asia
Minor, Halicarnassus, which was under the overlcrdship of the
Persians, and directly under the rule of a political boss or
tyrant. There is no sign that he was obliged either to work
for a living or spend very much time in the administration of
his property. We do not know the particulars of his affairs,
but it is clear that in this minor Greek city, under foreign
rule, he was able to obtain and read and study manuscripts
of nearly everything that had been written in the Greek lan-
guage before his time. He travelled, so far as one can gather,
with freedom and comfort about the Greek archipelagoes; he
stayed wherever he wanted to stay, and he seems to have found
comfortable accommodation; he went to Babylon and to Susa,
the new capital the Persians had set up in Babylonia to the
east of the Tigris ; he toured along the coast of the Black Sea,
and accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge about
the Scythians, the Aryan people who were then distributed over
South Russia ; he went to the south of Italy, explored the
antiquities of Tyre, coasted Palestine, landed at Gaza, and made
a long stay in Egypt. He went, about Egypt looking at temples
and monuments and gathering information. We know not only
from him, but from other evidence, that in those days the older
temples and the pyramids (which were already nearly three
thousand years old) were visited by strings of tourists, a special
sort of priests acting as guides. The inscriptions the sightseers
scribbled upon the walls remain to this day, and many of them
have been deciphered and published.
As his knowledge accumulated, he conceived the idea of writ-
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES
203
204 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
ing a great history of the attempts of Persia to suhdue Greece.
But in order to introduce that history he composed an account
of the past of Greece, Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt,
Scythia, and of the geography and peoples of those countries.
He then set himself, it is said, to make his history known among
his friends in Halicarnassus by reciting it to them, but they
failed to appreciate it; and he then betook himself to Athens,
the most flourishing of all Greek cities at that time. There his
work was received with applause. We find him in the centre
of a brilliant circle of intelligent and active-minded people, and
the city authorities voted him a reward of ten talents (a sum
of money equivalent to 2,400) in recognition of his literary
achievement. . . .
But we will not complete the biography of this most inter-
esting man, nor will we enter into any criticism of his garrulous,
marvel-telling, and most entertaining history. It is a book to
which all intelligent readers come sooner or later, abounding as
it does in illuminating errors and Boswellian charm. We give
these particulars here simply to show that in the fifth century
B.C. a new factor was becoming evident in human affairs. Read-
ing and writing had already long escaped from the temple pre-
cincts and the ranks of the court scribes. Record was no longer
confined to court and temple. A new sort of people, these peo-
ple of leisure and independent means, were asking questions,
exchanging knowledge and views, and developing ideas. So be-
neath the march of armies and the policies of monarchs, and
above the common lives of illiterate and incurious men, we
note the beginnings of what is becoming at last nowadays a
dominant power in human affairs, the free intelligence of
mankind.
Of that free intelligence we shall have more to say when in
a subsequent chapter we tell of the Greeks.
4
We may summarize the discussion of the last two chapters
here by making a list of the chief elements in this complicated
accumulation of human beings which made up the later Baby-
lonian and Egyptian civilizations of from two thousand five
hundred to three thousand years ago. These elements grew up
and became distinct one from another in the great river valleys
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 205
of the world in the course of five or six thousand years. They
developed mental dispositions and traditions and attitudes of
thought one to another. The civilization in which we live to-
day is simply carrying on and still further developing and work-
ing out and rearranging these relationships. This is the world
from which we inherit. It is only by the attentive study of
their origins that we can detach ourselves from the prejudices
and immediate ideas of the particular class to which we may
belong, and begin to understand the social and political questions
of our own time.
(1) First, then, came the priesthood, the temple system,
which was the nucleus and the guiding intelligence about which
the primitive civilizations grew. It was still in these later days
a great power in the world, the chief repository of knowledge
and tradition, an influence over the lives of every one, and a
binding force to hold the community together. But it was no
longer all-powerful, because its nature made it conservative and
inadaptable. It no longer monopolized knowledge nor initiated
fresh ideas. Learning had already leaked out to other less
pledged and controlled people, who thought for themselves.
About the temple system were grouped its priests and priestesses,
its scribes, its physicians, its magicians, its lay brethren, treas-
urers, managers, directors, and the like. It owned great prop-
erties and often hoarded huge treasures.
(2) Over against the priesthood, and originally arising out
of it, was the court system, headed by a king or a "king of
kings," who was in later Assyria and Babylonia a sort of cap-
tain and lay controller of affairs, and in Egypt a god-man, who
had released himself from the control of his priests. About
the monarch were accumulated his scribes, counsellors, record
keepers, agents, captains, and guards. Many of his officials,
particularly his provincial officials, had great subordinate estab-
lishments, and were constantly tending to become independent.
The nobility of the old river valley civilizations arose out of
the court system. It was, therefore, a different thing in its
origins from the nobility of the early Aryans, which was a re-
publican nobility of elders and leading men.
(3) At the base of the social pyramid was the large and most
necessary class in the community, the tillers of the soil. Their
status varied from age to age and in different lands ; they were
206 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
free peasants paying taxes, or serfs of the god, or serfs or
tenants of king or noble, or of a private owner, paying him a
rent; in most cases tax or rent was paid in produce. In the
states of the river valleys they were high cultivators, cultivating
comparatively small holdings; they lived together for safety
in villages, and had a common interest in maintaining their irri-
gation channels and a sense of community in their village life.
The cultivation of the soil is an exacting occupation; the sea-
sons and the harvest sunsets will not wait for men ; children can
be utilized at an early age, and so the cultivator class is gen-
erally a poorly educated, close-toiling class, superstitious by
reason of ignorance and the uncertainty of the seasons, ill-in-
formed and easily put upon. It is capable at times of great
passive resistance, but it has no purpose in its round but crops
and crops, to keep out of debt and hoard against bad times. So
it has remained to our own days over the greater part of Europe
and Asia.
(4) Differing widely in origin and quality from the tillers
of the soil was the artisan class. At first, this was probably
in part a town-slave class, in part it consisted of peasants who
had specialized upon a craft. But in developing an art and
mystery of its own, a technique that had to be learnt before it
could be practised, each sort of craft probably developed a cer-
tain independence and a certain sense of community of its own.
The artisans were able to get together and discuss their affairs
more readily than the toilers on the land, and they were able
to form guilds to restrict output, maintain rates of pay, and
protect their common interest.
(5) As the power of the Babylonian rulers spread out beyond
the original areas of good husbandry into grazing regions and
less fertile districts, a class of herdsmen came into existence.
In the case of Babylonia these were nomadic Semites, the
Bedouin, like the Bedouin of to-day. They probably grazed
their flocks over great areas much as the sheep ranchers of
California do. They were paid and esteemed much more highly
than the husbandmen.
(6) The first merchants in the world were shipowners like
the people of Tyre and Cnossos, or nomads who carried and
traded goods as they wandered between one area of primitive
civilization and another. In the Babylonian and Assyrian
world the traders were predominantly the Semitic Arameans,
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 207
the ancestors of the modern Syrians. They became a distinct
factor in the life of the community; they formed great house-
holds of their own. Usury developed largely in the last thou-
sand years B.C. Traders needed accommodation; cultivators
wished to anticipate their crops. Sayce (op. cit.) gives an ac-
count of the Babylonian banking-house of Egibi, which lasted
through several generations and outlived the Chaldean Empire.
(7) A class of small retailers, one must suppose, came into
existence with the complication of society during the later
days of the first empires, but it was not probably of any great
importance.
(8) A growing class of independent property owners.
(9) As the amenities of life increased, there grew up in the
court, temples, and prosperous private houses a class of domestic
servants, slaves or freed slaves, or young peasants taken into
the household.
(10) Gang workers. These were prisoners of war or debt
slaves, or impressed or deported men.
(11) Mercenary soldiers. These were also often captives or
impressed men. Sometimes they were enlisted from friendly
foreign populations in which the military spirit still prevailed.
(12) Seamen.
In modern political and economic discussions we are apt to
talk rather glibly of "labour." Much has been made of the
solidarity of labour and its sense of community. It is well to
note that in these first civilizations, what we speak of as
"labour" is represented by five distinct classes dissimilar in
origin, traditions, and outlook namely, classes 3, 4, 5, 9, 10,
and the oar-tugging part of 12. The "solidarity of labour" is, we
shall find when we come to study the mechanical revolution of
the nineteenth century A.D. ; a new idea and a new possibility in
human affairs.
5
Let us, before we leave this discussion of the social classes
that were developing in these first civilizations, devote a little
attention to their fixity. How far did they stand aloof from
each other, and how far did they intermingle? So far as the
classes we have counted as 9, 10, 11, and 12 go, the servants,
the gang labourers and slaves, the gang soldiers, and to a lesser
208 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
extent the sailors, or at any rate the galley rowers among the
sailors, they were largely recruited classes, they did not readily
and easily form homes, they were not distinctively breeding
classes ; they were probably replenished generation after genera-
tion by captives, by the failures of other classes, and especially
from the failures of the class of small retailers, and by persua-
sion and impressment from among the cultivators. But so far
as the sailors go, we have to distinguish between the mere rower
and the navigating and shipowning seaman of such ports as Tyre
and Sidon. The shipowners pass, no doubt, by insensible grada-
tions into the mercantile class, but the navigators must have
made a peculiar community in the great seaports, having homes
there and handing on the secrets of seacraft to their sons. The
eighth class we have distinguished was certainly a precarious
class, continually increased by the accession of the heirs and de-
pendents, the widows and retired members of the wealthy and
powerful, and continually diminished by the deaths or specula-
tive losses of these people and the dispersal of their properties.
The priests and .priestess, too, so far as all this world west of
India went, were not a very reproductive class; many priest-
hoods were celibate, and that class, too, may also be counted
as a recruited class. Nor are servants, as a rule, reproductive.
They live in the households of other people; they do not have
households and rear large families of their own. This leaves us
as the really vital classes of the ancient civilized community :
(a) The royal and aristocratic class, officials, military offi-
cers, and the like;
(6) The mercantile class ;
(c) The town artisans;
(d) The cultivators of the soil ; and
(e) The herdsmen.
Each of these classes reared its own children in its own
fashion, and so naturally kept itself more or less continuously
distinct from the others. General education was not organized
in those ancient states, education was mainly a household mat-
ter (as it is still in many parts of India to-day), and so it
was natural and necessary for the sons to follow in the footsteps
of their father and to marry women accustomed to their own
sort of household. Except during times of great, political dis-
turbance, therefore, there would be a natural and continuous
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 209
separation of classes ; which would not, however, prevent ex-
ceptional individuals from intermarrying or passing from one
class to another. Poor aristocrats would marry rich members
of the mercantile class ; ambitious herdsmen, artisans, or sailors
would become rich merchants. So far as one can gather, that
was the general state of affairs in both Egypt and Babylonia.
The idea was formerly entertained that in Egypt there was a
fixity of classes, but this appears to be a misconception due to
a misreading of Herodotus. The only exclusive class in Egypt
which did not intermarry was, as in England to-day, the semi-
divine royal family.
At various points in the social system there were probably
developments of exclusiveness, an actual barring out of inter-
lopers. Artisans of particular crafts possessing secrets, for ex-
ample, have among all races and in all ages tended to develop
guild organizations restricting the practice of their craft and
the marriage of members outside their guild. Conquering peo-
ple have also, and especially when there were marked physical
differences of race, been disposed to keep themselves aloof from
the conquered peoples, and have developed an aristocratic ex-
clusiveness. Such organizations of restriction upon free inter-
course have come and gone in great variety in the history of all
long-standing civilizations. The natural boundaries of func-
tion were always there, but sometimes they have been drawn
sharply and laid stress upon, and sometimes they have been
made little of. There has been a general tendency among the
Aryan peoples to distinguish noble (patrician) from common
(plebeian) families; the traces of it are evident throughout
the literature and life of Europe to-day, and it has received a
picturesque enforcement in the "science" of heraldry. This
tradition is still active even in democratic America. Germany,
the most methodical of European countries, had in the Middle
Ages a very clear conception of the fixity of such distinctions.
Below the princes (who themselves constituted an exclusive class
which did not marry beneath itself) there were the :
(a) Knights, the military and official caste, with heraldic
coats-of-arms ;
(& and c) The Biirgerstand, the merchants, shipping people,
and artisans; and
(d) The Bauernstand, the cultivating serfs or peasants.
Medieval Germany went as far as any of the Western heirs
210 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
of the first great civilizations towards a fixation of classes. The
idea is far less congenial both to the English-speaking people
and to the French and Italians, who, by a sort of instinct,
favour a free movement from class to class. Such exclusive
ideas began at first among, and were promoted chiefly by, the
upper classes, but it is a natural response and a natural Nemesis
to such ideas that the mass of the excluded should presently
range themselves in antagonism to their superiors. It was in
Germany, as we shall see in the concluding chapters of this story,
that the conception of a natural and necessary conflict, "the
class war," between the miscellaneous multitudes of the dis-
inherited ("the class-conscious proletariat'' of the Marxist) and
the rulers and merchants first arose. It was an idea more ac-
ceptable to the German mind than to the British or French.
. . . But before we come to that conflict, we must traverse a
long history of many centuries.
6
If now we turn eastward from this main development of civ-
ilization in the world between Central Asia and the Atlantic,
to the social development of India in the 2,000 years next be-
fore the Christian era, we find certain broad and very interest-
ing differences. The first of these is that we find such a fixity
of classes in process of establishment as no other part of the
world can present. This fixity of classes is known to Euro-
peans as the institution of caste; 1 its origins are still in com-
plete obscurity, but it was certainly well rooted in the Ganges
valley before the days of Alexander the Great. It is a com-
plicated horizontal division of the social structure into classes
or castes, the members of which may neither eat nor intermarry
with persons of a lower caste under penalty of becoming out-
casts, and who may also "lose caste" for various ceremonial
negligences and defilements. By losing caste a man does not
sink to a lower caste; he becomes outcast. The various sub-
divisions of caste are very complex ; many are practically trade
organizations. Each caste has its local organization which main-
tains discipline, distributes various charities, looks after its
own poor, protects the common interests of its members, and
1 From oasta, a word of Portuguese origin ; the Indian word is varna,
colour.
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 211
examines the credentials of new-comers from other districts.
(There is little to check the pretensions of a travelling Hindu
to be of a higher caste than is legitimately his.) Originally,
the four main castes seem to have been :
The Brahmins the priests and teachers ;
The Kshatriyas the warriors ;
The Yaisyas herdsmen, merchants, moneylenders, and land-
owners ;
The Sudras;
And, outside the castes, the Pariahs.
But these primary divisions have long been complicated by
subdivision into a multitude of minor castes, all exclusive, each
holding its members to one definite way of living and one group
of associates. In Bengal the Kshatriyas and Vaisyas have
largely disappeared. But this is too intricate a question for us
to deal with here in any detail.
Next to this extraordinary fission and complication of the
social body we have to note that the Brahmins, the priests and
teachers of the Indian world, unlike so many Western priest-
hoods, are a reproductive and exclusive class, taking no recruits
from any other social stratum.
Whatever may have been the original incentive to this ex-
tensive fixation of class in India, there can be little doubt of
the role played by the Brahmins as the custodians of tradition
and the only teachers of the people in sustaining it. By some
it is supposed that the first three of the four original castes,
known also as the "twice born," were the descendants of the
Vedic Aryan conquerors of India, who established these hard-
and-fast separations to prevent racial mixing with the conquered
Sudras and Pariahs. The Sudras are represented as a previous
wave of northern conquerors, and the Pariahs are the original
Dravidian inhabitants of India. But these speculations are not
universally accepted, and it is, perhaps, rather the case that
the uniform conditions of life in the Ganges valley throughout
long centuries served to stereotype a difference of classes that
have never had the same steadfastness of definition under the
more various and variable conditions of the greater world to
the west.
However caste arose, there can be no doubt of its extraordi-
nary hold upon the Indian mind. In the sixth century B.C.
arose Gautama, the great teacher of Buddhism, proclaiming,
212 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
"As the four streams that flow into the Ganges lose their names
as soon as they mingle their waters in the holy river, so all who
believe in Buddha cease to be Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas,
and Sudras." His teaching prevailed in India for some cen-
turies; it spread over China, Tibet, Japan, Burmah, Ceylon,
Turkestan, Manchuria ; it is to-day the religion of a large frac-
tion of the human race, but it was finally defeated and driven
out of Indian life by the vitality and persistence of the Brah-
mins and of their caste ideas.
In China we find a social system travelling along yet another,
and only a very roughly parallel line to that followed by the
Indian and Western civilizations. The Chinese civilization
even more than the Hindu is organized for peace, and the war-
rior plays a small part in its social scheme. As in the Indian
civilization, the leading class is an intellectual one ; less priestly
than the Brahmin and more official. But unlike the Brahmins,
the mandarins, who are the literate men of China, are not a
caste; one is not a mandarin by birth, but by education; they
are drawn by education and examination from all classes of
the community, and the son of a mandarin has no prescriptive
right to succeed his father. 1 As a consequence of these differ-
ences, while the Brahmins of India are, as a class, ignorant
even of their own sacred books, mentally slack, and full of a
pretentious assurance, the Chinese mandarin has the energy
that comes from hard mental work. But since his education so
far has been almost entirely a scholarly study of the classical
Chinese literature, his influence has been entirely conservative.
Before the days of Alexander the Great, China had already
formed itself and set its feet in the way in which it was still
walking in the year 1,000 A. D. Invaders and dynasties had come
and gone, but the routine of life of the yellow civilization re-
mained unchanged.
The traditional Chinese social system recognized four main
classes below the priest-emperor.
1 In the time of Confucius classes were much more fixed than later.
Under the Han dynasty the competitive examination system was not yet
established. Scholars were recommended for appointments by local dig-
nitaries, etc. I/, Y. C.
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 213
(a) The literary class, which was equivalent partly to the
officials of the Western world and partly to its teachers and
clerics. In the time of Confucius its education included archery
and horsemanship. Rites and music, history and mathematics
completed the "Six Accomplishments."
(5) The cultivators of the land.
(c) The artisans.
(d ) The mercantile class.
But since from the earliest times it has been the Chinese way
to divide the landed possessions of a man among all his sons,
there has never been in Chinese history any class of great land-
owners, renting their land to tenants, such as most other coun-
tries have displayed. The Chinese land has always been cut
up into small holdings, which are chiefly freeholds, and culti-
vated intensively. There are landlords in China who own one
or a few farms and rent them to tenants, but there are no
great, permanent estates. When a patch of land, by repeated
division, is too small to sustain a man, it is sold to some prosper-
ing neighbour, and the former owner drifts to one of the great
towns of China to join the mass of wage-earning workers there.
In China, for many centuries, there have been these masses of
town population with scarcely any property at all, men neither
serfs nor slaves, but held to their daily work by their utter
impecuniousness. From such masses it is that the soldiers
needed by the Chinese Government are recruited, and also such
gang labour as has been needed for the making of canals, the
building of walls, and the like has been drawn. The war cap-
tive and the slave class play a smaller part in Chinese history
than in any more westerly record of these ages before the
Christian era.
One fact, we may note, is common to all these three stories
of developing social structure and that is the immense power
exercised by the educated class in the early stages before the
crown or the commonalty began to read and, consequently, to
think for itself. In India, by reason of their exclusiveness, the
Brahmins, the educated class, retain their influence to this day ;
over the masses of China, along entirely different lines and be-
cause of the complexities of the written language, the man-
darinate has prevailed. The diversity of race and tradition in
the more various and eventful world of the West has delayed,
and perhaps arrested for ever, any parallel organization of the
214 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
specially intellectual elements of society into a class ascendancy.
In the Western world, as we have already noted, education early
"slopped over/' and soaked away out of the control of any spe-
cial class; it escaped from the limitation of castes and priest-
hoods and traditions into the general life of the community.
Writing and reading had been simplified down to a point when
it was no longer possible to make a cult and mystery of them.
It may be due to the peculiar elaboration and difficulty of the
Chinese characters, rather than to any racial difference, that the
same thing did not happen to the same extent in China.
8
In these last six chapters we have traced in outline the whole
process by which, in the course of 5,000 or 6,000 years that
is to say, in something between 150 and 200 generations man-
kind passed from the stage of early Neolithic husbandry, in
which the primitive skin-clad family tribe reaped and stored
in their rude mud huts the wild-growing fodder and grain-bear-
ing grasses with sickles of stone, to the days of the fourth cen-
tury B.C., when all round the shores of the Mediterranean and
up the Nile, and across Asia to India, and again over the great
alluvial areas of China, spread the fields of human cultivation
and busy cities, great temples, and the coming and going of
human commerce. Galleys and lateen-sailed ships entered and
left crowded harbours, and made their careful way from head-
land to headland and from headland to island, keeping always
close to the land. Pho3nician shipping under Egyptian owners
was making its way into the East Indies and perhaps even
further into the Pacific. Across the deserts of Africa and
Arabia and through Turkestan toiled the caravans with their re-
mote trade; silk was already coming from China, ivory from
Central Africa, and tin from Britain to the centres of this new
life in the world. Men had learnt to weave fine linen * and
delicate fabrics of coloured wool; they could bleach and dye;
they had iron as well as copper, bronze, silver, and gold; Jthey
had made the most beautiful pottery and porcelain ; there was
hardly a variety of precious stone in the world that they had
not found and cut and polished; they could read and write;
divert the course of rivers, pile pyramids, and make walls a
1 Damascus was already making Damask, and "Damascening" steel.
SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 215
thousand miles long. The fifty or sixty centuries in which all
this had to he achieved may seem a long time in comparison
with the threescore and ten years of a single human life, but
it is utterly inconsiderable in comparison with the stretches of
geological time. Measuring backward from these Alexandrian
cities to the days of the first stone implement*:, the rostro-carinate
implements of the Pliocene Age, gives us an extent of time fully
a hundred times as long.
We have tried in this account, and with the help of maps
and figures and time charts, to give a just idea of the order and
shape of these fifty or sixty centuries. Our business is with
that outline. We have named but a few names of individuals ;
though henceforth the personal names must increase in number.
But the content of this outline that we have drawn here in
a few diagrams and charts cannot but touch the imagination.
If only we could look closelier, we should see through all these
sixty centuries a procession of lives more and more akin in their
fashion to our own. We have shown how the naked Palaeo-
lithic savage gave place to the Neolithic cultivator, a type of
man still to be found in the backward places of the world. We
have given an illustration of Sumerian soldiers copied from a
carved stone that was set up long before the days when the
Semitic S argon I conquered the land. ' Day by day some busy
brownish man carved those figures, and, no doubt, whistled as
he carved. In those days the plain of the Egyptian delta was
crowded with gangs of swarthy workmen unloading the stone
that had come down the Nile to add a fresh course to the cur-
rent pyramid. One might paint a thousand scenes from those
ages: of some hawker merchant in Egypt spreading his stock
of Babylonish garments before the eyes of some pretty, rich
lady; of a miscellaneous crowd swarming between the pylons
to some temple festival at Thebes; of an excited, dark-eyed
audience of Cretans like the Spaniards of to-day, watching a
bull-fight, with the bull-fighters in trousers and tightly girded,
exactly like any contemporary bull-fighter ; of children learning
their cuneiform signs at Nippur the clay exercise tiles of a
school have been found ; of a woman with a sick husband at
home slipping into some great temple in Carthage to make a
vow for his recovery. Or perhaps it is a wild Greek, skin-clad
and armed with a bronze axe, standing motionless on some
Illyrian mountain crest, struck with amazement at his first
216 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
vision of a many-oared Cretan galley crawling like a great in-
sect across the amethystine mirror of the Adriatic Sea. He
went home to tell his folk a strange story of a monster, Briareus
with his hundred arms. Of millions of such stitches in each
of these 200 generations is the fabric of this history woven. But
unless they mark the presence of a primary seam or join, we
cannot pause now to examine any of these stitches.
XIX
THE HEBKEW SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS
1. The Place of the Israelites in History. 2. Saul, David,
and Solomon. 3. The Jews a People of Mixed Origin.
4. The Importance of the Hebrew Prophets.
WE are now in a position to place in their proper re-
lationship to this general outline of human history the
Israelites, and the most remarkable collection of an-
cient documents in the world, that collection which is known to
all Christian peoples as the Old Testament. We find in these
documents the most interesting and valuable lights upon the
development of civilization, and the clearest indications of a
new spirit that was coming into human affairs during the strug-
gles of Egypt and Assyria for predominance in the world of
men.
All the books that constitute the Old Testament were cer-
tainly in existence, and in very much their present, form, at latest
by the year 100 B.C. Most of them were probably recognized
as sacred writings in the time of Alexander the Great (330
B.C.). They were the sacred literature of a people, the Jews,
who, except for a small remnant of common people, had re-
cently been deported to Babylonia from their own country in
587 B.C. by Nebuchadnezzar II, the Chaldean. They had re-
turned to their city, Jerusalem, and had rebuilt their temple
there* under the auspices of Cyrus, that Persian conqueror who,
we have already noted, in 539 B.C. overthrew Nabonidus, the
last of the Chaldean rulers in Babylon. The Babylonian Cap-
tivity had lasted about fifty years, and many authorities are of
opinion that there was a considerable admixture during that
period both of race and ideas with the Babylonians.
The position of the land of Judea and of Jerusalem, its
217
218 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
capital, is a peculiar one. The country is a band-shaped strip
between the Mediterranean to the west and the desert beyond
the Jordan to the east ; through it lies the natural high-road be-
tween the Hittites, Syria, Assyria, and Babylonia to the north
and Egypt to the south. It was a country predestined, there-
fore, to a stormy history. Across it Egypt, and whatever power
was ascendant in the north, fought for empire ; against its people
they fought for a trade route. It had itself neither the area,
the agricultural possibilities, nor the mineral wealth to be im-
portant. The story of its people that these scriptures have
preserved runs like a commentary to the greater history of the
two systems of civilization to the north and south and of the
sea peoples to the west.
These scriptures consist of a number of different elements.
The first five books, the Pentateuch, were early regarded with
peculiar respect. They begin in the form of a universal his-
tory with a double account of the Creation of the world and
mankind, of the early life of the race, and of a great Flood
by which, except for certain favoured individuals, mankind
was destroyed. This flood story is very widely distributed in
ancient traditions ; it may be a memory of that flooding of the
Mediterranean valley which occurred in the Neolithic age of
mankind. Excavations have revealed Babylonian versions of
both the Creation story and the Flood story of prior date to
the restoration of the Jews, and it is therefore argued by Bibli-
cal critics that these opening chapters were acquired by the
Jews during their captivity. They constitute the first ten chap-
ters of Genesis.
There follows a history of the fathers and founders of the
Hebrew nation, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They are presented
as patriarchal Bedouin chiefs, living the life of nomadic shep-
herds in the country between Babylonia and Egypt. The ex-
isting Biblical account is said by the critics to be made up out
of several pre-existing versions ; but whatever its origins, the
story, as we have it to-day, is full of colour and vitality. What
is called Palestine to-day was at that time the land of Canaan,
inhabited by a Semitic people called the Canaanites, closely
related to the Phoenicians who founded Tyre and Sidon, and to
the Amorites who took Babylon and, under Hammurabi, founded
the first Babylonian Empire. The Canaanites were a settled
folk in the days which were perhaps contemporary with the
THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS
of t* HEBREWS
HiiZZ. country snaHea.
"Route, from.
to the, ~Red e&, across
[The. distance, 'froro, Tyre.
Jerusalem, is roughly 1OO
about wa, of London,
to Bristol Tram. Tyre to tfie
Red 5ea is aioui me. same,
distance, as from, London, to
Desert
5 i n a. i
11 I a.
220 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
days of Hammurabi when Abraham's flocks and herds passed
through the land. The God of Abraham, says the Bible narra-
tive, promised this smiling land of prosperous cities to him and
to his children. To the book of Genesis the reader must go
to read how Abraham, being childless, doubted this promise,
and of the births of Ishmael and Isaac. And in Genesis, too,
he will find the lives of Isaac and Jacob, whose name was
changed to Israel, and of the twelve sons of Israel; and
how in the days of a great famine they went down into
Egypt. With that, Genesis, the first book of the Pentateuch,
ends. The next book, Exodus, is concerned with the story of
Moses.
The story of the settlement and slavery of the children of
Israel in Egypt is a difficult one. There is an Egyptian rec-
ord of a settlement of certain Semitic peoples in the land of
Goshen by the Pharaoh Rameses II, and it is stated that they
were drawn into Egypt by want of food. But of the life and
career of Moses there is nb Egyptian record at all; there is
no account of any plagues of Egypt or of any Pharaoh who
was drowned in the Red Sea.
Very perplexing is the discovery of a clay tablet written by
the Egyptian governors of a city in Canaan to the Pharaoh
Amenophis IV, who came in the XVIIIth Dynasty before
Rameses II, apparently mentioning the Hebrews by name and
declaring that, they are overrunning Canaan. Manifestly, if
the Hebrews were conquering Canaan in the time of the
XVIIIth Dynasty, they could not have been made captive and
oppressed, before they conquered Canaan, by Rameses II of
the XlXth Dynasty. But it is quite understandable that the
Exodus story, written long after the events it narrates, may
have concentrated and simplified, and perhaps personified and
symbolized, what was really a long and complicated history
of tribal invasions. One Hebrew tribe may have drifted down
into Egypt and become enslaved, while the others were already
attacking the outlying Canaanite cities. It is even possible
that the land of the captivity was not Egypt (Hebrew, Misraim),
but Misrim in the north of Arabia, on the other side of the
Red Sea. These questions are discussed fully and acutely in
the Encyclopaedia Biblica (articles Moses and Exodus), to
which the curious reader must be referred. 1
1 See also G. B. Gray, A Critical Introduction to the Old Testament.
THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 221
Two other books of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy and Leviti-
cus, are concerned with the Law and the priestly rules. The
book of Numbers takes up the wanderings of the Israelites in the
desert and their invasion of Canaan-
Whatever the true particulars of the Hebrew invasion of
Canaan may be, there can be no doubt that the country they
invaded had changed very greatly since the days of the legend-
ary promise, made centuries before, to Abraham. Then it
seems to have been largely a Semitic land, with many pros-
perous trading cities. But great waves of strange peoples had
washed along this coast. We have already told how the dark
Iberian or Mediterranean peoples of Italy and Greece, the peo-
ples of that ^Egean civilization which culminated at Cnossos,
were being assailed by the southward movement of Aryan-speak-
ing races, such as the Italians and Greeks, and how Cnossos
was sacked about 1,400 B.C., and destroyed altogether about
1,000 B.C. It is now evident that the people of these ^Egean
seaports were crossing the sea in search of securer land
nests. They invaded the Egyptian delta and the African
coast to the west, they formed alliances with the Hittites and
other Aryan or Aryanized races. This happened after the time
of Eameses II, in the time of Rameses III. Egyptian monu-
ments record great sea fights, and also a march of these peo-
ple along the coast of Palestine towards Egypt. Their trans-
port was in the ox-carts characteristic of the Aryan tribes, and
it is clear that these Cretans were acting in alliance with some
early Aryan invaders. ~No connected narrative of these conflicts
that went on between 1,300 B.C. and 1,000 B.C. has yet been
made out, but it is evident from the Bible narrative, that when
the Hebrews under Joshua pursued their slow subjugation of
the promised land, they came against a new people, the Phil-
istines, unknown to Abraham, 1 who were settling along the
coast in a series of cities of which Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon,
and Joppa became the chief, who were really, like the Hebrews,
new-comers, and probably chiefly these Cretans from the sea and
from the north. The invasion, therefore, that began as an at-
tack upon the Canaanites, speedily became a long and not very
successful struggle for the coveted and promised land with
these much more formidable new-comers, the Philistines.
1 This may seem to contradict Genesis xx. 15, and xxi. and xxvi. various
verses, but compare with this the Encyclopedia, Biblica, article Philistines.
222 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
It cannot be said that the promised land was ever completely
in the grasp of the Hebrews. Following after the Pentateuch
in the Bible come the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth (a di-
gression), Samuel I and II, and Kings I and II, with Chronicles
repeating with variation much of the matter of Samuel II and
Kings; there is a growing flavour of reality in most of this
latter history, and in these books we find the Philistines
steadfastly in possession of the fertile lowlands of the south,
and the Canaanites and Phoenicians holding out against the
Israelites in the north. The first triumphs of Joshua are not
repeated. The book of Judges is a melancholy catalogue of
failures. The people lose heart. They desert the worship of
their own god Jehovah, and worship Baal and Ashtaroth
(^Bel and Ishtar). They mixed their race with the Philistines,
with the Hittites, and so forth, and became, as they have always
subsequently been, a racially mixed people. Under a series
of wise men and heroes they wage a generally unsuccessful and
never very united warfare against their enemies. In succession
they are conquered by the Moabites, the Canaanites, the Midi-
anites, and the Philistines. The story of these conflicts, of
Gideon and of Samson and the other heroes who now and then
cast a gleam of hope upon the distress of Israel, is told in the
book of Judges. In the first book of Samuel is told the story
of their great disaster at Ebenezer in the days when Eli was
judge.
This was a real pitched battle in which the Israelites lost
30,000 ( !) men. They had previously suffered 'd reverse and
lost 4,000 men, and then they brought out their most sacred
symbol, the Ark of the Covenant of God.
"And when the ark of the covenant of the Lord came into
the camp, all Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the
earth rang again. And when the Philistines heard the noise
of the shout, they said, 'What meaneth the noise of this great
shout in the camp of the Hebrews ?' And they understood that
the ark of the Lord was come into the camp. And the Phil-
istines were afraid, for they said, 'God is come into the camp. 7
And they said, 'Woe unto us ! for there hath not been such a
thing heretofore. Woe unto us! who shall deliver us out of
the hand of these mighty Gods ? these are the Gods that smote
the Egyptians with all the plagues in the wilderness. Be
strong, and quit yourselves like men, O ye Philistines, that ye
THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 223
be not servants unto the Hebrews, as they bave been to you:
quit yourselves like men, and fight.'
"And the Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and
they fled every man into his tent : and there was a very great
slaughter for there fell of Israel thirty thousand footmen.
And the ark of God was taken ; and the two sons of Eli, Hophni
and Phinehas, were slain.
"And there ran a man of Benjamin out of the army, and
came to Shiloh the same day, with his clothes rent, and with
earth upon his head. And when he came, lo, Eli sat upon
a seat by the wayside watching: for his heart trembled for the
ark of God. And when the man came into the city, and told
it, all the city cried out. And when Eli heard the noise of the
crying, he said, 'What meaneth the noise of this tumult ?' And
the man came in hastily, and told Eli. Now Eli was ninety
and eight years old; and his eyes were dim that he could not
see. And the man said unto Eli, 'I am he that came out of
the army, and I fled to-day out of the army.' And he said,
'What is there done, my son?' And the messenger answered
and said, 'Israel is fled before the Philistines, and there hath
been also a great slaughter among the people, and thy two
sons also, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead, and the ark of
God is taken. 7 And it came to pass, when he made mention
of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off the seat backward,
by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died: for
he was an old man, and heavy. And he had judged Israel
forty years.
"And his daughter in law, Phinehas' wife, was with child,
near to be delivered: and when she heard the tidings that the
ark of God was taken, and that her father in law and her
husband were dead, she bowed herself and travailed: for her
pains came upon her. And about the time of her death the
women that stood by her said unto her, Tear not, for thou
hast borne a son.' But she answered not, neither did she regard
it. And she named the child I-chabod, 1 saying, The glory
is departed from Israel' : because the ark of God was taken,
and because of her father in law and her husband." (I. Sam.,
chap, iv.)
The successor of Eli and the last of the judges was Samuel,
and at the end of his rule came an event in the history of
'That is, where is the glory?
224 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Israel which paralleled and was suggested by the experience
of the greater nations around. A king arose. We are told in
vivid language the plain issue between the more ancient rule
of priestcraft and the newer fashion in human affairs. It is
impossible to avoid a second quotation.
"Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together,
and came to Samuel unto Ramah, and said unto him: 'Be-
hold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now
make us a king to judge us like all the nations.'
"But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, 'Give
us a king to judge us/ And Samuel prayed unto the Lord.
And the Lord said unto Samuel, 'Hearken unto the voice of
the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not
rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign
over them. According to all the works which they have done
since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto
this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and serve other
gods, so do they also unto thee. Now, therefore, hearken unto
their voice : howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew
them the manner of the king that shall reign over them.'
"And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people
that asked of him a king. And he said, 'This will be the man-
ner of the king that shall reign over you: He will' take your
sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his
horsemen ; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will
appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties;
and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest,
and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his
chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectioners,
and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields,
and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them,
and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of
your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and
to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your
maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses,
and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your
sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in
that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you ;
and the Lord will not hear you in that day.'
"Nevertheless, the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel ;
and they said, 'Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we
THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 225
also may be like all the nations ; and that our king may judge
us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.' ' (I. Sam.,
chap, viii.)
2
But the nature and position of their land was against the
Hebrews, and their first king Saul was no more successful than
their judges. The long intrigues of the adventurer David
against Saul are told in the rest of the first book of Samuel,
and the end of Saul was utter defeat upon Mount Gilboa. His
army was overwhelmed by the Philistine archers.
"And it came to pass on the morrow, when the Philistines
came to strip the slain, that they found Saul and his three
sons fallen in Mount Gilboa. And they cut off his head, and
stripped off his armour, and sent into the land of the Philistines
round about, to publish it in the house of their idols, and
among the people. And they put his armour in the house of
Ashtaroth; and they fastened his body to the wall of Beth-
shan." (I. Sam., chap, xxxi.)
David (990 B.C. roughly) was more politic and successful
than his predecessor, and he seems to have placed himself under
the protection of Hiram, King of Tyre. This Phoenician
alliance sustained him, and was the essential element in the
greatness of his son Solomon. His story, with its constant
assassinations and executions, reads rather like the history of
some savage chief than of a civilized monarch. It is told with
great vividness in the second book of Samuel.
The first book of Kings begins with the reign of King
Solomon (960 B.C. roughly). The most interesting thing in
that story, from the point of view of the general historian, is
the relationship of Solomon to the national religion and the
priesthood, and his dealings with the tabernacle, the priest
Zadok, and the prophet Nathan.
The opening of Solomon's reign is as bloody as his father's.
The last recorded speech of David arranges for the murder
of Shimei ; his last recorded word is "blood." "But his hoar
head bring thou down to the grave with blood," he says, point-
ing out that though old Shimei is protected by a vow David
had made to the Lord so long as David lives, there is nothing
to bind Solomon in that matter. Solomon proceeds to murder
his brother, who has sought the throne but quailed and made
226 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
submission. He then deals freely with his brother's party.
The weak hold of religion upon the racially and mentally con-
fused Hebrews at that time is shown by the ease with which
he replaces the hostile chief priest by his own adherent Zadok,
and still more strikingly by the murder of Joab by Benaiah,
Solomon's chief ruffian, in the tabernacle, while the victim is
claiming sanctuary and holding to the very horns of Jehovah's
altar. Then Solomon sets to work, in what was for that time
a thoroughly modern spirit, to recast the religion of his people.
He continues the alliance with Hiram, King of Sidon, who
uses Solomon's kingdom as a high road by which to reach and
build shipping upon the Ked Sea, and a hitherto unheard of
wealth accumulates in Jesusalem as a result of this partner
ship. Gang labour appears in Israel ; Solomon sends relays o
men to cut cedarwood in Lebanon under Hiram, and organizes a
service of porters through the land. (There is much in all
this to remind the reader of the relations of some Central
African chief to a European trading concern.) Solomon then
builds a palace for himself, and a temple not nearly as big for
Jehovah. Hitherto, the Ark of the Covenant, the divine symbol
of these ancient Hebrews, had abode in a large tent, which had
been shifted from one high place to another, and sacrifices had
been offered to the God of Israel upon a number of different
high places, ^ow the ark is brought into the golden splendours
of the inner chamber of a temple of cedar-sheathed stone, and
put between two great winged figures of gilded olivewood, and
sacrifices are henceforth to be made only upon the altar be^
fore it.
This centralizing innovation will remind the reader of both
Akhnaton and Nabonidus. Such things as this are done suc-
cessfully only when the prestige and tradition and learning
of the priestly order has sunken to a very low level.
"And he appointed, according to the order of David his
father, the courses of the priests to their service, and the
Levites to their charges, to praise and minister before the priests,
as the duty of every day required; the porters also by their
courses at every gate; for so had David the man of God com-
manded. And they departed not from the commandment of
the king unto the priest and Levites concerning any matter, or
concerning the treasures."
Neither Solomon's establishment of the worship of Jehovah
THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 227
in Jerusalem upon this new footing, nor his vision of and con-
versation with his God at the opening of his reign, stood in
the way of his developing a sort of theological flirtatiousness
in his declining years. He married widely, if only for reasons
of state and splendour, and he entertained his numerous wives
by sacrificing to their national deities, to the Sidonian god-
dess Ashtaroth (Ishtar), to Chemosh (a Moabitish god),
to Moloch, and so forth. The Bible account of Solomon
does, in fact, show us a king and a confused people, both
superstitious and mentally unstable, in no way more religious
than any other people of the surrounding world.
A point of considerable interest in the story of Solomon,
because it marks a phase in Egyptian affairs, is his marriage
to a daughter of Pharaoh. This must have been one of the
Pharaohs of the XXIst Dynasty. In the great days of Ameno-
phis III, as the Tel-Amarna letters witness, Pharaoh could con-
descend to receive a Babylonian princess into his harem, but
he refused absolutely to grant so divine a creature as an Egyp-
tian princess in marriage to the Babylonian monarch. It points
to the steady decline of Egyptian prestige that now, three cen-
turies later, such a petty monarch as Solomon could wed on
equal terms with an Egyptian princess. There was, however,
a revival with the next Egyptian dynasty (XXII) ; and the
Pharaoh Shishak, the founder, taking advantage of the cleavage
between Israel and Judah, which had been developing through
the reigns of both David and Solomon, took Jerusalem and
looted the all-too-brief splendours both of the new temple and
of the king's house.
Shishak seems also to have subjugated Philistia. From this
time onward it is to be noted that the Philistines fade in im-
portance. They had already lost their Cretan language and
adopted that of the Semites they had conquered, and although
their cities remain more or less independent, they merge grad-
ually into the general Semitic life of Palestine.
There is evidence that the original rude but convincing narra-
tive of Solomon's rule, of his various murders, of his associa-
tion with Hiram, of his palace and temple building, and the
extravagances that weakened and finally tore his kingdom in
twain, has been subjected to extensive interpolations and ex-
pansions by a later writer, anxious to exaggerate his prosperity
and glorify his wisdom. It is not the place here to deal with
228 THE OUTLINE OF HflSTORY
the criticism of Bible origins, but it is a matter of ordinary
common sense rather than of scholarship to note the manifest
reality and veracity of the main substance of the account of
David and Solomon, an account explaining sometimes and justi-
fying sometimes, but nevertheless relating facts, even the harsh-
est facts, as only a contemporary or almost contemporary writer,
convinced that they cannot be concealed, would relate them, and
then to remark the sudden lapse into adulation when the in-
serted passages occur. It is a striking tribute to the power of the
written assertion over realities in men's minds that this Bible
narrative has imposed, not only upon the Christian but upon the
Moslem world, the belief that King Solomon was not only one
of the most magnificent, but one of the wisest of men. Yet
the first book of Kings tells in detail his utmost splendours, and
beside the beauty and wonder of the buildings and organizations
of such great monarchs as Thotmes III or Rameses II or half
a dozen other Pharaohs, or of Sargon II or Sardanapalus or
Nebuchadnezzar the Great, they are trivial. His temple meas-
ured internally was twenty cubits broad, about 35 feet l that
is, the breadth of a small villa residence and sixty cubits, say
100 feet, long. And as for his wisdom and statecraft, one
need go no further than the Bible to see that Solomon was a
mere helper in the wide-reaching schemes of the trader-king
Hiram, and his kingdom a pawn between Phoenicia and Egypt.
His importance was due largely to the temporary enfeeblement
of Egypt, which encouraged the ambition of the Phoenician
and made it necessary to propitiate the holder of the key to
an alternate trade route to the East. To his own people
Solomon was a wasteful and oppressive monarch, and already
before his death his kingdom was splitting, visibly to all
men.
With the reign of King Solomon the brief glory of the He-
brews ends; the northern and richer section of his kingdom,
long oppressed by taxation to sustain his splendours, breaks off
from Jerusalem to become the separate kingdom of Israel, and
this split ruptures that linking connection between Sidon and
the Red Sea by which Solomon's gleam of wealth was possible.
There is no more wealth in Hebrew history. Jerusalem re-
mains the capital of one tribe, the tribe of Judah, the capital
1 Estimates of the cubit vary. The greatest is 44 inches. This would
extend the width to seventy-odd feet.
THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 229
of a land of barren hills, cut off by Philistia from the sea and
surrounded by enemies.
The tale of wars, of religious conflicts, of usurpations, as-
sassinations, and of fratricidal murders to secure the throne
goes on for three centuries. It is a tale frankly barbaric. Israel
wars with Judah and the neighbouring states; forms alliances
first with one and then with the other. The power of Aramean
Syria burns like a baleful star over the affairs of the Hebrews,
and then there rises behind it the great and growing power of
the last Assyrian empire. For three centuries the life of the
Hebrews was like the life of a man who insists upon living in
the middle of a busy thoroughfare, and is consequently being
run over constantly by omnibuses and motor-lorries.
"Pul" (apparently the same person as Tiglath Pileser III)
is, according to the Bible narrative, the first Assyrian monarch
to appear upon the Hebrew horizon, and Menahem buys him
off with a thousand talents of silver (738 B.C.). But the power
of Assyria is heading straight for the now aged and decadent
land of Egypt, and the line of attack lies through Judea ; Tiglath
Pileser III returns and Shalmaneser follows in his steps, the
King of Israel intrigues for help with Egypt, that "broken
reed/' and in 721 B.C., as we have already noted, his kingdom
is swept off into captivity and utterly lost to history. The same
fate hung over Judah, but for a little while it was averted. The
fate of Sennacherib's army in the reign of King Hezekiah (701
B.C.), and how he was murdered by his sons (II. Kings xix. 37),
we have already mentioned. The subsequent subjugation of
Egypt by Assyria finds no mention in Holy Writ, but it is
clear that before the reign of Sennacherib, King Hezekiah had
carried on a diplomatic correspondence with Babylon (700
B.C.), which was in revolt against Sargon II of Assyria. There
followed the conquest of Egypt by Esarhaddon, and then for a
time Assyria was occupied with her own troubles ; the Scythians
and Medes and Persians were pressing her on the north, and
Babylon was in insurrection. As we have already noted, Egypt,
relieved for a time from Assyrian pressure, entered upon a
phase of revival, first under Psammetichus and then under
ISTecho II.
Again the little country in between made mistakes in its
alliances. But on neither side was there safety. Josiah op-
posed Necho, and was slain at the battle of Megiddo (608 B,C.).
230 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
The king of Judah became an Egyptian tributary. Then when
Necho, after pushing as far as the Euphrates, fell before
Nebuchadnezzar II, Judah fell with him (604 B.C.). Nebuchad-
nezzar, after a trial of three puppet kings, carried off the greater
part of the people into captivity in Babylon (586 B.C.), and the
rest, after a rising and a massacre of Babylonian officials, took
refuge from the vengeance of Chaldea in Egypt.
"And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and
the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the
king, and of his princes ; all these he brought to Babylon. And
they burnt the house of God and brake down the wall of Jerusa-
lem, and burnt all the palaces thereof with fire, and destroyed
all the goodly vessels thereof. And them that had escaped from
the sword carried he away to Babylon ; where they were servants
to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia."
(II. Chron. xxxvi. 18, 19, 20.)
So the four centuries of Hebrew kingship comes to an end.
From first to last it was a mere incident in the larger and greater
history of Egypt, Syria, Assyria, and Phoenicia. But out of
it there were now to arise moral and intellectual consequences
of primary importance to all mankind.
3
The Jews who returned, after an interval of more than two
generations, to Jerusalem from Babylonia in the time of Cyrus
were a very different people from the warring Baal worshippers
and Jehovah worshippers, the sacrificers in the high places and
sacrificers at Jerusalem of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
The plain fact of the Bible narrative is that the Jews went to
Babylon barbarians and came back civilized. They went a
confused and divided multitude, with no national self-con-
sciousness; they came back with an intense and exclusive na-
tional spirit. They went with no common literature generally
known to them, for it was only about forty years before the
captivity that King Josiah is said to have discovered "a book of
the law" in the temple (II. Kings xxii), and, besides that,
there is not a hint in the record of any reading of books ; and
they returned with most of their material for the Old Testa-
ment. It is manifest that, relieved of their bickering and mur-
derous kings, restrained from politics and in the intellectually
THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 231
stimulating atmosphere of that Babylonian world, the Jewish
mind made a great step forward during the Captivity.
It was an age of historical inquiry and learning in Baby-
lonia. The Babylonian influences that had made Sardanapalus
collect a great library of ancient writings in Nineveh were still
at work. We have already told how Nabonidus was so pre-
occupied with antiquarian research as to neglect the defence of
his kingdom against Cyrus. Everything, therefore, contributed
to set the exiled Jews inquiring into their own history, and they
found an inspiring leader in the prophet Ezekiel. From such
hidden and forgotten records as they had with them, genealogies,
contemporary histories of David, Solomon, and their other kings,
legends and traditions, they made out and amplified their own
story, and told it to Babylon and themselves. The story of the
Creation and the Flood, much of the story of Moses, much of
Samson, were probably incorporated from Babylonian sources. 1
When the Jews returned to Jerusalem, only the Pentateuch had
been put together into one book, but the grouping of the rest
of the historical books was bound to follow.
The rest of their literature remained for some centuries as
separate books, to which a very variable amount of respect was
paid. Some of the later books are frankly post-captivity com-
positions. Over all this literature were thrown certain leading
ideas. There was an idea, which even these books themselves
gainsay in detail, that all the people were pure-blooded children
of Abraham; there was next an idea of a promise made by
Jehovah to Abraham that he would exalt the Jewish race above
all other races; and, thirdly, there was the belief first of all
that Jehovah was the greatest and most powerful of tribal gods,
and then that he was a god above all other gods, and at last
that he was the only true god. The Jews became convinced
at last, as a people, that they were the chosen people of the
one God of all the earth.
And arising very naturally out of these three ideas, was a
fourth, the idea of a coming leader, a saviour, a Messiah who
would realize the long-postponed promises of Jehovah.
This welding together of the Jews into one tradition-cemented
people in the course of the "seventy years" is the first instance
*But one version of the Creation story and the Eden story, though
originally from Babylon, seem to have been known to the Hebrews before
the exile. G. W. B.
232 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
in history of the new power of the written word in human
affairs. It was a mental consolidation that did much more than
unite the people who returned to Jerusalem. This idea of be-
longing to a chosen race predestined to pre-eminence was a very
attractive one. It possessed also those Jews who remained in
Babylonia. Its literature reached the Jews now established
in Egypt. It affected the mixed people who had been placed
in Samaria, the old capital of the kings of Israel when the ten
tribes were deported to Media. It inspired a great number
of Babylonians and the like to claim Abraham as their father,
and thrust their company upon the returning Jews. Am-
monites and Moabites became adherents. The book of Nehe-
miah is full of the distress occasioned by this invasion of the
privileges of the chosen. The Jews were already a people dis-
persed in many lands and cities, when their minds and hopes
were unified and they became an exclusive people. But at first
their exclusiveness is merely to preserve soundness of doctrine
and worship, warned by such lamentable lapses as those of King
Solomon. To genuine proselytes of whatever race, Judaism
long held out welcoming arms.
To Pho3nicians after the falls of Tyre and Carthage, con-
version to Judaism must have been particularly easy and at-
tractive. Their language was closely akin to Hebrew. It is
possible that the great majority of African and Spanish Jews
are really of Phoanician origin. There were also great Arabian
accessions. In South Russia, as we shall note later, there were
even Mongolian Jews.
The historical books from Genesis to ^Tehemiah, upon which
the idea of the promise to the chosen people had been imposed
later, were no doubt the backbone of Jewish mental unity, but
they by no means complete the Hebrew literature from which
finally the Bible was made up. Of such books as Job, said to be
an imitation of Greek tragedy, the Song of Solomon, the
Psalms, Proverbs, and others, there is no time to write in this
Outline, but it is necessary to deal with the books known as
"the Prophets" with some fullness. For those books are almost
the earliest and certainly the best evidence of the appearance
of a new kind of leading in human affairs.
THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 233
These prophets are not a new class in the community; they
are of the most various origins Ezekiel was of the priestly
caste and of priestly sympathies, and Amos was a shepherd;
hut they have this ir. common, that they hring into life a re-
ligious force outside the sacrifices and formalities of priesthood
and temple. The earlier prophets seem most like the earlier
priests, they are oracular, they give advice and foretell events ;
it is quite possible that at first, in the days when there were
many high places in the land and religious ideas were com-
paratively unsettled, there was no great distinction hetween
priest and prophet. The prophets danced, it would seem, some-
what after the Dervish fashion, and uttered oracles. Generally
they wore a distinctive mantle of rough goatskin. They kept
up the nomadic tradition as against the "new ways" of the set-
tlement. But after the building of the temple and the organi-
zation of the priesthood the prophetic type remains over and
outside the formal religious scheme. They were probably al-
ways more or less of an annoyance to the priests. They became
informal advisers upon public affairs, denouncers of sin and
strange practices, "self-constituted," as we should say, having
no sanction but an inner light. "Now the word of the Lord
came unto" so and so ; that is the formula.
In the latter and most troubled days of the kingdom of Judah,
as Egypt, North Arabia, Assyria, and then Babylonia closed
like a vice upon the land, these prophets became very significant
and powerful. Their appeal was to anxious and fearful minds,
and at first their exhortation was chiefly towards repentance,
the pulling down of this or that high place, the restoration of
worship in Jerusalem, or the like. But through some of the
prophecies there runs already a note like the note of what we
call nowadays a "social reformer." The rich are "grinding the
faces of the poor" ; the luxurious are consuming the children's
bread; influential and wealthy people make friends with and
imitate the splendours and vices of foreigners, and sacrifice the
common people to these new fashions; and this is hateful to
Jehovah, who will certainly punish the land.
But with the broadening of ideas that came with the Cap-
tivity, the tenor of prophecy broadens and changes. The jealous
pettiness that disfigures the earlier tribal ideas of God gives
place to a new idea of a god of universal righteousness. It is
dear that the increasing influence of prophets was not confined
234 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
to the Jewish people; it was something that was going on in
those days all over the Semitic world. The breaking down of
nations and kingdoms to form the great and changing empires
of that age, the smashing up of cults and priesthoods, the mutual
discrediting of temple by temple in their rivalries and disputes
all these influences were releasing men's minds to a freer and
wider religious outlook. The temples had accumulated great
stores of golden vessels and lost their hold upon the imaginations
of men. It is difficult to estimate whether, amidst these con-
stant wars, life had become more uncertain and unhappy than
it had ever been before, but there can be no doubt that men
had become more conscious of its miseries and insecurities.
Except for the weak and the women, there remained little com-
fort or assurance in the sacrifices, ritual, and formal devotions
of the temples. Such was the world to which the later prophets
of Israel began to talk of the One God, and of a Promise that
some day the world should come to peace and unity and happi-
ness. This great God that men were now discovering lived in a
temple "not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." There
can be little doubt of a great body of such thought and utter-
ance in Babylonia, Egypt, and throughout the Semitic east.
The prophetic books of the Bible can be but specimens of the
prophesyings of that time. . . .
We have already drawn attention to the gradual escape of
writing and knowledge from their original limitation to the
priesthood and the temple precincts, from the shell in which
they were first developed and cherished. We have taken Herod-
otus as an interesting specimen of what we have called the free
intelligence of mankind. Now here we are dealing with a
similar overflow of moral ideas into the general community.
The Hebrew prophets, and the steady expansion of their ideas
towards one God in all the world, is a parallel development of
the free conscience of mankind. From this time onward there
runs through human thought, now weakly and obscurely, now
gathering power, the idea of one rule in the world, and of a
promise and possibility of an active and splendid peace and
happiness in human affairs. From being a temple religion
of the old type, the Jewish religion becomes, to a large extent,
a prophetic and creative religion of a new type. Prophet suc-
ceeds prophet. Later on, as we shall tell, there was born a
prophet of unprecedented power, Jesus, whose followers founded
THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 235
the great universal religion of Christianity. Still later Mu-
hammad, another prophet, appears in Arabia and founds Islam.
In spite of very distinctive features of their own, these two
teachers do in a manner arise out of and in succession to these
Jewish prophets. It is not the place of the historian to discuss
the truth and falsity of religion, but it is his business to record
the appearance of great constructive ideas. Two thousand four
hundred years ago, and six or seven or eight thousand years
after the walls of the first Sumerian cities arose, the ideas of
the moral unity of mankind and of a world peace had come
into the world. 1
1 Fletcher H. Swift's Education in Ancient Israel from Earliest Times to
A.D. 70 is an interesting account of the way in which the Jewish religion,
because it was a literature-sustained religion, led to the first efforts to
provide elementary education for all the children in the community.
XX
THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES IN PRE-
HISTOKIC TIMES
1. The Spreading of the Aryan-Speakers. 2. Primitive
Aryan Life. 3. Early Aryan Daily Life.
WE have spoken of the Aryan language as probably aris-
ing in the region of the Danube and South Russia and
spreading from that region of origin. We say "prob-
ably," because it is by no means certainly proved that that was
the centre; there have been vast discussions upon this point
and wide divergences of opinion. We give the prevalent view.
It was originally the language of a group of peoples of the
Nordic race. As it spread widely, Aryan began to differentiate
into a number of subordinate languages. To the west and south
it encountered the Basque language, which was then widely
spread in Spain, and also possibly various other Mediterranean
languages.
Before the spreading of the Aryans from- their lands of
origin southward and westward, the Iberian race was dis-
tributed over Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, north
Africa, south Italy, and, in a more civilized state, Greece and
Asia Minor. It was closely related to the Egyptian. To judge
by its European vestiges it was a rather small human type,
generally with an oval face and a long head. It buried its
chiefs and important people in megalithic chambers i.e. made
of big stones covered over by great mounds of earth ; and these
mounds of earth, being much longer than they are broad, are
spoken of as the long barrows. These people sheltered at times
in caves, and also buried some of their dead therein ; and from
the traces of charred, broken, and cut human bones, including
the bones of children, it is inferred that they were cannibals.
236
THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES
237
238 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
These short dark Iberian tribes (and the Basques also if they
were a different race) were thrust back westward, and con-
quered and enslaved by slowly advancing waves of the taller
and fairer Aryan-speaking people, coming southward and west-
ward through Central Europe, who are spoken of as the Kelts.
Only the Basque resisted the conquering Aryan speech. Grad-
ually these Keltic-speakers made their way to the Atlantic, and
all that now remains of the Iberians is mixed into the Keltic
population. How far the Keltic invasion affected the Irish
population is a matter of debate at the present time; in that
island the Kelts may have been a mere caste of conquerors
who imposed their language on a larger subject population. It
is even doubtful if the north of England is more Aryan than
pre-Keltic in blood. There is a sort of short dark Welshman,
and certain types of Irishmen, who are Iberians by race. The
modern Portuguese are also largely of Iberian blood.
The Kelts spoke a language, Keltic, 1 which was also in its
turn to differentiate into the language of Gaul, Welsh, Breton,
Scotch and Irish Gaelic, and other tongues. They buried the
ashes of their chiefs and important people^ in round barrows.
While these Nordic Kelts were spreading westward, other
Nordic Aryan peoples were pressing down upon the dark white
Mediterranean race in the Italian and Greek peninsulas, and
developing the Latin and Greek groups of tongues. Certain
other Aryan tribes were drifting towards the Baltic and across
into Scandinavia, speaking varieties of the Aryan which be-
came ancient Norse the parent of Swedish, Danish, Nor-
wegian, and Icelandic Gothic, and Low and High German.
While the primitive Aryan speech was thus spreading and
breaking up into daughter languages to the west, it was also
spreading and breaking up to the east. North of the Car-
pathians and the Black Sea, Aryan-speaking tribes were in-
creasing and spreading and using a distinctive dialect called
Slavonian, from which came Russian, Serbian, Polish, Bul-
garian, and other tongues ; other variations of Aryan distributed
over Asia Minor and Persia were also being individualized as
Armenian and Indo-Iranian, the parent of Sanscrit and
Persian. In this book we have used the word Aryan for all
'"The Keltic group of languages, of which it has been said that they
combined an Aryan vocabulary with a Berber (or Iberian) grammar."
Sir Harry Johnston.
THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 239
this family of languages, but the term Indo-European is some-
times used for the entire family, and "Aryan' 7 itself restricted
in a narrower sense to the Indo-Iranian speech. This Indo-
Iranian speech was destined to split later into a number of
languages, including Persian and Sanscrit, the latter being the
language of certain tribes of fair-complexioned Aryan speakers
who pushed eastward into India somewhen between 3,000 and
1,000 B.C. and conquered dark Dravidian peoples who were
then in possession of that land.
From their original range of wandering, other Aryan
tribes spread to the north as well as to the south of the Black
Sea, and ultimately, as these seas shrank and made way
for them, to the north and east of the Caspian, and so
began to come into conflict with and mix also with Mongolian
peoples of the Ural-Altaic linguistic group the horse-keeping
people of the grassy steppes of Central Asia. From these Mon-
golian races the Aryans seem to have acquired the use of the
horse for riding and warfare. There were three or four pre-
historic varieties or sub-species of horse in Europe and Asia,
but it was the steppe or semi-desert lands that first gave horses
of a build adapted to other than food uses. 1 All these peoples,
it must be understood, shifted their ground rapidly, a succes-
sion of bad seasons might drive them many hundreds of miles,
and it is only in a very rough and provisional manner that their
a beats" can now be indicated. Every summer they went north,
every winter they swung south again. This annual swing cov-
ered sometimes hundreds of miles. On our maps, for the sake
of simplicity, we represent the shifting of nomadic peoples by
a straight line; but really they moved in annual swings, as the
broom of a servant who is sweeping out a passage swishes from
side to side as she advances. Spreading round the north of the
Black Sea, and probably to the north of the Caspian, from
the range of the original Teutonic tribes of Central and North-
central Europe to the Iranian peoples who became the Medes
and Persians and (Aryan) Hindus, were the grazing lands
of a confusion of tribes, about whom it is truer to be vague than
precise, such as the Cimmerians, the Sarmatians, and those
Scythians who, together with the Medes and Persians, came into
effective contact with the Assyrian Empire by 1,000 B.C. or
earlier.
1 Roger Pocock's Horses is a good and readable book on these questions.
240 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
East and south of the Black Sea, between the Danube and
the Medes and Persians, and to the north of the Semitic and
Mediterranean peoples of the sea-coasts and peninsulas, ranged
another series of equally ill-defined Aryan tribes, moving easily
from place to place and intermixing freely to the great con-
fusion of historians. They seem, for instance, to have broken
up and assimilated the Hittite civilization, which was probably
pre-Aryan in its origin. These latter Aryans were, perhaps,
not so far advanced along the nomadic line as the Scythians of
the great plains.
2
What sort of life did these prehistoric Aryans lead, these
Nordic Aryans who were the chief ancestors of most Europeans
and most white Americans and European colonists of to-day,
as well as of the Armenians, 1 Persians, and high-caste Hindus?
In answering that question in addition to the dug-up remains
and vestiges upon which we have had to rely in the case of the
predecessors of the Aryans, we have a new source of knowledge.
We have language. By careful study of the Aryan languages
it has been found possible to deduce a number of conclusions
about the life of these Aryan peoples 5,000 or 4,000 years ago.
All these languages have a common resemblance, as each, as
we have already explained, rings the changes upon a number
of common roots. When we find the same root word running
through all or most of these tongues, it seems reasonable to
conclude that the thing that root word signifies must have been
known to the common ancestors. Of course, if they have ex-
actly the same word in their- languages, this may not be the
case; it may be the new name of a new thing or of a new idea
that has spread over the world quite recently. "Gas," for
instance, is a word that was made by Van Helmont, a Dutch
chemist, about 1625, and has spread into most civilized tongues,
and "tobacco" again is an American-Indian word which fol-
lowed the introduction of smoking almost everywhere. But if
the same word turns up in a number of languages, and if it
follows the characteristic modifications of each language, we
may feel sure that it has been in that language, and a part of
that language, since the beginning, suffering the same changes
1 But these may have been an originally Semitic people who learnt an
Aryan speech.
THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 241
with the rest of it. We know, for example, that the words for
waggon and wheel run in this fashion through the Aryan
tongues, and so we are able to conclude that the primitive
Aryans, the more purely Nordic Aryans, had waggons, though
it would seem from the absence of any common roots for spokes,
rim, or axle that their wheels were not wheelwright's wheels
with spokes, but made of the trunks of trees shaped out with
an axe between the ends.
These primitive waggons were drawn by oxen. The early
Aryans did not ride or drive horses ; they had very little to do
with horses. The Reindeer men were a horse-people, but the
Neolithic Aryans were a cow-people. They ate beef, not horse ;
and after many ages they began this use of draught cattle.
They reckoned wealth by cows. They wandered, following
pasture, and "trekking" their goods, as the South African Boers
do, in ox-waggons, though of course their waggons were much
clumsier than any to be found in the world to-day. They prob-
ably ranged over very wide areas. They were migratory, but
not in the strict sense of the word "nomadic" ; they moved in a
slower, clumsier fashion than did the later, more specialized
nomadic peoples. They were forest and parkland people with-
out horses. They were developing a migratory life out of the
more settled "forest clearing" life of the earlier Neolithic
period. Changes of climate which were replacing forest by
pasture, and the accidental burning of forests by fire, may have
assisted this development.
We have already described the sort of home the primitive
Aryan occupied and his household life, so far as the remains
of the Swiss pile dwellings enable us to describe these things.
Mostly his houses were of too flimsy a sort, probably of wattle
and mud, to have survived, and possibly he left them and
trekked on for very slight reasons. The Aryan peoples burnt
their dead, a custom they still preserve in India, but their
predecessors, the long-barrow people, the Iberians, buried their
dead in a sitting position. In some ancient Aryan burial
mounds (round barrows) the urns containing the. ashes of the
departed are shaped like houses, and these represent rounded
huts with thatched roofs. (See Fig., page 86.)
The grazing of the primitive Aryan was far more important
to him than his agriculture. At first he cultivated with a rough
wooden hoe ; then, after he had found out the use of cattle for
242 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
draught purposes, he began real ploughing with oxen, using
at first a suitably bent tree bough as his plough. His first
cultivation before that came about must have been rather in
the form of garden patches near the house buildings than of
fields. Most of the land his tribe occupied was common land
on which the cattle grazed together.
He never used sto::e for building house walls until upon
the very verge of history. He used stone for hearths (e. g. at
Glastonbury), and sometimes stone sub-structures. He did,
however, make a sort of stone house in the centre of the great
mounds in which he buried the ashes of his illustrious dead.
He may have learnt this custom from his Iberian neighbours
and predecessors. It was these dark whites of the heliolithic
culture, and not the primitive Aryans, who were responsible
for such temples as Stonehenge or Carnac in Brittany.
These Aryans were congregated not in cities but in districts
of pasturage, as clans and tribal communities. They formed
loose leagues of mutual help under chosen leaders, they had
centres where they could come together with their cattle in
times of danger, and they made camps with walls of earth and
palisades, many of which are still to be traced in the history-
worn contours of the European scenery. The leaders under
whom men fought in war were often the same men as the sacri-
ficial purifiers who were their early priests.
The knowledge of bronze spread late in Europe. The Nordic
European had been making his slow advances age by age for
7,000 or 8,000 years before the metals came. By that time
his social life had developed so that there were men of various
occupations and men and women of different ranks in the com-
munity. There were men who worked wood and leather, pot-
ters and carvers. The women span and wove and embroidered.
There were chiefs and families that were distinguished as
leaderly and noble. The Aryan tribesman varied the monotony
of his herding and wandering, he consecrated undertakings and
celebrated triumphs, held funeral assemblies, and distinguished
the traditional seasons of the year, by feasts. His meats we
have already glanced at ; he was an eager user of intoxicating
drinks. He made these of honey, of barley, and, as the Aryan-
speaking tribes spread southward, of the grape. And he got
merry and drunken. Whether he first used yeast to make his
bread light or to ferment his drink we do not know.
THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 243
At his feasts there were individuals with a gift for "playing
the fool/ 7 who did so no doubt to win the laughter of their
friends, but there was also another sort of men, of great im-
portance in their time, and still more important to the historian,
certain singers of songs and stories, the bards or rhapsodists.
These bards existed among all the Aryan-speaking peoples ; they
were a consequence of and a further factor in that development
of spoken language which was the chief of all the human ad-
vances made in Neolithic times. They chanted or recited stories
of the past, or stories of the living chief and his people ; they told
other stories that they invented; they memorized jokes and
catches. They found and seized upon and improved the
rhythms, rhymes, alliterations, and such-like possibilities latent
in language ; they probably did much to elaborate and fix gram-
matical forms. They were the first great artists of the ear, as
the later Aurignacian rock painters were the first great artists
of the eye and hand. No doubt they used much gesture ; prob-
ably they learnt appropriate gestures when they learnt their
songs ; but the order and sweetness and power of language was
their primary concern.
And they mark a new step forward in the power and range
of the human mind. They sustained and developed in men's
minds a sense of a greater something than themselves, the tribe,
and of a life that extended back into the past. They not only
recalled old hatreds and battles, they recalled old alliances and
a common inheritance. The feats of dead heroes lived again.
The Aryans began to live in thought before they were born
and after they were dead.
Like most human things, this bardic tradition grew first
slowly and then more rapidly. By the time bronze was coming
into Europe there was not an Aryan people that had not a
profession and training of bards. In their hands language
became as beautiful as it is ever likely to be. These bards were
living books, man-histories, guardians and makers of a new
and more powerful tradition in human life. Every Aryan peo-
ple had its long poetical records thus handed down, its sagas
(Teutonic), its epics (Greek), its vedas (Old Sanscrit). The
earliest Aryan people were essentially a people of the voice. The
recitation seems to have predominated even in those ceremonial
and dramatic dances and that "dressing-up" which among most
human races have also served for the transmission of tradition.
244 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
At that time there was no writing, and when first the art
of writing crept into Europe, as we shall tell later, it must
have seemed far too slow, clumsy, and lifeless a method of
record for men to trouble very much about writing down these
glowing and beautiful treasures of the memory. Writing was
at first kept for accounts and matters of fact. The bards and
rhapsodists flourished for long after the introduction of writing.
They survived, indeed, in Europe as the minstrels into the
Middle Ages.
Unhappily their tradition had not the fixity of a written
record. They amended and reconstructed, they had their
fashions and their phases of negligence. Accordingly we have
now only the very much altered and revised vestiges of that
spoken literature of prehistoric times. One of the most inter-
esting and informing of these prehistoric compositions of the
Aryans survives in the Greek Iliad. An early form of Iliad
was probably recited by 1,000 B.C., but it was not written down
until perhaps 700 or 600 B.C. Many men must have had to do
with it as authors and improvers, but later Greek tradition
attributed it to a blind bard named Homer, to whom also is
ascribed the Odyssey, a composition of a very different spirit
and outlook. It is possible that many of the Aryan bards were
blind men. According to Professor J. L. Myres their bards
were blinded to prevent their straying from the tribe. Mr.
L. Lloyd has seen in Ehodesia the musician of a troupe of
native dancers who had been blinded by his chief for this very
reason. The Slavs called all bards sliepac, which was also their
word for a blind man. The original recited version of the Iliad
was older than that of the Odyssey. "The Iliad as a complete
poem is older than the Odyssey, though the material of the
Odyssey, being largely undatable folk-lore, is older than any of
the historical material in the Iliad." Both epics were prob-
ably written over and rewritten at a later date, in much the
same manner that Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of Queen
Victoria, in his Idylls of the King, wrote over the Morte
d'Arthur (which was itself a writing over by Sir Thomas
Malory, circ. 1450, of pre-existing legends), making the
speeches and sentiments and the characters more in accordance
with those of his own time. But the events of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, the way of living they describe, the spirit of the acts
recorded, belong to the closing centuries of the prehistoric age.
THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 245
These sagas, epics, and vedas do supply, in addition to archaeol-
ogy and philology, a third source of information about those
vanished times.
Here, for example, is th3 concluding passage of the Iliad,
describing very exactly the making of a prehistoric barrow.
(We have taken here Chapman's rhymed translation, correct-
ing certain words with the help of the prose version of Lang,
Leaf, and Myers.)
"... Thus oxen, mules, in waggons straight they put,
Went forth, and an unmeasured pile of sylvan matter cut;
Nine days employed in carriage, but when the tenth morn shin'd
On wretched mortals, then they brought the bravest of his kind
Forth to be burned. Troy swam in tears. Upon the pile's most height
They laid the body, and gave fire. All day it burn'd, all night.
But when th' eleventh morn let on earth her rosy fingers shine,
The people flock'd about the pile, and first with gleaming wine
Quench'd all the flames. His brothers then, and friends, the snowy
bones
Gather' d into an urn of gold, still pouring out their moans.
Then wrapt they in soft purple veils the rich urn, digg'd a pit,
Grav'd it, built up the grave with stones, and quickly piled on it
A barrow. . . .
. . . The barrow heap'd once, all the town
In Jove-nurs'd Priam's Court partook a sumptuous fun'ral feast,
And so horse-taming Hector's rites gave up his soul to rest."
There remains also an old English saga, Beowulf, made long
before the English had crossed from Germany into England,
which winds up with a similar burial. The preparation of a
pyre is first described. It is hung round with shields and coats
of mail. The body is brought and the pyre fired, and then for
ten days the warriors built a mighty mound to be seen afar
by the traveller on sea or land. Beowulf, which is at least a
thousand years later than the Iliad, is also interesting because
one of the main adventures in it is the looting of the treasures
of a barrow already ancient in those days.
3
The Greek epics reveal the early Greeks with no knowledge
of iron, without writing, and before any Greek-founded cities
existed in the land into which they had evidently come quite
recently as conquerors. They were spreading southward from
246
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the Aryan region of origin. They seem to have been a fair peo-
ple, new-comers in Greece, new-comers to a land that had been
held hitherto by the Mediterranean or Iberian peoples.
Let us, at the risk of a slight repetition, be perfectly clear
upon one point. The Iliad does not give us the primitive neo-
lithic life of that Aryan region of origin; it gives us that life
already well on the move towards a new state of affairs. The
primitive neolithic way of living, with its tame and domesti-
cated animals, its pottery and cooking, and its transitory patches
of rude cultivation, we have already sketched. Between 15,000
and 6,000 B.C. the
neolithic way of liv-
ing had spread with
the forests and abun-
dant vegetation of the
Pluvial Period, over
the greater part of the
old world, from the
Niger to the Hwang-
ho and from Ireland
to the south of India.
Now, as the climate
of great portions of
the earth was swing-
ing towards drier and
more open conditions
again, the earlier,
Combat
From a platter ascribed to the end of the
seventh century in the British Museum. This
is probably the earliest known vase bearing a
Greek inscription. Greek writing was just be-
ginning. Note the Swastika.
simpler, neolithic life
was developing along
two divergent directions. One was leading to a more wander-
ing life, towards at last a constantly migratory life between
summer and winter pasture, which is called NOMADISM; the
other, in certain sunlit river valleys, was towards a water-treas-
uring life of irrigation, in which men gathered into the first
towns and made the first CIVILIZATION. We have already de-
scribed the first civilizations and their liability to recurrent
conquests by nomadic peoples. We have already noted that for
many thousands of years there has been an almost rhythmic re-
currence of conquest of the civilizations by the nomads. Here we
have to note that the Greeks, as the Iliad presents them, are
neither simple neolithic nomads, innocent of civilization, nor are
THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES
247
they civilized men. They are nomads in an excited state, be-
cause they have just come upon civilization, and regard it as an
opportunity for war and loot.
These early Greeks of the Iliad are sturdy fighters, but with-
out discipline their battles are a confusion of single combats.
They have horses, but no cavalry; they use the horse, which is
a comparatively recent addition to Aryan resources, to drag a
rude fighting chariot into battle. The horse is still novel enough
to be something of a terror in itself. For ordinary draught pur-
poses, as in the quo-
tation from the Iliad
we have just made,
oxen were employed.
The only priests of
these Aryans are the
keepers of shrines
and sacred places.
There are chiefs, who
are heads of families
and who also perform
sacrifices, but there
does not seem to be
much mystery or sac-
ramental feeling in
their religion. When the Greeks go to war, these heads and
elders meet in council and appoint a king, whose powers are
very loosely defined. There are no laws, but only customs;
and no exact standards of conduct.
The social life of the early Greeks centred about the house-
holds of these leading men. There were no doubt huts for herds
and the like, and outlying farm buildings; but the hall of
the chief was a comprehensive centre, to which everyone went
to feast, to hear the bards, to take part in games and exercises.
The primitive craftsmen were gathered there. About it were
cowsheds and stabling and such-like offices. Unimportant peo-
ple slept about anywhere as retainers did in the mediaeval castles
and as people still do in Indian households. Except for quite
personal possessions, there was still an air of patriarchal com-
munism about the tribe. The tribe, or the chief as the head of the
tribe, owned the grazing lands ; forest and rivers were the wild.
The Aryan social organization seems, and indeed all early
&
(from, an archaic Qre^k vase)
248 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
communities seem, to have been without the little separate
households that make up the mass of the population in western
Europe or America to-day. The tribe was a big family; the
nation a group of tribal families; a household often contained
hundreds of people. Human society began, just as herds
and droves begin among animals, by the family delaying its
breaking up. Nowadays the lions in East Africa are apparently
becoming social animals in this way, by the young keeping with
the mother after they are fully grown, and hunting in a group.
Hitherto the lion has been much more of a solitary beast. If
men and women do not cling to their families nowadays as
much as they did, it is because the state and the community
supply now safety and help and facilities that were once only
possible in the family group.
In the Hindu community of to-day these great households
of the earlier stages of human society are still to be found. Mr.
Bhupendranath Basu has recently described a typical Hindu
household. 1 It is an Aryan household refined and made gentle
by thousands of years of civilization, but its social structure
is the same as that of the households of which the Aryan epics
tell.
"The joint family system," he said, "has descended to us from
time immemorial, the Aryan patriarchal system of old still
holding sway in India. The structure, though ancient, remains
full of life. The joint family is a co-operative corporation, in
which men and women have a well-defined place. At the head
of the corporation is the senior member of the family, generally
the eldest male member, but in his absence the senior female
member often assumes control." (Cp. Penelope in the
Odyssey.)
"All able-bodied members must contribute their labour and
earnings, whether of personal skill or agriculture and trade, to
the common stock ; weaker members, widows, orphans, and desti-
tute relations, all must be maintained and supported; sons,
nephews, brothers, cousins, all must be treated equally, for any
undue preference is apt to break up the family. We have no
word for cousins they are either brothers or sisters, and we
do not know what are cousins two degrees removed. The chil-
dren of a first cousin are your nephews and nieces, just the same
1 Some Aspects of Hindu Life in India. Paper read to the Royal Society
of Arts, Nov. 28, 1918.
THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 249
as the children of your brothers and sisters. A man can no
more marry a cousin, however removed, than he can marry
his own sister, except in certain parts of Madras, where a man
may marry his maternal uncle's daughter. The family affec-
tions, the family ties, are always very strong, and therefore
the maintenance of an equal standard among so many members
is not so difficult as it may appear at first sight. Moreover,
life is very simple. Until recently shoes were not in general
use at home, but sandals without any leather fastenings. I
have known of a well-to-do middle-class family of several
brothers and cousins who had two or three pairs of leather shoes
between them, these shoes being only used when they had occa-
sion to go out, and the same practice is still followed in the case
of the more expensive garments, like shawls, which last for
generations, and with their age are treated with loving care, as
having been used by ancestors of revered memory.
"The joint family remains together sometimes for several
generations, until it becomes too unwieldy, when it breaks up
into smaller families, and you- thus see whole villages peopled
by members of the same clan. I have said that the family is a
co-operative society, and it may be likened to a small state, and
is kept in its place by strong discipline based on love and obedi-
ence. You see nearly every day the younger members coming
to the head of the family and taking the dust of his feet as a
token of benediction; whenever they go on an enterprise, they
take his leave and carry his blessing. . . . There are many
bonds which bind the family together the bonds of sympathy,
of common pleasures, of common sorrows ; when a death occurs,
all the members go into mourning; when there is a birth or a
wedding, the whole family rejoices. Then above all is the
family deity, some image of Vishnu, the preserver; his place
is in a separate room, generally known as the room of God, or
in well-to-do families in a temple attached to the house, where
the family performs its daily worship. There is a sense of per-
sonal attachment between this image of the deity and the family,
for the image generally comes down from past generations, often
miraculously acquired by a pious ancestor at some remote time.
. . . With the household gods is intimately associated the
family priest. . . . The Hindu priest is a part of the family
life of his flock, between whom and himself the tie has existed
for many generations. The priest is not generally a man of
250 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
much learning; he knows, however, the traditions of his faith.
. . . He is not a very heavy burden, for he is satisfied with
little a few handfuls of rice, a few home-grown bananas or
vegetables, a little unrefined sugar made in the village, and
sometimes a few pieces of copper are all that is needed. ... A
picture of our family life would be incomplete without the
household servants. A female servant is known as the *jhi/ or
daughter, in Bengal she is like the daughter of the house;
she calls the master and the mistress father and mother, and
the young men and women of the family brothers and sisters.
She participates in the life of the family ; she goes to the holy
places along with her mistress, for she could not go alone, and
generally she spends her life with the family of her adoption ;
her children are looked after by the family. The treatment of
men servants is very similar. These servants, men and women,
are generally people of the humbler castes, but a sense of per-
sonal attachment grows up between them and the members of
the family, and as they get on in years they are affectionately
called by the younger members elder brothers, uncles, aunts,
etc. ... In a well-to-do house there is always a resident
teacher, who instructs the children of the family as well as
other boys of the village; there is no expensive school building,
but room is found in some veranda or shed in the courtyard for
the children and their teacher, and into this school low-caste
boys are freely admitted. These indigenous schools were not of
a very high order, but they supplied an agency of instruction
for the masses which was probably not available in many other
countries. . . .
"With Hindu life is bound up its traditional duty of hos-
pitality. It is the duty of a householder to offer a meal to any
stranger who may come before midday and ask for one; the
mistress of the house does not sit down to her meal until every
member is fed, and, as sometimes her food is all that is left,
she does not take her meal until well after midday lest a hungry-
stranger should come and claim ona" . . .
We have been tempted to quote Mr. Basu at some length,
because here we do get to something like a living understanding
of the type of household which has prevailed in human com-
munities since Neolithic days, which still prevails to-day in
THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 251
India, China, and the Far East, but which in the west is rapidly
giving ground before a state and municipal organization of
education and a large-scale industrialism within which an
amount of individual detachment and freedom is possible, such
as these great households never knew. . . .
But let us return now to the history preserved for us in the
Aryan epics.
The Sanscrit epics tell a very similar story to that under-
lying the Iliad, the story of a fair, beef-eating people only
later did they become vegetarians coming down from Persia
into the plain of N"orth India and conquering their way slowly
towards the Indus. From the Indus they spread over India,
but as they spread they acquired much from the dark Dravidians
they conquered, and they seem to have lost their bardic tradi-
tion. The vedas, says Mr. Basu, were transmitted chiefly in
the households by the women. . . .
The oral literature of the Keltic peoples who pressed west-
ward has not been preserved so completely as that of the Greeks
or Indians ; it was written down many centuries later, and so,
like the barbaric, primitive English Beowulf, has lost any clear
evidence of a period of migration into the lands of an antece-
dent people. If the pre-Aryans figure in it at all, it is as the
fairy folk of the Irish stories. Ireland, most cut off of all
the Keltic-speaking communities, retained to the latest date its
primitive life ; and the Tain, the Irish Iliad, describes a cattle-
keeping life in which war chariots are still used, and war dogs
also, and the heads of the slain are carried off slung round the
horses 7 necks. The Tain is the story of a cattle raid. Here,
too, the same social order appears as in the Iliad; the chiefs sit
and feast in great halls, they build halls for themselves, there
is singing and story-telling by the bards, and drinking and in-
toxication. Priests are not very much in evidence, but there
is a sort of medicine-man who deals in spells and prophecy.
XXI
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS
1. The Hellenic Peoples. 2. Distinctive Features of Hel-
lenic Civilization. 3. Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democ-
racy in Greece. 4. The Kingdom of Lydia. 5. The
Rise of the Persians in the East. 6. The Story of Croesus.
7. Darius Invades Russia. 8. The Battle of Marathon.
9. Thermopylae and Salamis. 10. Platcea and Mycale.
THE Greeks appear in the dim light before the dawn of
history (say, 1,500 B.C.) as one of the wandering im-
perfectly nomadic Aryan peoples who were gradually
extending the range of their pasturage southward into the Bal-
kan peninsula and coming into conflict and mixing with that
preceding /Egean civilization of which Cnossos was the crown.
In the Homeric poems these Greek tribes speak one common
language, and a commo^ tradition upheld by the epic poems
keeps them together in a loose unity; they call their various
tribes by a common name, Hellenes. They probably came in
successive waves. Three main variations of the ancient Greek
speech are distinguished: the Ionic, the ^Eolic, and the Doric.
There was a great variety of dialects. The lonians seem to
have preceded the other Greeks, and to have mixed very inti-
mately with the civilized peoples they overwhelmed. Racially
the people of such cities as Athens and Miletus may have been
less Nordic than Mediterranean. The Doric apparently con-
stituted the last most powerful and least civilized wave of the
migration. These Hellenic tribes conquered and largely de-
stroyed the ^Egean civilization that had preceded their arrival ;
upon its ashes they built up a civilization of their own. They
took to the sea and crossed by way of the islands to Asia Minor ;
and, sailing through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, spread
252
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS
253
their settlements along the south, and presently along the north
borders of the Black Sea. They spread also over the south of
Italy, which was called at last Magna Grsecia, and round the
northern coast of the Mediterranean. They founded the town
of Marseilles on the site of an earlier Phoenician colony. They
began settlements in Sicily in rivalry with the Carthaginians
as early as 735 B.C.
In the rear of the Greeks proper came the kindred Mace-
donians and Thracians; on their left wing, the Phrygians
crossed by the Bosphorus into Asia Minor.
We find all this distribution of the Greeks effected before the
254
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
beginnings of written history.
By the seventh century B.C.
that is to say, by the time
of the Babylonian captivity of
the Jews the landmarks of
the ancient world of the pre-
Hellenic civilization in Eu-
rope have been obliterated.
Tiryns and Cnossos are unim-
portant sites; Mycenae and
Troy survive in legend; the
great cities of this new Greek
world are Athens, Sparta (the
capital of Lacedemon) ,
Corinth, Thebes, Samos,
Miletus. The world our
grandfathers called "Ancient
Greece" had arisen on the
forgotten ruins of a still more
Ancient Greece, in many
ways as civilized and artistic,
of which to-day we are only
beginning to learn through
the labours of the excavator.
But the newer Ancient
Greece, of which we are now
telling, still lives vividly in
the imaginations and institu-
tions of men because it spoke
a beautiful and most expres-
sive Aryan tongue akin to our
own, and because it had taken
over the Mediterranean alpha-
bet and perfected it by the ad-
dition of vowels, so that read-
ing and writing were now
easy arts to learn and practise, and great numbers of
people could master them and make a record for later ages. 1
bowels were less necessary for the expression of a Semitic language.
In the early Semitic alphabets only A, I, and U were provided with sym-
bols, but for such a language as Greek, in which many of the inflectional
endings are vowels, a variety of vowel signs was indispensable.
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 255
2
Now this Greek civilization that we find growing up in South
Ttaly and Greece and Asia Minor in the seventh century B.C.,
is a civilization differing in ninny important respects from the
two great civilized systems whose growths we have already
traced, that of the Nile and that of the Two Eivers of Mesopo-
tamia. These civilizations grew through long ages where they
are found ; they grew slowly about a temple life out of a primi-
tive agriculture; priest-kings and god-kings consolidated such
early city states into empires. But the barbaric Greek herds-
men raiders came southward into a world whose civilization
was already an old story. Shipping and agriculture, walled
cities and writing were already there. The Greeks did not
grow a civilization of their own; they wrecked one and put
another together upon and out of the ruins.
To this we must ascribe the fact that there is no temple-
state stage, no stage of priest-kings, in the Greek record. The
Greeks got at once to the city organization that in the east had
grown round the temple. They took over the association of
temple and city ; the idea was ready-made for them. What im-
pressed them most about the city was probably its wall. It is
doubtful if they took to city life and citizenship straight away.
At first they lived in open villages outside the ruins of the cities
they had destroyed, but there stood the model for them, a con-
tinual suggestion. They thought first of a city as a safe place
in a time of strife, and of the temple uncritically as a proper
feature of the city. They came into this inheritance of a pre-
vious civilization with the ideas and traditions of the wood-
lands still strong in their minds. The heroic social system of
the Iliad took possession of the land, and adapted itself to the
new conditions. As history goes on the Greeks became more
religious and superstitious as the faiths of the conquered welled
up from below.
We have already said that the social structure of the primi-
tive Aryans was a two-class system of nobles and commoners,
the classes not very sharply marked off from each other, and
led in warfare by a king who was simply the head of one of the
noble families, primus inter pares, a leader among his equals.
With the conquest of the aboriginal population and with the
building of towns there was added to this simple social arrange-
256 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
ment of two classes a lower stratum of farm-workers and skilled
and unskilled workers, who were for the most part slaves. But
all the Greek communities were not of this "conquest" type.
Some were "refugee" cities representing smashed communities,
and in these the aboriginal substratum would be missing.
In many of the former cases the survivors of the earlier popu-
lation formed a subject class, slaves of the state as a whole, as,
for instance, the Helots in Sparta. The nobles and commoners
became landlords and gentlemen farmers; it was they who
directed the shipbuilding and engaged in trade. But some of
the poorer free citizens followed mechanic arts, and, as we have
already noted, would even pull an oar in a galley for pay.
Such priests as there were in this Greek world were either the
guardians of shrines and temples or sacrificial functionaries;
Aristotle, in his Politics, makes them a mere subdivision of
his official class. The citizen served as warrior in youth, ruler
in his maturity, priest in his old age. The priestly class, in
comparison with the equivalent class in Egypt and Babylonia,
was small and insignificant. The gods of the Greeks proper,
the gods of the heroic Greeks, were, as we have already noted,
glorified human beings, and they were treated without very
much fear or awe; but beneath these gods of the conquering
freemen lurked other gods of the subjugated peoples, who found
their furtive followers among slaves and women. The original
Aryan gods were not expected to work miracles or control men's
lives. But Greece, like most of the Eastern world in the thou-
sand years B.C., was much addicted to consulting oracles or
soothsayers. Delphi was particularly famous for its oracle.
"When the Oldest Men in the tribe could not tell you the right
thing to do," says Gilbert Murray, a you went to the blessed
dead. All oracles were at the tombs of Heroes. They told you
what was 'Themis/ what was the right thing to do, or, as re
ligious people would put it now, what was the Will of the God.'
The priests and priestesses of these temples were not united
into one class, nor did they exercise any power as a class. It
was the nobles and free commoners, two classes which, in some
cases, merged into one common body of citizens, who consti-
tuted the Greek state. In many cases, especially in great city
states, the population of slaves and unenfranchised strangers
greatly outnumbered the citizens. But for them the state
existed only by courtesy ; it existed legally for the select body
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS
257
of citizens alone. It might or might not tolerate the outsider
and the slave, but they had no legal voice in their treatment
any more than if it had been a despotism.
This is a social structure differing widely from that of the
Eastern monarchies. The exclusive importance of the Greek
citizen reminds one a little of the exclusive importance of the
children of Israel in the later Jewish state, but there is no
equivalent on the Greek side to the prophets and priests, nor
to the idea of an overruling Jehovah.
Another contrast between the Greek states and any of the
human communities to which we have hitherto given attention
ut an. 'Qtheniaxi. warship, about 4OO "B.C.
of relief found, on,
is their continuous and incurable division. The civilizations
of Egypt, Sumeria, China, and no doubt North India, all began
in a number of independent city states, each one a city with a
few miles of dependent agricultural villages and cultivation
around it, but out of this phase they passed by a process of
coalescence into kingdoms and empires. But to the very end
of their independent history the Greeks did not coalesce. Com-
monly, this is ascribed to the geographical conditions under
which they lived. Greece is a country cut up iito a multitude
of valleys by mountain masses and arms of the sea that render
intercommunication difficult; so difficult that few cities were
able to hold many of the others in subjection for any length
of time. Moreover, many Greek cities were on islands and
scattered along remote coasts. To the end the largest city states
of Greece remained smaller than many English counties; and
258 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
some had an area of only a few square miles. Athens, one of
the largest of the Greek cities, at the climax of its power had
a population of perhaps a third of a million. Few other Greek
cities exceeded 50,000. Of this, half or more were slaves and
strangers, and two-thirds of the free body women and children.
3
The government of these city states varied very widely in its
nature. As they settled down after their conquests the Greeks
retained for a time the rule of their kings, but these kingdoms
drifted back more and more to the rule of the aristocratic class.
In Sparta (Lacedemon) kings were still distinguished in the
sixth century B.C. The Lacedemonians had a curious system
of a double kingship; two kings, drawn from different royal
families, ruled together. But most of the Greek city states
had become aristocratic republics long before the sixth century.
There is, however, a tendency towards slackness and inefficiency
in most families that rule by hereditary right; sooner OF later
they decline; and as the Greeks got out upon the seas and set
up colonies and commerce extended, new rich families arose to
jostle the old and bring new personalities into power. These
nouveaux riches became members of an expanded ruling class,
a mode of government known as oligarchy in opposition to
aristocracy though, strictly, the term oligarchy ( = govern-
ment by the few) should of course include hereditary aristocracy
as a special case.
In many cities persons of exceptional energy, taking advan-
tage of some social conflict or class grievance, secured a more
or less irregular power in the state. This combination of
personality and opportunity has occurred in the United States
of America, for example, where men exercising various kinds
of informal power are called bosses. In Greece they were
called tyrants. But the tyrant was rather more than a boss;
he was recognized as a monarch, and claimed the authority
of a monarch. The modern boss, on the other hand, shelters
behind legal forms which he has "got hold of" and uses for
his own ends. Tyrants were distinguished from kings, who
claimed some sort of right, some family priority, for example,
to rule. They were supported, perhaps, by the poorer class
with a grievance; Peisistratus, for example, who was tyrant of
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 259
Athens, with two intervals of exile, between 560 and 527 B.C.,
was supported by the poverty-struck Athenian hillmen. Some-
times, as in Greek Sicily, the tyrant stood for the rich against
the poor. When, later on, the Persians began to subjugate the
Greek cities of Asia Minor, they set up pro-Persian tyrants.
Aristotle, the great philosophical teacher, who was born under
the hereditary Macedonian monarchy, and who was for some
years tutor to the king's son, distinguishes in his Politics be-
tween kings who ruled by an admitted and inherent right, such
as the King of Macedonia, whom he served, and tyrants who
ruled without the consent of the governed. As a matter of
fact, it is hard to conceive of a tyrant ruling without the con-
sent of many, and the active participation of a substantial num-
ber of his subjects ; and the devotion and unselfishness of your
"true kings" has been known to rouse resentment and question-
ing. Aristotle was also able to say that while the king ruled
for the good of the state, the tyrant ruled for his own good.
Upon this point, as in his ability to regard slavery as a natural
thing and to consider women unfit for freedom and political
rights, Aristotle was in harmony with the trend of events about
him.
A third form of government that prevailed increasingly in
Greece in the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C., was known
as democracy. As the modern world nowadays is constantly
talking of democracy, and as the modern idea of democracy is
something widely different from the democracy of the Greek
city states, it will be well to be very explicit upon the meaning
of democracy in Greece. Democracy then was government by
the commonalty, the Demos; it was government by the whole
body of the citizens, by the many as distinguished from the few.
But let the modern reader mark that word "citizen." The slave
was excluded, the freedman was excluded, the stranger; even
the Greek born in the city, whose father had come eight or ten
miles from the city beyond the headland, was excluded. The
earlier democracies (but not all) demanded a property qualifica-
tion from the citizen, and property in those days was land ; this
was subsequently relaxed, but the modern reader will grasp
that here was something very different from modern democracy.
At the end of the fifth century B.C. this property qualification
had been abolished in Athens, for example; but Pericles, a
great Athenian statesman of whom we shall have more to tell
260 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
later, had established a law (451 B.C.) restricting citizenship to
those who could establish Athenian descent on both sides. Thus,
in the Greek democracies quite as much as in the oligarchies,
the citizens formed a close corporation, ruling sometimes, as in
the case of Athens in its great days, a big population of serfs,
slaves, and "outlanders." A modern politician used to the idea,
the entirely new and different idea, that democracy in its per-
fected form means that every adult man and woman shall have
a voice in the government, would, if suddenly spirited back to
the extremist Greek democracy, regard it as a kind of oligarchy.
The only real difference between a Greek "oligarchy" and a
Greek democracy was that in the former the poorer and less
important citizens had no voice in the government, and in the
latter every citizen had. Aristotle, in his Politics, betrays very
clearly the practical outcome of this difference. Taxation set
lightly on the rich in the oligarchies; the democracies, on the
other hand, taxed the rich, and generally paid the impecunious
citizen a maintenance allowance and special fees. In Athens
fees were paid to citizens even for attending the general as-
sembly. But the generality of people outside the happy order
of citizens worked and did what they were told, and if one
desired the protection of the law, one sought a citizen to plead
for one. For only the citizen had any standing in the law
courts. The modern idea, that any one in the state should be
a citizen, would have shocked the privileged democrats of
Athens profoundly.
One obvious result of this monopolization of the state by the
class of citizens was that the patriotism of these privileged
people took an intense and narrow form. They would form
alliances, but never coalesce with other city states. That would
have obliterated every advantage by which they lived. The
narrow geographical limits of these Greek states added to the
intensity of their feeling. A man's love for his country was
reinforced by his love for his native town, his religion, and his
home; for these were all one. Of course the slaves did not
share in these feelings, and in the oligarchic states very often
the excluded class got over its dislike of foreigners in its greater
dislike of the class at home which oppressed it But in the
main, patriotism in the Greek was a personal passion of an
inspiring and dangerous intensity. Like rejected love, it was
apt to turn into something very like hatred. The Greek exile
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 261
resembled the French or Russian emigre in being ready to treat
his beloved country pretty roughly in order to save her from
the devils in human form who had taken possession of her and
turned him- out.
In the fifth century B.C. Athens formed a system of relation-
ships with a number of other Greek city states which is often
spoken of by historians as the Athenian Empire. But all the
other city states retained their own governments. One "new
fact" added by the Athenian Empire was the complete and
effective suppression of piracy; another was the institution of
a sort of international law. The law indeed was Athenian law ;
but actions could now be brought and justice administered be-
tween citizens of the different states of the League, which of
course had not been possible before. The Athenian Empire had
really developed out of a league of mutual defence against
Persia; its seat had originally been in the island of Delos, and
the allies had contributed to a common treasure at Delos; the
treasure of Delos was carried off to Athens because it was ex-
posed to a possible Persian raid. Then one city after another
offered a monetary contribution instead of military service, with
the result that in the end Athens was doing almost all the work
and receiving almost all the money. She was supported by
one or two of the larger islands. The "League" in this way
became gradually an "Empire," but the citizens of the allied
states remained, except where there were special treaties of
intermarriage and the like, practically foreigners to one an-
other. And it was chiefly the poorer citizens of Athens who
sustained this empire by their most vigorous and incessant per-
sonal service. Every citizen was liable to military service at
home or abroad between the ages of eighteen and sixty, some-
times on purely Athenian affairs and sometimes in defence of
the cities of the Empire whose citizens had bought themselves
off. There was probably no single man over twenty-five in the
Athenian Assembly who had not served in several campaigns
in different parts of the Mediterranean or Black Sea, and who
did not expect to serve again. Modern imperialism is denounced
by its opponents as the exploitation of the world by the rich;
Athenian imperialism was the exploitation of the world by the
poorer citizens of Athens.
Another difference from modern conditions, due to the small
size of the Greek city states, was that in a democracy every
262 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
citizen had the right to attend and speak and vote in the popular
assembly. For most cities this meant a gathering of only a
few hundred people ; the greatest had no more than some thou-
sands of citizens. Nothing of this sort is possible in a modern
"democracy" with, perhaps, several million voters. The mod-
ern "citizen's" voice in public affairs is limited to the right
to vote for one or other of the party candidates put before
him. He, or she, is then supposed to have "assented" to the
resultant government. Aristotle, who would have enjoyed the
electoral methods of our modern democracies keenly, points out
very subtly how the outlying farmer class of citizens in a
democracy can be virtually disenfranchised by calling the popu-
lar assembly too frequently for their regular attendance. In
the later Greek democracies (fifth century) the appointment
of public officials, except in the case of officers requiring very
special knowledge, was by casting lots. This was supposed to
protect the general corporation of privileged citizens from the
continued predominance of rich, influential, and conspicuously
able men.
Some democracies (Athens and Miletus, e.g.) had an insti-
tution called the ostracism, 1 by which in times of crisis and
conflict the decision was made whether some citizen should go
into exile for ten years. This may strike a modern reader as
an envious institution, but that was not its essential quality.
It was, says Gilbert Murray, a way of arriving at a decision
in a case when political feeling was so divided as to threaten a
deadlock. There were in the Greek democracies parties and
party leaders, but no regular government in office and no regu-
lar opposition. There was no way, therefore, of carrying out
a policy, although it might be the popular policy, if a strong
leader or a strong group stood out against it. But by the
ostracism, the least popular or the least trusted of the chief
leaders in the divided community was made to retire for a
period without loss of honour or property. Professor Murray
suggests that a Greek democracy, if it had found itself in such
a position of deadlock as the British Empire did upon the
question of Home Rule for Ireland in 1914, would have prob-
ably first ostracized Sir Edward Carson, and then proceeded
to carry out the provisions of the Home Rule Bill.
This institution of the ostracism has immortalized one ob-
1 From ostrakon, a tile ; the voter wrote the name on a tile or shell.
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 263
scure and rather illiterate member of the democracy of Athens.
A certain Aristides had gained a great reputation in the law
court for his righteous dealing. He fell into a dispute with
Themistocles upon a question of naval policy ; Aristides was for
the army, Themistocles was a "strong navy 77 man, and a dead-
lock was threatened. There was resort to an ostracism to
decide between them. Plutarch relates that as Aristides walked
through the streets while the voting was in progress, he was
accosted by a strange citizen from the agricultural environs
unaccustomed to the art of writing, and requested to write his
own name on the proffered potsherd.
"But why ?" he asked. "Has Aristides ever injured you ?"
"No," said the citizen. "No. Never have I set eyes on
him. But, oh ! I am so bored by hearing him called Aristides
the Just."
Whereupon, says Plutarch, without further parley Aristides
wrote as the man desired. . . .
When one understands the true meaning of these Greek con-
stitutions, and in particular the limitation of all power, whether
in the democracies or the oligarchies, to a locally privileged
class, one realizes how impossible was any effective union of
the hundreds of Greek cities scattered about the Mediterranean
region, or even of any effective co-operation between them for
a common end. Each city was in the hands of a few or a few
hundred men, to whom its separateness meant everything that
was worth having in life. Only conquest from the outside could
unite the Greeks, and until Greece was conquered they had no
political unity. When at last they were conquered, they were
conquered so completely that their unity ceased to be of any
importance even to themselves ; it was a unity of subjugation.
Yet there was always a certain tradition of unity between
all the Greeks, based on a common language and script, on
the common possession of the heroic epics, and on the con-
tinuous intercourse that the maritime position of the states
made possible. And in addition, there were certain religious
bonds of a unifying kind. Certain shrines, the shrines of the
god Apollo in the island of Delos and at Delphi, for example,
were sustained not by single states, but by leagues of states or
Amphictyonies ( League of neighbours), which in such in-
stances as the Delphic amphictyony became very wide-reaching
unions. The league protected the shrine and the safety of
2G4 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
pilgrims, kept up the roads leading thereunto, secured peace at
the time of special festivals, upheld certain rules to mitigate
the usages of war among its members, and the Delian league
especially suppressed piracy. A still more important link of
Hellenic union was the Olympian games that were held every
four years at Olympia. Foot races, boxing, wrestling, javelin
throwing, quoit throwing, jumping, and chariot and horse racing
were the chief sports, and a record of victors and distinguished
visitors was kept. From the year 776 B.C. onward 1 these games
were held regularly for over a thousand years, and they did
much to maintain that sense of a common Greek life (pan-
Hellenic) transcending the narrow politics of the city states.
Such links of sentiment and association were of little avail
against the intense "separatism" of the Greek political institu-
tions. From the History of Herodotus the student will be able
to gather a sense of the intensity and persistence of the feuds
that kept the Greek world in a state of chronic warfare. In the
old days (say, to the sixth century B.C.) fairly large families
prevailed in Greece, and something of the old Aryan great
household system (see Chap. XX), with its strong clan feeling
and its capacity for maintaining an enduring feud, still re-
mained. The history of Athens circles for many years about
the feud of two great families, the Alcma?onida3 and the Peisis-
tratidse ; the latter equally an aristocratic family, but founding
its power on the support of the poorer class of the populace
and the exploitation of their grievances. Later on, in the sixth
and fifth centuries, a limitation of births and a shrinkage of
families to two or three members a process Aristotle notes
without perceiving its cause led to the disappearance of the
old aristocratic clans, and the later wars were due rather to
trade disputes and grievances caused and stirred up by indi-
vidual adventurers than to family vendettas.
It is easy to understand, in view of this intense separatism
of the Greeks, how readily the lonians of Asia and of the
islands fell first under the domination of the kingdom of Lydia,
and then under that of the Persians when Cyrus overthrew
Croesus, the king of Lydia. They rebelled only to be recon-
quered. Then came the turn of European Greece. It is a
matter of astonishment, the Greeks themselves were astonished,
1 776 B.C. is the year of the First Olympiad, a valuable starting-point in
Greek chronology.
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 265
to find that Greece itself did not fall under the dominion of
the Persians, these barbaric Aryan masters of the ancient civili-
zations of Western Asia. But before we tell of this struggle
we must give some attention to these Asiatics against whom they
were pitted ; and particularly to these Medes and Persians who,
by 538 B.C., were already in possession of the ancient civiliza-
tions of Assyria, Babylonia and about to subjugate Egypt.
4
We have had occasion to mention the kingdom of Lydia, and
it may be well to give a short note here upon the Lydians before
proceeding with our story. The original population of the
larger part of Asia Minor may perhaps have been akin to the
original population of Greece and Crete. If so, it was of
"Mediterranean" race. Or it may have been another branch of
those still more generalized and fundamental darkish peoples
from whom arose the Mediterranean race to the west and the
Dravidians to the east. Eemains of the same sort of art that
distinguishes Cnossos and Mycenae are to be found scattered
over Asia Minor. But just as the Nordic Greeks poured south-
ward into Greece to conquer and mix with the aborigines, so
did other and kindred Nordic tribes pour over the Bosphorus
into Asia Minor. Over some areas these Aryan peoples pre-
vailed altogether, and became the bulk of the inhabitants and
retained their Aryan speech. Such were the Phrygians, a peo-
ple whose language was almost as close to that of the Greeks as
the Macedonian. But over other areas the Aryans did not so
prevail. In Lydia the original race and their language held
their own. The Lydians were a non-Aryan people speaking a
non-Aryan speech, of which at the present time only a few
words are known. Their capital city was Sardis.
Their religion was also non-Aryan. They worshipped a
Great Mother goddess. The Phrygians also, though retaining
their Greek-like language, became infected with mysterious
religion, and much of the mystical religion and secret cere-
monial that pervaded Athens at a later date was Phrygian
(when not Thracian) in origin.
At first the Lydians held the western sea-coast of Asia Minor,
but they were driven back from it by the establishment of
Ionian Greeks coming by the sea and founding cities. Later
266 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
on, however, these Ionian Greek cities were brought into sub-
jection by the Lydian kings.
The history of this country is not clearly known, and were
it known it would scarcely be of sufficient importance to be
related in this historical outline, but in the eighth century B.C.
one monarch, named Gyges, becomes noteworthy. The country
under his rule was subjected to another Aryan invasion; certain
nomadic tribes called the Cimmerians came pouring across Asia
Minor, and they were driven back with difficulty by Gyges and
his son and grandson. Sardis was twice taken and burnt by
these barbarians. And it is on record that Gyges paid tribute
to Sardanapalus, which serves to link him up with our general
ideas of the history of Assyria, Israel, and Egypt. Later Gyges
rebelled against Assyria, and sent troops to help Psammetichus I
to liberate Egypt from its brief servitude to the Assyrians.
It was Alyattes, the grandson of Gyges, whomade Lydia into
a considerable power. He reigned for seven years, and he re-
duced most of the- Ionian cities of Asia Minor to subjection.
The country became the centre of a great trade between Asia
and Europe; it had always been productive and rich in gold,
and now the Lydian monarch was reputed the richest in Asia.
There was a great coming and going between the Black and
Mediterranean Seas, and between the East and West. We have
already noted that Lydia was reputed to be the first country in
the world to produce coined money, and to provide the conven-
ience of inns for travellers and traders. The Lycian dynasty
seems to have been a trading dynasty of the type of Minos in
Crete, with a banking and financial development. ... So much
we may note of Lydia by way of preface to the next section.
5
Now while one series of Aryan-speaking invaders had de-
veloped along the lines we have described in Greece, Magna
Grsecia, and around the shores of the Black Sea, another series
of Aryan-speaking peoples, whose originally Nordic blood was
perhaps already mixed with a Mongolian element, were settling
and spreading to the north and east of the Assyrian and Baby-
lonian empires. We have already spoken of the arc-like dis-
persion of the Nordic Aryan peoples to the north of the Black
and Caspian Seas ; it was probably by this route that the Aryan-
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 267
speaking races gradually came down into what is now the
Persian country, and spread, on the one hand, eastward to India
( ? 2,000 to 1,000 B.C.), and on the other, increased and multi-
plied in the Persian uplands until they were strong enough to
assail first Assyria (650 B.C.) and then Babylon (538 B.C.).
There is much that is not yet clear about the changes of
climate that have been going on in Europe and Asia during the
last 10,000 years. The ice of the last glacial age receded grad-
ually, and gave way to a long period of steppe or prairie-like
conditions over the great plain of Europe. About 12,000 or
10,000 years ago, as it is reckoned now, this state of affairs
was giving place to forest conditions. We have already noted
how, as a consequence of these changes, the Solutrian horse
hunters gave place to Magdalenian fishers and forest deer
hunters ; and these, again, to the Neolithic herdsmen and agri-
culturists. For some thousands of years the European climate
seems to have been warmer than it is to-day. A great sea spread
from the coast of the Balkan peninsula far into Central Asia
and extended northward into Central Eussia, and the shrinkage
of that sea arid the consequent hardening of the climate of South
Russia and Central Asia was going on contemporaneously with
the development of the first civilizations in the river valleys.
Many facts seem to point to a more genial climate in Europe
and Western Asia, and still more strongly to a greater luxuri-
ance of plant and vegetable life, 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, than
we find to-day. There were forests then in South Russia and
in the country which is now Western Turkestan, where now
steppes and deserts prevail. On the other hand, between 1,500
and 2,000 years kgo, the Aral-Caspian region was probably
drier and those seas smaller than they are at the present time.
We may note in this connection that Thotmes III (say, the
fifteenth century B.C.), in his expedition beyond the Euphrates,
hunted a herd of 120 elephants in that region. Again, an
^Egean dagger from Mycenae, dating about 2,000 B.C., shows a
lion-hunt in progress. The hunters carry big shields and spears,
and stand in rows one behind the other. The first man spears
the lion, and when the wounded beast leaps at him, drops flat
under the protection of his big shield, leaving the next man to
repeat his stroke, and so on, until the lion is speared to death.
This method of hunting is practised by the Masai to-day, and
could only have been worked out by a people in a land where
268 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
lions were abundant. But abundant lions imply abundant game,
and that again means abundant vegetation. About 2,000 B.C.
the hardening of the climate in the central parts of the Old
World, to which we have already referred, which put an end
to elephants and lions in Asia Minor and Greece, 1 was turning
the faces of the nomadic Aryan peoples southward towards the
fields and forests of the more settled and civilized nations.
These Aryan peoples come down from the East Caspian
regions into history about the time that Mycenae and Troy and
Cnossos are falling to the Greeks. It is difficult to disentangle
the different tribes and races that appear under a multitude of
names in the records and inscriptions that record their first ap-
pearance, but, fortunately, these distinctions are not needed in
an elementary outline such as this present history. A people
called the Cimmerians appear in the districts of Lake Urumiya
and Van, and shortly after Aryans have spread from Armenia
to Elam. In the ninth century B.C., a people called the Medes,
very closely related to the Persians to the east of them, appear
in the Assyrian inscriptions. Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon
II, names already familiar in this story, profess to have made
them pay tribute. They are spoken of in the inscriptions as the
"dangerous Medes." They are as yet a tribal people, not united
under one king.
About the ninth century B.C. Elam and the Elamites, whose
capital was Susa, a people which possessed a tradition and
civilization at least as old as the Sumerian, suddenly vanish
from history. We do not know what happened. They seem
to have been overrun and the population absorbed by the con-
querors. Susa is in the hands of the Persians.
A fourth people, related to these Aryan tribes, who appear
at this time in the narrative of Herodotus, are the "Scythians."
For a while the monarchs of Assyria play off these various
kindred peoples, the Cimmerians, the Medes, the Persians, and
1 It is, at least, doubtful whether any change of climate expelled either
lion or elephant from southeast Europe and Asia Minor; the cause of
their gradual disappearance was I think nothing but Man, increasingly
well armed for the chase. Lions lingered in the Balkan peninsula till
about the fourth century B.C., if not later. Elephants had perhaps dis-
appeared from western Asia by the eighth century B.C. The lion (much
bigger than the existing form) stayed on in southern Germany till the
Neolithic period. The panther inhabited Greece, southern Italy, and
southern Spain likewise till the beginning of the historical period (say
1,000 B.C.). H. H. J.
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS
269
the Scythians, against each other. Assyrian princesses (a
daughter of Esarhaddon, e.g.) are married to Scythian chiefs.
^Nebuchadnezzar the Great, on the
other hand, marries a daugh-
ter of Cyaxares, who has become
king of all the Medes. The Aryan
Scythians are for the Semitic
Assyrians; the Aryan Medes for
the Semitic Babylonians. It was
this Cyaxares who took Nine-
veh, the Assyrian capital, in GO 6
B.C., and so released Babylon from
the Assyrian yoke to establish,
under Chaldean rule, the Second
Babylonian Empire. The Scyth-
ian allies of Assyria drop out of
the story after this. They go on
living their own life away to the
north without much interference
with the peoples to the south. A
glance at the map of this
period shows how, for two-thirds
of a century, the Second Baby-
lonian Empire lay like a lamb
within the embrace of the Median
lion.
Into the internal struggles of
the Medes and Persians, that
ended at last in the accession of
Cyrus "the Persian" to the
throne of Cyaxares in 550 B.C.,
we will not enter. In that year
Cyrus was ruling over an empire
that reached from the boundaries
of Lydia to Persia and perhaps
to India. Nabonidus, the last of
the Babylonian rulers, was, as we have already told, digging up
old records and buildicg temples in Babylonia.
270
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
6
But one monarch in the world was alive to the threat of the
new power that lay in the hands of Cyrus. This was Croesus,
the Lydian king. His son had been killed in a very tragic man-
ner, which Herodotus relates, but which we will not describe
here. Says Herodotus :
"For two years then, Croesus remained quiet in great mourn-
ing, because he was deprived of his son; but after this period
of time, the overthrowing of the rule of the son of Cyaxares
TViaxr ,5/umnj
of A*
Second. BABYLONIAN:
by Cyrus, and the growing greatness of the Persians, caused
Croesus to cease from his mourning, and led him to .a care of
cutting short the power of the Persians if by any means he
might, while yet it was in growth and before they should have
become great."
He then made trial of the various oracles.
"To the Lydians who were to carry these gifts to the temples
Croesus gave charge that they should ask the Oracles this que,*-
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 271
tion: whether Croesus should inarch against the Persians, and,
if so, whether he should join with himself any army of men
as his friends. And when the Lydians had arrived at the places
to which they had been sent and had dedicated the votive offer-
ings, they inquired of the Oracles, and said: 'Croesus, king of
the Lydians and of other nations, considering that these are
the only true Oracles among men, presents to you gifts such
as your revelations deserve, and asks you again now whether
he shall march against the Persians, and, if so, whether he shall
join with himself any army of men as allies. 7 They inquired
thus, and the answers of both the Oracles agreed in one, de-
claring to Croesus that if he should march against the Persians
he should destroy a great empire. ... So when the answers
were brought back and Croesus heard them, he was delighted
with the Oracles, and expecting that he would certainly destroy
the kingdom of Cyrus, he sent again to Pytho, and presented
to the men of Delphi, having ascertained the number of them,
two staters of gold for each man: and in return for this the
Delphians gave to Croesus and to the Lydians precedence in
consulting the Oracle and freedom from all payments, and the
right to front seats at the games, with this privilege also for
all time, that any one of them who wished should be allowed
to become a citizen of Delphi."
So Croesus made a defensive alliance both with the Lace-
demonians and the Egyptians. And Herodotus continues,
"while Croesus was preparing to march against the Persians,
one of the Lydians, who even before this time was thought to
be a wise man, but in consequence of this opinion got a very
great name for wisdom among the Lydians, advised Croesus
as follows: ( O king, thou art preparing to march against men
who wear breeches of leather, and the rest of their clothing is of
leather also; and they eat food not such as they desire, but such
as they can obtain, dwelling in a land which is rugged; and,
moreover, they make no use of wine but drink water; and no
figs have they for dessert, nor any other good thing. On the
one hand, if thou shalt overcome them, what wilt thou take
away from them, seeing they have nothing? and, on the other
hand, if thou shalt be overcome, consider how many good things
thou wilt lose ; for once having tasted our good things, they will
cling to them fast, and it will not be possible to drive them away.
I ? for my own part ? feel gratitude to the gods that they do not
272 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
put it into the minds of the Persians to march against the
Lydians.' Thus he spoke not persuading Croesus ; for it is true
indeed that the Persians hefore they subdued the Lydians had
no luxury nor any good thing."
Croesus and Cyrus fought an indecisive battle at Pteria, from
which Croesus retreated. Cyrus followed him up, and he gave
battle outside his capital town of Sardis. The chief strength
of the Lydians lay in their cavalry; they were excellent, if
undisciplined, horsemen, and fought with long spears.
"Cyrus, when he saw the Lydians being arrayed for battle,
fearing their horsemen, did on the suggestion of Harpagos, a
Mede, as follows: All the camels which were in the train of
his army carrying provisions and baggage he gathered together
and he took off their burdens and set men upon them provided
with the equipment of cavalry; and, having thus furnished
them, forth he appointed them to go in front of the rest of
the a-rmy towards the horsemen of Croesus ; and after the camel-
troop he ordered the infantry to follow ; and behind the infantry
he placed his whole force of cavalry. Then, when all his men
had been placed in their several positions, he charged them
to spare none of the other Lydians, slaying all who might come
in their way, but Croesus himself they were not to slay, not even
if he should make resistance when he was being captured. Such
was his charge : and he set the camels opposite the horsemen for
this reason because the horse has a fear of the camel and
cannot endure either to see his form or to scent his smell: for
this reason then the trick had been devised, in order that the
cavalry of Croesus might be useless, that very force wherewith
the Lydian king was expecting most to shine. And as they
were coming together to the battle, so soon as the horses scented
the camels and saw them, they turned away back, and the hopes
of Croesus were at once brought to nought."
In fourteen days Sardis was stormed and Croesus taken
prisoner. . . .
"So the Persians having taken him brought him into the
presence of Cyrus; and he piled up a great pyre and caused
Croesus to go up upon it bound in fetters, and along with him
twice seven sons of Lydians, whether it was that he meant to
dedicate this offering as first-fruits of his victory to some god,
or whether he desired to fulfil a vow, or else had heard that
Croesus was a god-fearing man, and so caused him to go up on
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 273
the pyre because lie wished to know if any one of the divine
powers would save him, so that he should not he hurnt alive.
He, they say, did this ; but to Croesus as he stood upon the pyre
there came, although he was in such evil case, a memory of
the saying of Solon, how he had said with divine inspiration
that no one of the living might be called happy. And when
this thought came into his mind, they say that he sighed deeply
and groaned aloud, having been for long silent, and three times
he uttered the name of Solon. Hearing this, Cyrus bade the
interpreters ask Croesus who was this person on whom he called ;
and they came near and asked. And Croesus for a time, it is
said, kept silence when he was asked this, but afterwards, being
pressed, he said : 'One whom more than much wealth I should
have desired to have speech with all monarchs.' Then, since his
words were of doubtfiil import, they asked again of that which
he said; and as they were urgent with him and gave him no
peace, he told how once Solon, an Athenian, had come and
having inspected all his wealth had made light of it, with such
and such words ; and how all had turned out for him according
as Solon had said, not speaking at all especially with a view to
Croesus himself, but with a view to the whole human race, and
especially those who seem to themselves to be happy men. And
while Croesus related these things, already the pyre was lighted
and the edges of it round about were burning. Then they say
that Cyrus, hearing from the interpreters what Croesus had
said, changed his purpose and considered that he himself also
was but a man, and that he was delivering another man, who
had been not inferior to himself in felicity, alive to the fire;
and, moreover, he feared the requital, and reflected that there
was nothing of that which men possessed which was secure;
therefore, they say, he ordered them to extinguish as quickly
as possible the fire that was burning, and to bring down Croesus
and those who were with him from the pyre; and they, using
endeavours, were not able now to get the mastery of the flames.
Then it is related by the Lydians that Croesus, having learned
how Cyrus had changed his mind, and seeing that every one was
trying to put out the fire, but that they were no longer able
to check it, cried aloud, entreating Apollo that if any gift had
ever been given by him which was acceptable to the god, he
would come to his aid and rescue him from the evil which was
now upon him. So he with tears entreated the god, and sud-
THE OUTLINE OF
denly, they say, after dear sky and calm weather clouds gathered
and a storm burst, and it rained with a very violent shower,
and the pyre was extinguished.
"Then Cyrus, having perceived that Croesus was a lover of
the gods and a good man, caused him to be brought down from
the pyre and asked him as follows: 'Crcesus, tell me who of
all men was it who persuaded thee to march upon my land and
so to become an enemy to me instead of a friend ?' And he said :
*O king, I did this to thy felicity and to my own misfortune,
and the causer of this was the god of the Hellenes, who incited
me to march with my army. For no one is so senseless as to
choose of his own will war rather than peace, since in peace
the sons bury their fathers, but in war the fathers bury their
sons. But it was pleasing, I suppose, to the divine powers that
these things should come to pass thus.' ?
So Croesus became a councillor of Cyrus, and lived in Baby-
lon. When Lydia was subdued, Cyrus turned his attention ta
Nabonidus in Babylon. He defeated the Babylonian army,
under Belshazzar, outside Babylon, and then laid siege to the
town. He entered the town (538 B.C.), probably as we have
already suggested, with the connivance of the priests of Bel.
7
Cyrus was succeeded by his son Cambyses, who took an army
into Egypt (525 B.C.). There was a battle in the delta, in
which Greek mercenaries fought on both sides. Herodotus
declares that he saw the bones of the slain still lying on the
field fifty or sixty years later, and comments on the comparative
thinness of the Persian skulls. After this battle Cambyses took
Memphis and most of Egypt.
In Egypt, we are told, Cambyses went mad. He took great
liberties with the Egyptian temples, and remained at Memphis
"opening ancient tombs and examining the dead bodies." He
had already murdered both Croesus, ex-king of Lydia, and his
own brother Smerdis before coming to Egypt, and he died in
Syria on the way back to Susa of an accidental wound, leaving
no heirs to succeed him. He was presently succeeded by Darius
the Mede (521 B.C.), the son of Hystaspes, one of the chief
councillors of Cyrus.
The empire of Darius I was larger than any one of the pre-
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 275
ceding empires whose growth we have traced. It included all
Asia Minor and Syria, that is to say, the ancient Lydian and
Hittite empires, all the old Assyrian and Babylonian empire^,
Egypt, the Caucasus and Caspian regions, Media, Persia, and
it extended, perhaps, into India to the Indus. The nomadic
Arabians alone of all the peoples of what is nowadays called the
Near East, did not pay tribute to the satraps (provincial gover-
nors) of Darius. The organization of this great empire seems
to have been on a much higher level of efficiency than any of
its precursors. Great arterial roads joined province to prov-
ince, and there was a system of royal posts ; * at stated intervals
post horses, stood always ready to carry the government messen-
ger, or the traveller if he had a government permit, on to the
next stage of his journey. Apart from this imperial right-of-
way and the payment of tribute, the local governments possessed
a very considerable amount of local freedom. They were re-
strained from internecine conflict, which was all to their own
good. And at first the Greek cities of the mainland of Asia
paid the tribute and shared in this Persian Peace.
Darius was first incited to attack the Greeks in Europe by a
homesick Greek physician at his court, who wanted at any
cost to be back in Greece. Darius had already made plans for
an expedition into Europe, aiming not at Greece, but to the
northward of Greece, across the Bosphorus and Danube. He
wanted to strike at South Russia, which he believed to be the
home country of the Scythian nomads who threatened him on
his northern and north-eastern frontiers. But he lent an at-
tentive ear to the tempter, and sent agents into Greece.
This great expedition of Darius opens out our view in this
history. It lifts a curtain upon the Balkan country behind
Greece about which we have said nothing hitherto; it carries
us to and over the Danube. The nucleus of his army marched
from Susa, gathering up contingents as they made their way
to the Bosphorus. Here Greek allies (Ionian Greeks from
Asia) had made a bridge of boats, and the army crossed over
while the Greek allies sailed on in their ships to the Danube,
and, two days' sail up from its mouth, landed to make another
floating bridge. Meanwhile, Darius and his host advanced along
the coast of what is now Bulgaria, but which was then called
1 But a thousand years earlier the Hittites seem to have had paved high-
roads running across their country.
276
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 277
Thrace. They crossed the Danube, and prepared to give battle
to the Scythian army and take the cities of the Scythians.
But the Scythians had no cities, and they evaded a battle,
and the war degenerated into a tedious and hopeless pursuit of
more mobile enemies. Wells were stopped up and pastures
destroyed by the nomads. The Scythian horsemen hung upon
the skirts of the great army, which consisted mostly of foot
soldiers, picking off stragglers and preventing foraging; and
they did their best to persuade the Ionian Greeks, who had
made and were guarding the bridge across the Danube, to break
up the bridge, and so ensure the destruction of Darius. So
long as Darius continued to advance, however, the loyalty of
his Greek allies remained unshaken.
But privation, fatigue, and sickness hindered and crippled
the Persian army; Darius lost many stragglers and consumed
his supplies, and at last the melancholy conviction dawned upon
him that a retreat across the Danube was necessary to save
him from complete exhaustion and defeat.
In order to get a start in his retreat he sacrificed his sick and
wounded. He had these men informed that he was about to
attack the Scythians at nightfall, and under this pretence stole
out of the camp with the pick of his troops and made off south-
ward, leaving the camp fires burning and the usual noises and
movements of the camp behind him. Next day the men left
in the camp realized the trick their monarch had played upon
them, and surrendered themselves to the mercy of the Scythians ;
but Darius had got his start, and was able to reach the bridge
of boats before his pursuers came upon him. They were more
mobile than his troops, but they missed their quarry in the
darkness. At the river the retreating Persians "were brought
to an extremity of fear," for they found the bridge partially
broken down and its northern end destroyed.
At this point a voice echoes down the centuries to us. We
see a group of dismayed Persians standing about the Great
King upon the bank of the streaming river ; we see the masses
of halted troops, hungry and war-worn; a trail of battered
transport stretches away towards the horizon, upon which at
any time the advance guards of the pursuers may appear. There
is not much noise in spite of the multitude, but rather an in-
quiring silence. Standing out like a pier from the further side
of the great stream are the remains of the bridge of boats, an
278 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
enigma. . . . We cannot discern whether there are men over
there or not. The shipping of the Ionian Greeks seems still to
be drawn up on the further shore, but it is all very far away.
"Now there was with Darius an Egyptian who had a voice
louder than that of any other man on earth, and this man Darius
ordered to take his stand upon the bank of the Ister (Danube)
and to call Histiseus of Miletus."
This worthy a day is to come, as we shall presently tell,
when his decapitated head will be sent to Darius at Susa
appears approaching slowly across the waters in a boat.
There is a parley, and we gather that it is "all right."
The explanation Histiseus has to make is a complicated one.
Some Scythians have been and have gone again. Scouts, per-
haps, these were. It would seem there had been a discussion
between the Scythians and the Greeks. The Scythians wanted
the bridge broken down ; they would then, they said, undertake
to finish up the Persian army and make an end of Darius and
his empire, and the Ionian Greeks of Asia could then free
their cities again. Miltiades, the Athenian, was for accepting
this proposal. But Histiseus had been more subtle. He would
prefer, he said, to see the Persians completely destroyed before
definitely abandoning their cause. Would the Scythians go
back and destroy the Persians to make sure of them while the
Greeks on their part destroyed the bridge? Anyhow, which-
ever side the Greeks took finally, it was clear to him that it
would be wise to destroy the northern end of the bridge, because
otherwise the Scythians might rush it. Indeed, even as they
parleyed the Greeks set to work to demolish the end that linked
them to the Scythians as quickly as possible. In accordance
with the suggestions of Histiseus the Scythians rode off in search
of the Persians, and so left the Greeks safe in either event.
If Darius escaped, they could be on his side; if he were
destroyed, there was nothing of which the Scythians could
complain.
Histiseus did not put it quite in that fashion to Darius. He
had at least kept the shipping and most of the bridge. He
represented himself as the loyal friend of Persia, and Darius
was not disposed to be too critical. The Ionian ships came
over. With a sense of immense relief the remnant of the
wasted Persians were presently looking back at the steely flood
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 279
of the Danube streaming wide between themselves and their
pursuers. . . .
The pleasure and interest had gone out of the European
expedition for Darius. He returned to Susa, leaving an army
in Thrace, under a trusted general Megabazus. This Mega-
bazus set himself to the subjugation of Thrace, and among other
states which submitted reluctantly to Darius was a kingdom,
which thus comes into our history for the first time, the kingdom
of Macedonia, a country inhabited by a people so closely allied
to the Greeks that one of its princes had already been allowed
to compete and take a prize in the Olympian games.
Darius was disposed to reward Histiseus by allowing him
to build a city for himself in Thrace, but Megabazus had a dif-
ferent opinion of the trustworthiness of Histiseus, and pre-
vailed upon the king to take him to Susa, and, under the title
of councillor, to keep him a prisoner there. HistiaBus was at
first flattered by this court position, and then realized its true
meaning. The Persian court bored him, and he grew homesick
for Miletus. He set himself to make mischief, and was able
to stir up a revolt against the Persians among the Ionian Greeks
on the mainland. The twistings and turnings of the story, which
included the burning of Sardis by the lonians and the defeat
of a Greek fleet at the battle of Lade (495 B.C.), are too com-
plicated to follow here. It is a dark and intricate^ story of
treacheries, cruelties, and hate, in which the death of the wily
Histiseus shines almost cheerfully. The Persian governor of
Sardis, through which town he was being taken on his way back
to Susa as a prisoner, having much the same opinion of him
as Megabazus had, and knowing his ability to humbug Darius,
killed him there and then, and sent on the head only to his
master.
Cyprus and the Greek islands were dragged into this contest
that HistiaBus had stirred up, and at last Athens. Darius
realized the error he had made in turning to the right and not
to the left when he had crossed the Bosphorus, and he now
set himself to the conquest of all Greece. He began with the
islands. Tyre and Sidon were subject to Persia, and ships of
the Phoenician and of the Ionian Greeks provided the Persians
with a fleet by means of which one Greek island after another
was subjugated.
280
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
8
The first attack upon Greece proper was made in 490 B.C. It
was a sea attack upon Athens, with a force long and carefully
prepared for the task, thfe fleet being provided with specially
GREEK5 *n3 "PERSIANS*
built transports for the conveyance of horses. This expedition
made a landing near Marathon in Attica. The Persians were
guided into Marathon by a renegade Greek, Hippias, the son
of Peisistratus, who had been tyrant of Athens. If Athens
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 281
fell, then Hippias was to be its tyrant, under the protection
of the Persians. Meanwhile, so urgent was the sense of a
crisis in the affairs of Hellas, that a man, a herald and runner,
went from Athens to Sparta, forgetful of all feuds, to say:
"Lacedemonians, the Athenians make request of you to come to
their help, and not to allow a city most anciently established
among the Hellenes to fall into slavery by the means of Bar-
barians ; for even now Eretria has been enslaved and Hellas has
become the weaker by a city of renown. " This man, Pheidip-
pides, did the distance from Athens to Sparta, nearly a hundred
miles as the crow flies, and much more if we allow for the
contours, and the windings of the way, in something under
eight and forty hours.
But before the Spartans could arrive on the scene the battle
was joined. The Athenians charged the enemy. They fought
"in a memorable fashion : for they were the first of all the
Hellenes about whom we know who went to attack the enemy
at a run, and they were the first also who endured to face the
Median garments and the men who wore them, whereas up to
this time the very name of the Medes was to the Hellenes a
terror to hear."
The Persian wings gave before this impetuous attack, but
the centre held. The Athenians, however, were cool as well
as vigorous ; they let the wings run and closed in on the flanks
of the centre, whereupon the main body of the Persians fled
to their ships. Seven vessels fell into the hands of the Athe-
nians; the rest got away, and, after a futile attempt to sail
round to Athens and seize the city before the army returned
thither, the fleet made a retreat to Asia. Let Herodotus close
the story with a paragraph that still further enlightens us upon
the tremendous prestige of the Medes at this time :
"Of the Lacedemonians there came to Athens two thousand
after the full moon, making great haste to be in time, so that
they arrived in Attica on the third day after leaving Sparta:
and though they had come too late for the battle, yet they de-
sired to behold the Medes; and accordingly they went on to
Marathon and looked at the bodies of the slain : then afterwards
they departed home, commending the Athenians and the work
which they had done."
282
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
9
So Greece, unified for a while by fear, gained her first victory
over Persia. The news came to Darius simultaneously with
the news of a rebellion in
Egypt, and he died while still
undecided in which direction
to turn. His son and succes-
sor, Xerxes, turned first to
Egypt and set up a Persian
satrap there; then for four
years he prepared a second
attack upon Greece. Says
Herodotus, who was, one must
remember, a patriotic Greek,
approaching now to the climax
of his History :
"For what nation did
Xerxes not lead out of Asia
against Hellas? and what
water was not exhausted,
being drunk by his host, ex-
cept only the great rivers?
For some supplied ships, and
others were appointed to serve
in the land army; to some it
was appointed to furnish
cavalry, and to others vessels
to carry horses, while they
served in the expedition them-
selves also; others were or-
dered to furnish ships of war
for the bridges, and others
again ships with provisions."
Xerxes passed into Europe,
not as Darius did at the half-
mile crossing of the Bos-
phorus, but at the Hellespont
(== the Dardanelles). In his account of the assembling of the
great army, and its march from Sardis to the Hellespont, the
poet in Herodotus takes possession of the historian, The great
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 283
host passes in splendour by Troy, and Xerxes, who although a
Persian and a Barbarian, seems to have had the advantages of a
classical education, turns aside, says our historian, to visit the
citadel of Priam. The Hellespont was bridged at Abydos, and
upon a hill was set a marble throne from which Xerxes sur-
veyed the whole array of his forces.
"And seeing all the Hellespont covered over with the ships
and all the shores and the plains of Abydos full of men, then
Xerxes pronounced himself a happy man, and after that he
fell to weeping. Artabanus, his uncle, therefore perceiving
him the same who at first boldly declared his opinion advising
Xerxes not to march against Hellas this man, I say, having
observed Xerxes wept, asked as follows: 'O king, how far
different from one another are the things which thou hast
done now and a short while before now ! for having pronounced
thyself a happy man, thou art now shedding tears.' He said:
'Yea, for after I had reckoned up, it came into my mind to
feel pity at the thought how brief was the whole life of man,
seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive when a
hundred years have gone by. 7 '
This may not be exact history, but it is great poetry. It is
as splendid as anything in The Dynasts.
The Persian fleet, coasting from headland to headland, ac-
companied this land multitude during its march southward ; but
a violent storm did the fleet great damage and 400 ships were
lost, including much corn transport. At first the united Hellenes
marched out to meet the invaders at the Yale of Tempe near
Mount Olympus, but afterwards retreated through Thessaly,
and chose at last to await the advancing Persians at a place
called Thermopyla?, where at that time 2,300 years have
altered these things greatly there was a great cliff on the land-
ward side and the sea to the east, with a track scarcely wide
enough for a chariot between. The great advantage to the
Greeks of this position at Thermopylae was that it prevented the
use of either cavalry or chariots, and narrowed the battle front
so as to minimize their numerical inequality. And there the
Persians joined battle with them one summer day in the year
480 B.C.
For three days the Greeks held this great army, and did
them much damage with small loss to themselves, and then
on the third day a detachment of Persians appeared upon the
284 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
rear of the Greeks, having learnt of a way over the mountains
from a peasant. There were hasty discussions among the Greeks ;
some were for withdrawing, some for holding out. The leader
of the whole force, Leonidas, was for staying; and with him
he would keep, he said, 300 Spartans. The rest of the Greek
army could, meanwhile, make good its retreat to the next de-
fensible pass. The Thespian contingent of 700, however, re-
fused to fall back. They preferred to stay and die with the
Spartans. Also a contingent of 400 Thebans remained. As
Thebes afterwards joined the Persians, there is a story that
these Thebans were detained by force against their will, which
seems on military as well as historical grounds improbable.
These 1,400 stayed, and were, after a conflict of heroic quality,
slain to a man. Two Spartans happened to be away, sick with
ophthalmia. When they heard the news, one was too ill to
move; the other made his helot guide him to the battle, and
there struck blindly until he was killed. The other, Aristo-
demus, was taken away with the retreating troops, and returned
to Sparta, where he was not actually punished for his conduct,
but was known as Tresas, "the man who retreated." It was
enough to distinguish him from all other Spartans, and he got
himself killed at the Battle of Platsea a year later, performing
prodigies of reckless courage. . . . For a whole day this little
band had held the pass, assailed in front and rear by the whole
force of the Persians. They had covered the retreat of the
main Greek army, they had inflicted great losses on the in-
vaders, and they had raised the prestige of the Greek warrior
over that of the Mede higher even than the victory of Marathon
had done.
The Persian cavalry and transport filtered slowly through
the narrow passage of Thermopylse, and marched on towards
Athens, while a series of naval encounters went on at sea. The
Hellenic fleet retreated before the advance of the Persian ship-
ping, which suffered seriously through its comparative ignorance
of the intricate coasts and of the tricks of the local weather;
Weight of numbers carried the Persian army forward to
Athens; now that Thermopylse was lost, there was no line of
defence nearer than the Isthmus of Corinth, and this meant
the abandonment of all the intervening territory, including
Athens. The population had either to fly or submit to the
Persians. Thebes with all Boeotia submitted, and was pressed
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 285
into the Persian army, except one town, Platsea, whose in-
habitants fled to Athens. The turn of Athens came next, and
great efforts were made to persuade her to make terms; but,
instead, the whole population determined to abandon everything
and take to the shipping. The women and non-combatants were
carried to Salamis and various adjacent islands. Only a few
people too old to move and a few dissentients remained in the
town, which was occupied by the Persians and burnt. The
sacred objects, statues, etc., which were burnt at this time, were
afterwards buried in the Acropolis by the returning Athenians,
and have been dug up in our own day with the marks of burn-
ing visible upon them. Xerxes sent off a mounted messenger
to Susa with the news, and he invited the sons of Peisistratus,
whom he had brought back with him, to enter upon their in-
heritance and sacrifice after the Athenian manner upon the
Acropolis.
Meanwhile, the Hellenic confederate fleet had come round to
Salamis, and in the council of war there were bitter differences
of opinion. Corinth and the states behind the Isthmus wanted
the fleet to fall back to that position, abandoning the cities of
Megara and ^Egina. Themistocles insisted with all his force
on fighting in the narrows of Salamis. The majority was
steadily in favour of retreat, when there suddenly arrived the
news that retreat was cut off. The Persians had sailed round
Salamis and held the sea on the other side. This news was
brought by that Aristides the Just, of whose ostracism we have
already told; his sanity and eloquence did much to help
Themistccles to hearten the hesitating commanders. These two
men had formerly been bitter antagonists ; but, with a generos-
ity rare in those days, they forgot their differences before the
common danger. At dawn the Greek ships pulled out to battle.
The fleet before them was a fleet more composite and less
united than their own. But it was about three times as great.
On one wing were the Phoenicians, on the other Ionian Greeks
from Asia and the Islands. Some of the latter fought stoutly ;
others remembered that they, too, were Greeks. The Greek ships,
on the other hand, were mostly manned by freemen fighting for
their homes. Throughout the early hours the battle raged con-
fusedly. Then it became evident to Xerxes, watching the combat,
that his fleet was attempting flight. The flight became disaster.
Xerxes had taken his seat to watch the battle. He saw his
286
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
galleys rammed by the sharp prows of other galleys ; his fight-
ing-men shot down ; his ships boarded. Much of the sea-fighting
in those days was done by ramming ; the big galleys bore down
their opponents by superior weight of impact, or sheared off
their oars and so destroyed their manoeuvring power and left
them helpless. Presently, Xerxes saw that some of his broken
Soldiers' of
bodyguard
(From, &vzz& in th&
022jd fence Kali of
Darws at 5usa,.)
ships were surrendering. In the water he could see the heads
of Greeks swimming to land; but "of 'the Barbarians the greater
number perished in the sea, not knowing how to swim." The
clumsy attempt of the hard-pressed first line of the Persian
fleet to put about led to indescribable confusion. Some were
rammed by the rear ships of their own side. This ancient ship-
ping was poor, unseaworthy stuff by any modern standards.
The west wind was blowing and many of the broken ships of
Xerxes were now drifting away out of his sight to be wrecked
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS
287
on the coast beyond. Others were being towed towards Salamis
by the Greeks. Others, less injured and still in fighting trim,
were making for the beaches close beneath him that would bring
them under the protection of his army. Scattered over the
further sea, beyond the headlands, remote and vague, were ships
in flight and Greek ships in pursuit. Slowly, incident by in-
cident, the disaster had unfolded under his eyes. We can
imagine something of the coming and going of messengers, the
issuing of futile orders, the changes of plan, throughout the
day. In the morning Xerxes had come out provided with tables
to mark the most successful of his commanders for reward. In
the gold of the sunset he beheld the sea power of Persia utterly
scattered, sunken and destroyed, and the Greek fleet over against
Salamis unbroken and triumphant, ordering its ranks, as if
still incredulous of victory.
The Persian army remained as if in indecision for some days
close to the scene of this sea fight, and then began to retreat to
Thessaly, where it was proposed to winter and resume the cam-
paign. But Xerxes, like Darius I before him, had conceived a
disgust for European campaigns. He was afraid of the de-
struction of the bridge of boats. With part of the army he went
on to the Hellespont, leaving the main force in Thessaly under
a general, Mardonius. Of his own retreat the historian relates :
" Whithersoever they came on the march and to whatever
nation they seized the crops of that people and used them for
provisions ; and if they found no crops, then they took the grass
288 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
which was growing up from the earth, and stripped off the bark
from the trees and plucked down the leaves and devoured them ;
alike of the cultivated trees and of those growing wild ; and they
left nothing behind them : thus they did by reason of famine.
Then plague too seized upon the army and dysentery, which de-
stroyed them by the way, and some of them also who were sick
the king left behind, laying charge upon the cities where at the
time he chanced to be in his march, to take care of them and
support them; of these he left some in Thessaly, and some at
Siris in Paionia, and some in Macedonia. . . . When, passing
on from Thrace they came to the passage, they crossed over the
Hellespont in haste to Abydos by means of the ships, for they
did not find the floating bridges still stretched across, but
broken up by a storm. While staying there for a time they had
distributed to them an allowance of food more abundant than
they had had by the way, and from satisfying their hunger with-
out restraint and also from the changes of water there died many
of those in the army who had remained safe till then. The
rest arrived with Xerxes at Sardis."
10
The rest of the Persian army remained in Thessaly under
the command of Mardonius, and for a year he maintained an
aggressive compaign against the Greeks. Finally, he was de-
feated and killed in a pitched battle at Platsea (479 B.C.), and
on the same day the Persian fleet and a land army met with
joint disaster under the shadow of Mount Mycale on the Asiatic
mainland, between Ephesus and Miletus. The Persian ships,
being in fear of the Greeks, had been drawn up on shore and
a wall built about them; but the Greeks disembarked and
stormed this enclosure. They then sailed to the Hellespont
to destroy what was left of the bridge of boats, so that later
the Persian fugitives, retreating from Plataea, had to cross
by shipping at the Bosphorus, and did so with difficulty.
Encouraged by these disasters of the imperial power, says
Herodotus, the Ionian cities in Asia began for a second time
to r^;olt against the Persians.
Vith this the ninth book of the History of Herodotus comes
V) an end. He was born about 484 B.C., so that at the time
of the battle of Plataea he was a child of five years old. Much
THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 289
of the substance of his story was gathered by him from actors
in, and eye-witnesses of, the great events he relates. The war
still dragged on for a long time; the Greeks supported a re-
bellion against Persian rule in Egypt, and tried unsuccessfully
to take Cyprus ; it did not end until about 449 B.C. Then the
Greek coasts of Asia Minor and the Greek cities in the Black
Sea remained generally free, but Cyprus and Egypt continued
under Persian rule. Herodotus, who had been born a Persian
subject in the Ionian city of Halicarnassus, was five and thirty
years old by that time, and he must have taken an early op-
portunity after this peace of visiting Babylon and Persia. He
probably went to Athens, with his History ready to recite,
about 438 B.C.
The idea of a great union of Greece for aggression against
Persia was not altogether strange to Herodotus. Some of his
readers suspect him of writing to enforce it. It was certainly
in the air at that time. He describes Aristagoras, the son-in-
law of Histiseus, as showing the Spartans a a tablet of bronze
on which was engraved a map of the whole earth with all the
seas and rivers." He makes Aristagoras say: "These Bar-
barians are not valiant in fight. You, on the other hand, have
now attained to the utmost skill in war. They fight with bows
and arrows and a short spear: they go into battle wearing
trousers and having caps on their heads. You have perfected
your weapons and discipline. They are easily to be conquered.
Not all the other nations of the world have what they possess ;
gold, silver, bronze, embroidered garments, beasts and slaves;
all this you might have for yourselves, if you so desired."
It was a hundred years before these suggestions bore fruit.
Xerxes was murdered in his palace about 465 B.C., and there-
after Persia made no further attempts at conquest in Europe.
We have no such knowledge of the things that were happening
in the empire of the Great King as we have of the occurrences
in the little states of Central Greece. Greece had suddenly be-
gun to produce literature, and put itself upon record as no other
nation had ever done hitherto. After 479 B.C. (Platsea) the
spirit seems to have gone out o the government of the Medes
and Persians. The empire of the Great King enters upon a
period of decay. An Artaxerxes, a second Xerxes, a second
Darius, pass across the stage; there are rebellions in
Egypt and Syria; the Medes rebel; a second Arta-
290 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
xerxes and a second Cyrus, his brother, fight for the throne.
This history is even as the history of Babylonia, Assyria, and
Egypt in the older times. It is autocracy reverting to its nor-
mal state of palace crime, blood-stained magnificence, and moral
squalor. But the last-named struggle produced a Greek master-
piece, for this second Cyrus collected an army of Greek mer-
cenaries and marched into Babylonia, and was there killed at
the moment of victory over Artaxerxes II. Thereupon, the
Ten Thousand Greeks, left with no one to employ them, made
a retreat to the coast again (401 B.C.), and this retreat was
immortalized in a book, one of the first of personal war books,
the Anabasis, by their leader Xenophon.
Murders, revolts, chastisements, disasters, cunning alliances,
and base betrayals, and no Herodotus to record them. Such is
the texture of Persian history. An Artaxerxes III, covered
with blood, flourishes dimly for a time. "Artaxerxes III is
said to have been murdered by Bagoas, who places Arses, the
youngest of the king's sons, on the throne only to slay him
in turn when he seemed to be contemplating independent ac-
tion." l So it goes on.
Athens, prospering for a time after the Persian repulse, was
smitten by the plague in which Pericles, its greatest ruler, died
(428 B.C.). But, as a noteworthy fact amidst these confusions,
the Ten Thousand of Xenophon were scattering now among
the Greek cities, repeating from their own experience the
declaration of Aristagoras that the Persian empire was a rich
confusion which it would be very easy for resolute men to
conquer.
1 Winckler, in Helmolt's Universal History.
XXII
GREEK THOUGHT IN RELATION TO HUMAN
SOCIETY
1. The Athens of Pericles. 2. Socrates. 3. Plato and
the Academy. 4. Aristotle and the Lyceum. 5. Phi-
losophy becomes Unworldly. 6. The Quality and Limita-
tions of Greek Thought.
GREEK history for the next forty years after Platsea and
Mycale is a story of comparative peace and tranquillity.
There were wars, but they were not intense wars. For
a little while in Athens, for a section of the prosperous, there
was leisure and opportunity. And by a combination of acci-
dents and through the character of a small group of people,
this leisure and opportunity produced the most memorable re-
sults. Much beautiful literature was produced; the plastic
arts flourished, and the foundations of modern science,
already laid by the earlier philosophers of the Ionian Greek
cities, were consolidated. Then, after an interlude of fifty odd
years, the long-smouldering hostility between Athens and
Sparta broke out into a fierce and exhausting war, which sapped
at last the vitality of this creative movement.
This war is known in history as the Peloponnesian War ; it
went on for nearly thirty years, and wasted all the power of
Greece. At first Athens was in the ascendant, then Sparta.
Then arose Thebes, a city not fifty miles from Athens, to over-
shadow Sparta. Once more Athens flared into importance as
the head of a confederation. It is a story of narrow rivalries
and inexplicable hatreds that would have vanished long ago out
of the memories of men, were it not that it is recorded and
reflected in a great literature.
Through all this time Persia appears and reappears as the
ally first of this league and then of that. About the middle of
291
292 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the fourth century B.C., Greece becomes aware of a new in-
fluence in its affairs, that of Philip, King of Macedonia. Mace-
donia does, indeed, arise in the background of this incurably
divided Greece, as the Medes and Persians arose behind the
Chaldean Empire. A time comes when the Greek mind turns
round, so to speak, from its disputes, and stares in one united
dismay at the Macedonian.
Planless and murderous squabbles are still planless and mur-
derous squabbles even though Thucydides tells the story, even
though the great beginnings of a new civilization are wrecked
by their disorders ; and in this general outline we can give
no space at all to the particulars of these internecine feuds, to
the fights and flights that sent first this Greek city and then
that up to the sky in flames. Upon a one-foot globe Greece
becomes a speck almost too small to recognize; and in a short
history of mankind, all this century and more of dissension
between the days of Salamis and Plataea and the rise of King
Philip shrinks to a little, almost inaudible clash of disputa-
tion, to a mere note upon the swift passing of opportunity
for nations as for men.
But what does not shrink into insignificance, because it has
entered into the intellectual process of all subsequent nations,
because it is inseparably a part of our mental foundation, is
the literature that Greece produced during such patches and
gleams of tranquillity and security as these times afforded her.
Says Professor Gilbert Murray : l
"Their outer political history, indeed, like that of all other
nations, is filled with war and diplomacy, with cruelty and de-
ceit. It is the inner history, the history of thought and feeling
and character, that is so grand. They had some difficulties to
contend with which are now almost out of our path. They had
practically no experience, but were doing everything for the
first time; they were utterly weak in material resources, and
their emotions, their 'desires and fears and rages/ were prob-
ably wilder and fiercer than ours. Yet they produced the Athens
of Pericles and of Plato."
This remarkable culmination of the long-gathering creative
power of the Greek mind, which for three and twenty centuries
has been to men of intelligence a guiding and inspiring beacon
out of the past, flared up after the battles of Marathon and
1 Ancient Greek Literature, by Gilbert Murray ( Heinemann, 1911).
GREEK THOUGHT 293
Salamis had made Athens free and fearless, and, without any
great excesses of power, predominant in her world. It was
the work of a quite small group of men. A number of her
citizens lived for the better part of a generation under con-
ditions which, in all ages, have disposed men to produce good
and beautiful work ; they were secure, they were free, and they
had pride; and they were without that temptation of appar-
ent and unchallenged power which disposes all of us to inflict
wrongs upon our fellow men. When political life narrowed
down again to the waste and crimes of a fratricidal war with
Sparta, there was so broad and well-fed a flame of intellectual
activity burning that it lasted through all the windy distresses
of this war and beyond the brief lifetime of Alexander the
Great, for a period altogether of more than a hundred years
after the wars began.
Flushed with victory and the sense of freedom fairly won,
the people of Athens did for a time rise towards nobility. Un-
der the guidance of a great demagogue, Pericles, the chief offi-
cial of the Athenian general assembly, and a politician states-
man rather of the calibre of Gladstone or Lincoln in modern
history, they were set to the task of rebuilding their city and
expanding their commerce. For a time they were capable of
following a generous leader generously, and Fate gave them a
generous leader. In Pericles there was mingled in the strang-
est fashion political ability with a real living passion for deep
and high and beautiful things. He kept in power for over
thirty years. He was a man of extraordinary vigour and lib-
erality of mind. He stamped these qualities upon his time.
As Winckler has remarked, the Athenian democracy had for
a time "the face of Pericles." He was sustained by what was
probably a very great and noble friendship. There was a woman
of unusual education, Aspasia, from Miletus, whom he could
not marry because of the law that restricted the citizenship of
Athens to the home-born, but who was in effect his wife. She
played a large part in gathering about him men of unusual
gifts. All the great writers of the time knew her, and sev-
eral have praised her wisdom. Plutarch, it is true, accuses
her of instigating a troublesome and dangerous but finally suc-
cessful war against Samos, but, as he himself shows later, this
was necessitated by the naval hostility of the Samians, which
294 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
threatened the overseas trade of Athens, upon which all the
prosperity of the republic depended.
Men's ambitions are apt to reflect the standards of their in-
timates. Pericles was content, at any rate, to serve as a leader
in Athens rather than to dominate as a tyrant. Alliances were
formed under his guidance, new colonies and trading stations
were established from Italy to the Black Sea ; and the treasures
of the league at Delos were brought to Athens. Convinced of
his security from Persia, Pericles spent the war hoard of the
allies upon the beaut ificat ion of his city. This was an unright-
eous thing to do by our modern standards, but it was not a
base or greedy thing to do. Athens had accomplished the work
of the Delian League, and is not the labourer worthy of his
hire? This sequestration made a time of exceptional oppor-
tunity for architects and artists. The Parthenon of Athens,
whose ruins are still a thing of beauty, was but the crown set
upon the clustering glories of the Athens Pericles rebuilt. Such
sculptures as those of Phidias, Myron, and Polyclitus that still
survive, witness to the artistic quality of the time.
The reader must bear in mind that illuminating remark of
Winckler's, which says that this renascent Athens bore for a
time the face of Pericles. It was the peculiar genius of this
man and of his atmosphere that let loose the genius of men
about him, and attracted men of great intellectual vigour to
Athens. Athens wore his face for a time as one wears a mask,
and then became restless and desired to put him aside. There
was very little that was great and generous about the common
Athenian. We have told of the spirit of one sample voter for
the ostracism of Aristides, and Lloyd (in his Age of Pericles)
declares that the Athenians would not suffer the name of
Miltiades to be mentioned in connection with the battle of
Marathon. The sturdy self-respect of the common voters re-
volted presently against the beautiful buildings rising about
them; against the favours shown to such sculptors as Phidias
over popular worthies in the same line of business; against
the donations made to a mere foreigner like Herodotus of
Halicarnassus ; against the insulting preference of Pericles
for the company and conversation of a Milesian woman. The
public life of Pericles was conspicuously orderly, and that pres-
ently set the man in the street thinking that his private life
must be very corrupt. One gathers that Pericles was "superior"
GREEK THOUGHT 295
in his demeanour; he betrayed at times a contempt for the
citizens he served.
"Pericles acquired not only an elevation of sentiment, and
a loftiness and purity of style far removed from the low ex-
pression of the vulgar, but likewise a gravity of countenance
which relaxed not into laughter, a firm and even tone of voice,
an easy deportment, and a decency of dress which no vehemence
of speaking ever put into disorder. These things, and others
of a like nature, excited admiration in all that saw him. Such
was his conduct, when a vile and abandoned fellow loaded him
a whole day with reproaches and abuse ; he bore it with patience
and silence, and continued in public for the despatch of some
urgent affairs. In the evening he walked softly home, this
impudent wretch following, and insulting him all the way with
the most scurrilous language. And as it was dark when he
came to his own door, he ordered one of his servants to take
a torch and light the man home. The poet Ion, however, says
he was proud and supercilious in conversation, and that there
was a great deal of vanity and contempt of others mixed with
his dignity of manner. . . . He appeared not in the streets
except when he went to the forum or the senate house. He
declined the invitations of his friends, and all social entertain-
ments and recreations; insomuch that in the whole time of his
administration, which was a considerable length, he never went
to sup with any of his friends but once, which was at the mar-
riage of his nephew Euryptolemus, and he stayed there only
until the ceremony of libation was ended. He considered
that the freedom of entertainments takes away all distinction
of office, and that dignity is but little consistent with
familiarity. . . ," 1
There was as yet no gutter journalism to tell the world of
the vileness of the conspicuous and successful; but the com-
mon man, a little out of conceit with himself, found much con-
solation in the art of comedy, which flourished exceedingly. The
writers of comedy satisfied that almost universal craving for
the depreciation of those whose apparent excellence offends
our self-love. They threw dirt steadily and industriously at
Pericles and his friends. Pericles was portrayed in a helmet;
a helmet became him, and it is to be feared he knew as much.
This led to much joy and mirth over the pleasant suggestion
1 Plutarch.
296
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
of a frightfully distorted head, an onion head. The "goings
on" of Aspasia were of course a fruitful vineyard for the in-
ventions of the street. . . .
Dreaming souls, weary of the vulgarities of our time, have
desired to he transferred to the sublime Age of Pericles. But,
plumped down into that Athens, they would have found them-
selves in very much the at-
mosphere of the lower sort of
contemporary music-hall, very
much in the vein of our popu-
lar newspapers; the same hot
blast of braying libel, foul im-
putation, greedy "patri-
otism," and general baseness
would have blown upon them,
the "modern note" would
have pursued them. As the
memories of Platsea and
Salamis faded and the new
buildings grew familiar,
Pericles and the pride of
Athens became more and
more offensive to the homely
humour of the crowd. He
was never ostracized his
prestige with the quieter citi-
zens saved him from that ; but
he was attacked with increas-
1 ing boldness and steadfast-
ness. He lived and died a poor man ; he was perhaps the most
honest of demagogues; but this did not save him from an
abortive prosecution for peculation. Defeated in that, his
enemies resorted to a more devious method ; they began to lop
away his friends.
Eeligious intolerance and moral accusations are the natural
weapons of the envious against the leaders of men. His friend
Damon was ostracized. Phidias was attacked for impiety. On
the shield of the great statue of the goddess Athene, Phidias
had dared to put, among the combatants in a fight between
Greeks and Amazons, portraits of Pericles and himself. Phidias
died in prison. Anaxagoras, a stranger welcomed to Athens
GREEK THOUGHT 297
by Pericles when there were plenty of honest fellows already
there quite willing to satisfy any reasonable curiosities was
saying the strangest things about the sun and stars, and hint-
ing not obscurely that there were no gods, but only one animat-
ing spirit (nous) in the world. 1 The comedy writers suddenly
found they had deep religious feelings that could be profoundly
and even dangerously shocked, and Anaxagoras fled the threat
of a prosecution. Then came the turn of Aspasia. Athens
seemed bent upon deporting her, and Pericles was torn be-
tween the woman who was the soul of his life and the un-
gracious city he had saved, defended, and made more beautiful
and unforgettable than any other city in history. He stood up
to defend Aspasia, he was seized by a storm of very human
emotion, and as he spoke he wept a gleeful thing for the
rabble. His tears saved Aspasia for a time.
The Athenians were content to humiliate Pericles, but he
had served them so long that they were indisposed to do without
him. He had been their leader now for a third of a century.
In 431 B.C. came the war with Sparta. Plutarch accuses
Pericles of bringing it on, because he felt his popularity waned
so fast that a war was needed to make him indispensable.
"And as he himself was become obnoxious to the people upon
Phidias's account, and was afraid of being called in question
for it, he urged on the war, which as yet was uncertain, and
blew up that flame which till then was stifled and suppressed.
By this means he hoped to obviate the accusations that threat-
ened him, and to mitigate the rage of envy, because such was his
dignity and power, that in all important affairs, and in every great
danger, the republic could place its confidence in him alone."
But the war was a slow and dangerous war, and the Athenian
people were impatient. A certain Cleon arose, ambitious to
oust Pericles from his leadership. There was a great clamour
for a swift ending of the war. Cleon set out to be "the man who
won the war." The popular poets got to work in this fashion :
"Thou king of satyrs . . . why boast thy prowess,
Yet shudder at the sound of sharpened swords,
Spite of the flaming Cleon?"
An expedition under the leadership of Pericles was unsuc-
cessful, and Cleon seized the opportunity for a prosecution.
*For an account of his views, see Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy.
Gomperz' Greek Thinkers is also a good book for this section.
298 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Pericles was supended from his command and fined. The story
goes that his oldest son this was not the son of Aspasia, but
of a former wife turned against him, and pursued him with
vile and incredible accusations. This young man was carried
off by the plague. Then the sister of Pericles died, and then
his last legitimate son. When, after the fashion of the time,
he put the funeral garlands on the boy he wept aloud. Presently
he himself took the contagion and died (428 B.C.).
The salient facts of this brief summary will serve to show
how discordant Pericles was with much of the life of his city.
This intellectual and artistic outbreak in Athens was no doubt
favoured by the conditions of the time, but it was also due in
part to the appearance of some very unusual men. It was not
a general movement; it was the movement of a small group of
people exceptionally placed and gifted.
2
Another leading figure in this Athenian movement, a figure
still more out of harmony with the life around him, and quite
as much an original source and stimulant of the enduring great-
ness of his age, was a man called Socrates, a son of a stone-
mason. He was born about sixteen years later than Herodotus,
and he was beginning to be heard of about the time when
Pericles died. He himself wrote nothing, but it was his cus-
tom to talk in public places. There was in those days a great
searching for wisdom going on ; there was a various multitude
of teachers called sophists who reasoned upon truth, beauty, and
right living, and instructed the developing curiosities and im-
aginations of youth. This was so because tnere were no great
priestly schools in Greece. And into these discussions this
man came, a clumsy and slovenly figure, barefooted, gathering
about him a band of admirers and disciples.
His method was profoundly sceptical; he believed that the
only possible virtue was true knowledge ; he would tolerate no
belief, no hope that could not pass the ultimate acid test. For
himself this meant virtue, but for many of his weaker followers
it meant the loss of beliefs and moral habits that would have
restrained their impulses. These weaklings became self-excus-
ing, self-indulging scoundrels. Among his young associates
were Plato, who afterwards immortalized his method in a series
GREEK THOUGHT 299
of philosophical dialogues, and founded the philosophical school
of the Academy, which lasted nine hundred years, Xenophon, of
the Ten Thousand, who described his death, and Isocrates, one
of the wisest of Greek political thinkers; but there were also
Critias, who, when Athens was utterly defeated by Sparta,
was leader among the Thirty Tyrants appointed by the Spartans
to keep the crushed city under; 1 Charmides, who was killed
beside Critias when the Thirty were overthrown ; and Alcibiades,
a brilliant and complex traitor, who did much to lead Athens
into the disastrous expedition against Syracuse which destroyed
her strength, who betrayed her to the Spartans, and who was
at last assassinated while on his way to the Persian court to
contrive mischief against Greece. These latter pupils were not
the only young men of promise whose vulgar faith and patriotism
Socrates destroyed, to leave nothing in its place. His most
inveterate enemy was a certain Anytus, whose son, a devoted
disciple of Socrates, had become a hopeless drunkard. Through
Anytus it was that Socrates was at last prosecuted for "cor-
rupting" the youth of Athens, and condemned to death by drink-
ing a poisonous draught made from hemlock (399 B.C.).
His death is described with great beauty in the dialogue of
Plato called by the name of Phcedo.
3
Plato was born 427 B.C., and he lived for eighty years.
In mental temperament Plato was of an altogether different
*"But it was not only against the lives, properties, and liberties of
Athenian citizens that the Thirty made war. They were not less solicitous
to extinguish the intellectual force and education of the city, a project so
perfectly in harmony both with the sentiment and practice of Sparta,
that they counted on the support of their foreign allies. Among the or-
dinances which they promulgated was one, expressly forbidding any one
'to teach the art of words.' The edict of the Thirty was, in fact, a general
suppression of the higher class of teachers or professors, above the rank of
the elementary (teacher of letters or) grammatist. If such an edict could
have been maintained in force for a generation, combined with the other
mandates of the Thirty the city out of which Sophocles and Euripides
had just died, and in which Plato and Isocrates were in vigorous age, would
have been degraded to the intellectual level of the meanest community in
Greece. It was not uncommon for a Grecian despot to suppress all those
assemblies wherein youths came together' for the purpose of common
training, cither intellectual or gymnastic, as well as the public banquets
and clubs or associations, as being dangerous to his authority, tending to
elevation of courage, and to a consciousness of political rights among the
citizens." Grote's History of Greece.
300 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
type from Socrates. He was a most artistic and delicate writer,
and Socrates could write nothing consecutive. He cared for
beautiful things and Socrates despised them. He was supremely
concerned with the ordering of public affairs and the scheming
of happier human relationships, while Socrates, heedless of heat
and cold and the opinion of his fellow creatures, concentrated
his mind upon a serene disillusionment. Life, said Socrates,
was deception; only the Soul lived. Plato had a very great
affection for this rugged old teacher, he found his method of
the utmost value in disentangling and cleaning up opinions,
and he made him the central figure of his immortal dialogues;
but his own thoughts and disposition turned him altogether
away from the sceptical attitude. In many of the dialogues
the voice is the voice of Socrates, but the thought is the thought
of Plato.
Plato was living in a time of doubt and questioning about
all human relationships. In the great, days of Pericles, be-
fore 450 B.C., there seems to have been a complete satisfaction
in Athens with social and political institutions. Then there
seemed no reason for questioning. Men felt free; the com-
munity prospered; one suffered chiefly from jealousy. The
History of Herodotus displays little or no dissatisfaction with
Athenian political institutions.
But Plato, who was born about the time Herodotus died,
and who grew up in the atmosphere of a disastrous war and
great social distress and confusion, was from the first face to
face with human discord and the misfit of human institutions.
To that challenge his mind responded. One of his earlier
works and his latest are bold and penetrating discussions of
the possible betterment of social relations. Socrates had taught
him to take nothing for granted, not even the common relations
of husband and wife or parent and child. His Republic, the
first of all Utopian books, is a young man's dream of
a city in which human life is arranged according to
a novel and a better plan ; his last unfinished work, the Laws,
is a discussion of the regulation of another such Utopia. There
is much in Plato at which we cannot even glance here, but it
is a landmark in this history, it is a new thing in the develop-
ment of mankind, this appearance of the idea of wilfully and
completely recasting human conditions. So far mankind has
been living by tradition under the fear of the gods. Here is
GREEK THOUGHT 301
a man who says boldly to our race, and as if it were a quite
reasonable and natural thing to say, "Take hold of your lives.
Most of these things that distress you, you can avoid; most of
these things that dominate you, you can overthrow. You can
do as you will with them."
One other thing besides the conflicts of the time perhaps
stimulated the mind of Plato in this direction. In the days of
Pericles Athens had founded many settlements overseas, and
the setting up of these settlements had familiarized men with
the idea that a community need not grow, it could also be made.
Closely associated with Plato was a younger man, who later
also maintained a school in Athens and lived to an even greater
age. This was Isocrates. He was what we should call a pub-
licist, a writer rather than an orator, and his peculiar work was
to develop the idea of Herodotus, the idea of a unification of
Greece against the Persian Empire, as a remedy for the base-
ness and confusion of her politics and the waste and destruc-
tion of her internecine wars. His political horizon was in
some respects broader than Plato's, and in his later years he
looked towards monarchy, and particularly towards the Mace-
donian monarchy of Philip, as a more unifying and broadening
method of government than city democracy. The same drift to
monarchist ideas had occurred in the case of that Xenophon
whose Anabasis we have already mentioned. In his old age
Xenophon wrote the Cyropcedia, a "vindication both theoreti-
cally and practically of absolute monarchy as shown in the
organization of the Persian Empire." *
4
Plato taught in the Academy. To him in his old age came
a certain good-looking youngster from Stagira in Macedonia,
Aristotle, who was the son of the Macedonian king's physician,
and a man with a very different type of mind from that of
the great Athenian. He was naturally sceptical of the imagina-
tive will, and with a great respect for and comprehension of
established fact. Later on, after Plato was dead, he set up
a school at the Lyceum in Athens and taught, criticizing Plato
and Socrates with a certain hardness. When he taught, the
shadow of Alexander the Great lay across the freedom of
1 Mahaffy.
302 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Greece, and he favoured slavery and constitutional kings. He
had previously been the tutor of Alexander for several years
at the court of Philip of Macedon. Intelligent men were
losing heart in those days, their faith in the power of men
to make their own conditions of life was fading. There were
n more Utopias. The rush of events was manifestly too power-
ful for such organized effort as was then practicable between
men of fine intelligence. It was possible to think of recasting
human society when human society was a little city of a few
thousand citizens, but what was happening about them was
something cataclysmal; it was the political recasting of the
whole known world, of the affairs of what even then must have
amounted to something between fifty and a hundred million
people. It was recasting upon a scale no human mind was
yet equipped to grasp. It drove thought back upon the idea
of a vast and implacable Fate. It made men snatch at what-
ever looked stable and unifying. Monarchy, for instance, for
all its manifest vices, was a conceivable government for mil-
lions; it had, to a certain extent, worked; it imposed a ruling
will where it would seem that a collective will was impossible.
This change of the general intellectual mood harmonized with
Aristotle's natural respect for existing fact. If, on the one
hand, it made him approve* of monarchy and slavery and the
subjection of women as reasonable institutions, on the other
hand it made him eager to understand fact and to get some
orderly knowledge of these realities of nature and human nature
that were now so manifestly triumphant over the creative dreams
of the preceding generation. He is terribly sane and luminous,
and terribly wanting in self-sacrificial enthusiasm. He ques-
tions Plato when Plato would exile poets from his Utopia, for
poetry is a power; he directs his energy along a line dia-
metrically opposed to Socrates' depreciation of Anaxagoras.
He anticipates Bacon and the modern scientific movement in his
realization of the importance of ordered knowledge. He set
himself to the task of gathering together and setting down
knowledge. He was the first natural historian. Other men
before him had speculated about the nature of things, but he,
with every young man he could win over to the task, set him-
self to classify and compare things. Plato says in effect : "Let
us take hold of life and remodel it"; this soberer successor:
"Let us first know more of life and meanwhile serve the king."
GREEK THOUGHT 303
It was not so much a contradiction as an immense qualification
of the master.
The peculiar relation of Aristotle to Alexander the Great
enabled him to procure means for his work such as were not
available again for scientific inquiry for long ages. He could
command hundreds of talents (a talent = about 240) for his
expenses. At one time he had at his disposal a thousand men
scattered throughout Asia and Greece, collecting matter for
his natural history. They were, of course, very untrained obser-
vers, collectors of stories rather than observers; but nothing
of the kind had ever been attempted, had even been thought of,
so far as we know, before his time. Political as well as natural
science began. The students of the Lyceum under his direc-
tion made an analysis of 158 political constitutions. . . .
This was the first gleam of organized science in the world.
The early death of Alexander and the breaking up of his empire
almost before it had begun, put an end to endowments on this
scale for 2,000 years. Only in Egypt at the Alexandria Museum
did any scientific research continue, and that only for a few
generations. Of that we will presently tell. Fifty years
after Aristotle's death the Lyceum had already dwindled to
insignificance.
5
The general drift of thought in the concluding years of the
fourth century B.C. was not with Aristotle, nor towards the
laborious and necessary accumulation of ordered knowledge.
It is possible that without his endowments from the king he
would have made but a small figure in intellectual history.
Through them he was able to give his splendid intelligence sub-
stance and effect. The ordinary man prefers easy ways so
long as they may be followed, and is almost wilfully heedless
whether they end at last in a cul-de-sac. Finding the stream
of events too powerful to control at once, the generality of
philosophical teachers drifted in those days from the scheming
of model cities and the planning of new ways of living into the
elaboration of beautiful and consoling systems of evasion.
Perhaps that is putting things coarsely and unjustly. But
let Professor Gilbert Murray speak upon this matter. 1
* Ancient Greek Literature,
304 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
"The Cynics cared only for virtue and the relation of the
soul to God; the world and its learning and its honours were
as dross to them. The Stoics and Epicureans, so far apart at
first sight, were very similar in their ultimate aim. What they
really cared ahout was ethics the practical question how a
man should order his life. Both, indeed, gave themselves to some
science the Epicureans to physics, the Stoics to logic and
rhetoric but only as a means to an end. The Stoic tried to
win men's hearts and convictions by sheer subtlety of abstract
argument and dazzling sublimity of thought and expression.
The Epicurean was determined to make Humanity go its way
without cringing to capricious gods and without sacrificing
Free-Will. He condensed his gospel into four maxims: "God
is not to be feared ; Death cannot be felt ; the Good can be won ;
all that we dread can be borne and conquered."
And meanwhile the stream of events flowed on, with a
reciprocal indifference to philosophy.
6
If the Greek classics are to be read with any benefit by mod-
ern men, they must be read as the work of men like ourselves.
Kegard must be had to their traditions, their opportunities, and
their limitations. There is a disposition to exaggeration in all
human admiration; most of our classical texts are very much
mangled, and all were originally the work of human beings in
difficulties, living in a time of such darkness and narrowness
of outlook as makes our own age by comparison a period of
dazzling illumination. What we shall lose in reverence by this
familiar treatment, we shall gain in sympathy for that group
of troubled, uncertain, and very modern minds. The Athenian
writers were, indeed, the first of modern men. They were
discussing questions that we still discuss ; they began to struggle
with the great problems that confront us to-day. Their writ-
ings are our dawn. 1
1 Jung in his Psychology of the Unconscious is very good in his Chapter
I on the differences between ancient (pre- Athenian) thought and modern
thought. The former he calls Undirected Thinking, the latter Directed
Thinking. The former was a thinking in images, akin to dreaming; the
latter a thinking in words. Science is an organization of directed thinking.
The Antique spirit (before the Greek thinkers i.e.] created not science
but mythology. The ancient human world was a world of subjective
fantasies like the world of children and uneducated young people to-day,
GREEK THOUGHT 305
They began an inquiry, and they arrived at no solutions.
We cannot pretend to-day that we have arrived at solutions
to most of the questions they asked. The mind of the Hebrews,
as we have already shown, awoke suddenly to the endless
miseries and disorders of life, saw that these miseries and
disorders were largely due to the lawless acts of men, and con-
cluded that salvation could come only through subduing our-
selves to the service of the one God who rules heaven and
earth. The Greek, rising to the same perception, was not pre-
pared with the same idea of a patriarchal deity; he lived in a
world in which there was not God but the gods; if perhaps
he felt that the gods themselves were limited, then he thought
of Fate behind them, cold and impersonal. So he put his
problem in the form of an inquiry as to what was right living,
without any definite correlation of the right-living man with
the will of God. ... To us, looking at the matter from a
standpoint purely historical, the common problem can now
be presented in a form that, for the purposes of history, covers
both the Hebrew and Greek way of putting it. We have seen
our kind rising out of the unconsciousness of animals to a
continuing racial self -consciousness, realizing the unhappiness
of its wild diversity of aims, realizing the inevitable tragedy of
individual self-seeking, and feeling its way blindly towards some
linking and subordinating idea to save it from the pains and
accidents of mere individuality. The gods, the god-king, the
idea of the tribe, the idea of the city ; here are ideas that have
claimed and held for a time the devotion of men, ideas in which
they have a little lost their individual selfishness and escaped
to the realization of a more enduring life. Yet, as our wars
and disasters prove, none of these greater ideas have yet been
great enough. The gods have failed to protect, the tribe has
proved itself vile and cruel, the city ostracized one's best and
truest friends, the god-king made a beast of himself. . . .
As we read over the speculative literature of this great period
and like the world of savages and dreams. Infantile thought and dreams
are a re-echo of prehistoric and savage methods of thinking. Myths,
says Jung, are the mass dreams of peoples, and dreams the myths of in-
dividuals. We have already directed the reader's attention to the re-
semblance of the early gods of civilization to the fantasies of children.
The work of hard and disciplined thinking by means of carefully analyzed
words and statements which was begun by the Greek thinkers and re-
sumed by the scholastic philosophers of whom we shall tell in the middle
ages, was a necessary preliminary to the development of modern science.
30G THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
of the Greeks, we realize three barriers set about the Greek
mind, from which it rarely escaped, but from which we now
perhaps are beginning to escape.
The first of these limitations was the obsession of the Greek
mind by the idea of the city as the ultimate state. In a world
in which empire had followed empire, each greater than its pre-
decessor, in a world through which men and ideas drove ever
more loosely and freely, in a world visibly unifying even then,
the Greeks, because of their peculiar physical and political cir-
cumstances, were still dreaming impossibly of a compact little
city state, impervious to outer influences, valiantly secure
against the whole world. Plato's estimate of the number of citi-
zens in a perfect state varied between 1,000 (the Republic) and
5,040 (the Laws) citizens. 1 This state was to go to war and
hold its own against other cities of the same size. And this
was not a couple of generations after the hosts of Xerxes had
crossed the Hellespont !
Perhaps these Greeks thought the day of world empires had
passed for ever, whereas it was only beginning. At the utmost
their minds reached out to alliances and leagues. There must
have been men at the court of Artaxerxes thinking far away
beyond these little ideas of the rocky creek, the island, and the
mountain-encircled valley. But the need for unification against
the greater powers that moved outside the Greek-speaking world,
the Greek mind disregarded wilfully. These outsiders were
barbarians, not to be needlessly thought about ; they were barred
out now from Greece for ever. One took Persian money ; every-
body took Persian money; what did it matter? Or one en-
listed for a time in their armies (as Xenophon did) and hoped
for his luck with a rich prisoner. Athens took sides in Egyptian
affairs, and carried on minor wars with Persia, but there was
no conception of a common policy or a common future for
Greece. . . . Until at last a voice in Athens began to shout
"Macedonia !" to clamour like a watch-dog, "Macedonia !" This
was the voice of the orator and demagogue, Demosthenes, hurl-
ing warnings and threats and denunciations at King Philip
1 "For the proper administration of justice and for . the distribution of
authority it is necessary that the citizens be acquainted with each other's
characters, so that, where this cannot be, much mischief ensues, both in
the use of authority and in the administration of justice; for it is not
just to decide arbitrarily, as must be the case with excessive population."
Aristotle: Politics.
GREEK THOUGHT 307
of Macedon, who had learnt his politics not only from Plato
and Aristotle, but also from Isocrates and Xenophon, and from
Babylon and Susa, and who was preparing quietly, ably, and
steadfastly to dominate all Greece, and through Greece to con-
quer the known world. . . .
There was a second thing that cramped the Greek mind, the
institution of domestic slavery. Slavery was implicit in Greek
life ; men could conceive of neither comfort nor dignity without
it. But slavery shuts off one's sympathy not only from a class
of one's fellow subjects ; it puts the slave-owner into a class and
organization against all stranger men. One is of an elect tribe.
Plato, carried b}^ his clear reason and the noble sanity of his
spirit beyond the things of the present, would have abolished
slavery; much popular feeling and the ~New Comedy were
against it; the Stoics and Epicureans, many of whom were
slaves, condemned it as unnatural, but finding it too strong to
upset, decided that it did not affect the soul and might be
ignored. With the wise there was no bound or free. To the
matter-of-fact Aristotle, and probably to most practical men,
its abolition was inconceivable. So they declared that there
were in the world men "naturally slaves." ...
Finally, the thought of the Greeks was hampered by a want
of knowledge that is almost inconceivable to us to-day. They
had no knowledge of the past of mankind at all; at best they
had a few shrewd guesses. They had no knowledge of geography
beyond the range of the Mediterranean basin and the frontiers
of Persia. We know far more to-day of what was going on
in Susa, Persepolis, Babylon, and Memphis in the time of
Pericles than he did. Their astronomical ideas were still in the
state of rudimentary speculations. Anaxagoras, greatly daring,
thought the sun and moon were vast globes, so vast that the sun
was probably "as big as all the Peloponnesus." Their ideas
in physics and chemistry were the results of profound cogita-
tion; it is wonderful that they did guess at atomic structure.
One has to remember their extraordinary poverty in the matter
of experimental apparatus. They had coloured glass for orna-
ment, but no white glass ; no accurate means of measuring the
minor intervals of time, no really efficient numerical notation,
no very accurate scales, no rudiments of telescope or microscope.
A modern scientific man dumped down in the Athens of Pericles
would have found the utmost difficulty in demonstrating the
308 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
elements of his knowledge, however crudely, to the men he would
have found there. He would have had to rig up the simplest
apparatus under every disadvantage, while Socrates pointed
out the absurdity of seeking Truth with pieces of wood and
string and metal such as small boys use for fishing. And our
professor of science would also have been in constant danger
of a prosecution for impiety.
Our world to-day draws upon relatively immense accumula-
tions of knowledge of fact. In the age of Pericles scarcely the
first stone of our comparatively tremendous cairn of things
recorded and proved had been put in place. When we reflect
upon this difference, then it ceases to be remarkable that the
Greeks, with all their aptitude for political speculation, were
blind to the insecurities of their civilization from without and
from within, to the necessity for effective unification, to the
swift rush of events that was to end for long ages these first
brief freedoms of the human mind.
It is not in the results it achieved, but in the attempts it
made, that the true value for us of this group of Greek talkers
and writers lies. It is not that they answered questions, but
that they dared to ask them. Never before had man challenged
his world and the way of life to which he found his birth had
brought him. Never had he said before that he could alter his
conditions. Tradition and a seeming necessity had held him
to life as he had found it grown up about his tribe since time
immemorial. Hitherto he had taken the world as children still
take the homes and habits in which they have been reared.
So in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. we perceive, most
plainly in Judea and in Athens, but by no means confined to
those centres, the beginnings of a moral and an intellectual
process in mankind, an appeal to righteousness and an appeal
to the truth from the passions and confusions and immediate
appearances of existence. It is like the dawn of the sense of
responsibility in a youth,, who suddenly discovers that life is
neither easy nor aimless. Mankind is growing up. The rest
of history for three and twenty centuries is threaded with the
spreading out and development and interaction and the clearer
and more effective statement of these main leading ideas. Slowly
more and more men apprehend the reality of human brother-
hood, the needlessness of wars and cruelties and* oppression,
the possibilities of a common purpose for the whole of our
GREEK THOUGHT 309
kind. In every generation thereafter there is the evidence
of men seeking for that better order to which they feel our
world must come. But everywhere and wherever in any man
the great constructive ideas have taken hold, the hot greeds,
the jealousies, the suspicions and impatience that are in the
nature of every one of us, war 'against the struggle towards
greater and broader purposes. The last twenty-three centimes
of history are like the efforts of some impulsive, hasty immortal
to think clearly and live rightly. Blunder follows blunder;
promising beginnings end in grotesque disappointments ; streams
of living water are poisoned by the cup that conveys them to
the thirsty lips of mankind. But the hope of men rises again
at last after every disaster. . . .
We pass on now to the story of one futile commencement,
one glorious shattered beginning of human unity. There was
in Alexander the Great knowledge and imagination, power and
opportunity, folly, egotism, detestable vulgarity, and an im-
mense promise broken by the accident of his early death while
men were still dazzled by its immensity.
XXIII
THE CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
1. Philip of Macedonia. 2. The Murder of King Philip.
3. Alexander's First Conquests. ,4. The Wanderings of
Alexander. 5. Was Alexander Indeed Great? 6.' The
Successors of Alexander. 7. Pergamum a Refuge of Cul-
ture. 8. Alexander as a Portent of World Unity.
flr^HE true hero of the story of Alexander is not so much
Alexander as his father Philip. The author of a piece
does not shine in the limelight as the actor does, and
it was Philip who planned much of the greatness that his son
achieved, who laid the foundations and forged the tools, who
had indeed already begun the Persian expedition at the time
of his death. Philip, beyond doubting, was one of the greatest
monarchs the world has ever seen ; he was a man of the utmost
intelligence and ability, and his range of ideas was vastly
beyond the scope of his time. He made Aristotle his friend;
he must have discussed with him those schemes for the organ-
ization of real knowledge which the philosopher was to realize
later through Alexander's endowments. Philip, so far as we
can judge, seems to have been Aristotle's "Prince"; to him
Aristotle turned as men turn only to those whom they admire
and trust. To Philip also Isocrates appealed as the great leader
who should unify and ennoble the chaotic public life of Greece.
In many books it is stated that Philip was a man of in-
credible cynicism and of uncontrolled lusts. It is true that at
feasts, like all the Macedonians of his time, he was a hard
drinker and sometimes drunken it was probably considered
unamiable not to drink excessively at feasts; but of the other
accusations there is no real proof, and for evidence we have
only the railings of such antagonists as Demosthenes, the
Athenian demagogue and orator, a man of reckless rhetoric.
310
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
31}
The quotation of a phrase or so will serve to show to what the
patriotic anger of Demosthenes could bring him. In one of
the Philippics, as his denunciations of Philip are called, he
gives vent in this style:
"Philip a man who not only is no Greek, and no way
akin to the Greeks, but is not even a barbarian from a re-
spectable country- no, a pestilent fellow of Macedon, a country
from which we never
get even a decent
slave." And so on and
so on. We know, as a
matter of fact, that
the Macedonians were
an Aryan people very
closely akin to the
Greeks, and that
Philip was probably
the best educated man
of his time. This was
the spirit in which the
adverse accounts of
Philip were written.
When Philip be-
came king of Mace-
donia in 359 B.C., his
country was a little
country without a seaport or industries or any considerable
city. It had a peasant population, Greek almost in lan-
guage and ready to be Greek in sympathies, but more purely
Nordic in blood than any people to the south of it. Philip
made this little barbaric state into a great one; he cre-
ated the most efficient military organization the world
had so far seen, and he had brought most of Greece into one
confederacy under his leadership at the time of his death. And
his extraordinary quality, his power of thinking out beyond
the current ideas of his time, is shown not so much in those
matters as in the care with which he had his son trained to carry
on the policy he had created. He is one of the few monarchs
in history who cared for his successor. Alexander was, as few
other monarchs have ever been, a specially educated king;
he was educated for empire. Aristotle was but one of the sev-
312 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
eral able tutors his father chose for him. Philip confided his
policy to him, and entrusted him with commands and authority
by the time he was sixteen. He commanded the cavalry at
ChaBronea under his father's eye. He was nursed into power
generously and unsuspiciously.
To any one who reads his life with care it is evident that
Alexander started with an equipment of training and ideas
of unprecedented value. As he got beyond the wisdom of his
upbringing he began to blunder and misbehave sometimes with
a dreadful folly. The defects of his character had triumphed
over his upbringing long before he died.
Philip was a king after the old pattern, a leader-king, first
among his peers, of the ancient Nordic Aryan type. The army
he found in Macedonia consisted of a general foot levy and
a noble equestrian order called the "companions." The people
were farmers and hunters and somewhat drunken in their
habits, but ready for discipline and good fighting stuff. And
if the people were homely, the government was intelligent and
alert. For some generations the court language had been Attic
( Athenian) Greek, and the court had been sufficiently civi-
lized to shelter and entertain such great figures as Euripides,
who died there in 406 B.C., and Zeuxis the artist. Moreover,
Philip, before his accession, had spent some years as a hostage
in Greece. He had had as good an education as Greece could
give at that time. He was, therefore, quite familiar with what
we may call the idea of Isocrates the idea of a great union
of the Greek states in Europe to dominate the Eastern world;
and he knew, too, how incapable was the Athenian democracy,
because of its constitution and tradition, of taking the op-
portunity that lay before it. For it was an opportunity that
would have to be shared. To the Athenians or the Spartans
it would mean letting in a "lot of foreigners" to the advantages
of citizenship. It would mean lowering themselves to the level
of equality and fellowship with Macedonians a people from
whom "we" do not get "even a decent slave."
There was no way to secure unanimity among the Greeks
for the contemplated enterprise except by some revolutionary
political action. It was no love of peace that kept the Greeks
from such an adventure; it was their political divisions. The
resources of the several states were exhausted in a series of
internecine wars wars arising out of the merest excuses and
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
SIS
fanned by oratorical wind. The ploughing of certain sacred
lands near Delphi by the Phocians was, for example, the pre-
text for a sanguinary Sacred War.
Philip's first years of kingship were devoted to the discipline
of his army. Hitherto most of the main battle fighting in the
world had been done by footmen in formation. In the very
ancient Sumerian battle-pieces we see spearmen in close order
forming the main battle, just as they did in the Zulu armies
of the nineteenth century; the Greek troops of Philip's time
were still fighting in that same style ; the Theban phalanx was
a mass of infantry holding spears, the hinder ranks thrusting
their longer spears between the front-line men. Such a forma-
tion went through anything less disciplined that opposed it.
314 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY '
Mounted archers could, of course, inflict considerable losses
on such a mass of men, and accordingly, as the horse came into
warfare, horsemen appeared on either side as an accessory to
this main battle. The reader must remember that the horse
did not come into very effective use in western war until the
rise of the Assyrians, and then at first only as a chariot horse.
The chariots drove full tilt at the infantry mass and tried to
break it. Unless its discipline was very solid they succeeded.
The Homeric fighting is chariot fighting. It is not until the
last thousand years B.C. that we begin to find mounted soldiers,
as distinct from charioteers, playing a part in warfare. At first
they appear to have fought in a scattered fashion, each man
doing his personal feats. So the Lydians fought against Cyrus.
It was Philip who seems to have created charging cavalry.
He caused his "companions" to drill for a massed charge.
And also he strengthened his phalanx by giving the rear men
longer spears than had been used hitherto, and so deepening
its mass. The Macedonian phalanx was merely a more solid
version of the Theban phalanx. None of these massed in-
fantry formations was flexible enough to stand a flank or rear
attack. They had very slight manoeuvring power. Both
Philip's and his son's victories followed, therefore, with varia-
tions, one general scheme of co-operation between these two
arms. The phalanx advanced in the centre and held the
enemy's main body; on one wing or the other the cavalry
charges swept away the enemy cavalry, and then swooped round
upon the flank and rear of the enemy phalanx, the front, of
which the Macedonian phalanx was already smiting. The
enemy main battle then broke and was massacred. As Alex-
ander's military experience grew, he also added a use of cata-
pults in the field, big stone-throwing affairs, to break up
the enemy infantry. Before his time catapults had been
used in sieges, but never in battles. He invented "artillery
preparation."
With the weapon of his new army in his hand, Philip first
turned his attention to the north of Macedonia. He carried
expeditions into Illyria and as far as the Danube; he also
spread his power along the coast as far as the Hellespont. He
secured possession of a port, Amphipolis, and certain gold
mines adjacent. After several Thracian expeditions he turned
southward in good earnest. He took up the cause of the Delphic
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 315
ainphictyony against those sacrilegious Phocians, and so ap-
peared as the champion of Hellenic religion.
There was a strong party of Greeks, it must be understood,
a Pan-Hellenic party, in favour of the Greek headship of Philip.
The chief writer of this Pan-Hellenic movement was Isocrates.
Athens, on the other hand, was the head and front of the op-
position to Philip, and Athens was in open sympathy with
Persia, even sending emissaries to the Great King to warn
him of the danger to him of a united Greece. The comings
and goings of twelve years cannot he related here. In 338 B.C.
the long struggle between division and pan-Hellenism came to a
decisive issue, and at the battle of Chseronea Philip inflicted
a crushing defeat upon Athens and her allies. He gave Athens
peace upon astonishingly generous terms; he displayed him-
self steadfastly resolved to propitiate and favour that im-
placable city; and in 338 B.C. a congress of Greek states recog-
nized him as captain-general for the war against Persia.
He was now a man of forty-seven. It seemed as though the
world lay at his feet. He had made his little country into
the leading state in a great Grseco-Macedonian confederacy.
That unification was to be the prelude to a still greater one,
the unification of the Western world with the Persian empire
into one world state of all known peoples. Who can doubt he
had that dream ? The writings of Isocrates convince us that
he had it. Who can deny that he might have realized it ? He
had a reasonable hope of living for perhaps another quarter
century of activity. In 336 B.C. his advanced guard crossed
into Asia. . . .
But he never followed with his main force. He was
assassinated.
2
It is necessary now to .tell something of the domestic life of
King Philip. The lives of both Philip and his son were per-
vaded by the personality of a restless and evil woman, Olympias,
the mother of Alexander.
She was the daughter of the king of Epirus, a country to
the west of Macedonia, and, like Macedonia, a semi-Greek land.
She met Philip, or was thrown in his way, at some religious
gathering in Samothrace. Plutarch declares the marriage was
316
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
a love-match, and there seems to be at least this much in the
charges against Philip that, like many energetic and imaginative
men, he was prone to impatient love impulses. He married
her when he was already a king, and Alexander was born
to him three years later.
It was not long before Olympias and Philip were bitterly
estranged. She was jealous of him, but there was another
and graver source of trouble in her
passion for religious mysteries. We
have already noted that beneath the
fine and restrained Nordic religion
of the Greeks the land abounded
with religious cults of a darker and
more ancient kind, aboriginal cults
with secret initiations, orgiastic
celebrations, and often with cruel
and obscene rites. These religions
of the shadows, these practices of
the women and peasants and slaves,
gave Greece her Orphic, Dionysic,
and Demeter cults ; they have
lurked in the tradition of Europe
down almost to our own times. The
witchcraft of the Middle Ages, with
its resort to the blood of babes,
scraps of executed criminals, incan-
tations and magic circles, seems to have been little else than
the lingering vestiges of these solemnities of the dark whites.
In these matters Olympias was an expert and an enthusiast,
and Plutarch mentions that she achieved considerable celebrity
by use of tame serpents in these pious exercises. The
snakes invaded her domestic apartments, and history is not
clear whether Philip found in them matter for exasperation
or religious awe. These occupations of his wife must have
been a serious inconvenience to Philip, for the Macedonian
people were still in that sturdy stage of social development in
which neither enthusiastic religiosity nor uncontrollable wives
are admired.
The evidence of a bitter hostility between mother and father
peeps out in many little things in the histories. She was evi-
dently jealous of Philip's conquests ; she hated his fame. There
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 817
are many signs that Olympias did her best to set her son against
his father and attach him wholly to herself. A story survives
(in Plutarch's Life) that "whenever news was brought of
Philip's victories, the capture of a city or the winning of
some great battle, he never seemed greatly rejoiced to hear
it ; on the contrary he used to say to his play-fellows : 'Father
will get everything in advance, boys; he won't leave any
great task for me to share with you.' " . . .
It is not a natural thing for a boy to envy his father in
this fashion without some inspiration. That sentence sounds
like an echo.
We have already pointed out how manifest it is that Philip
planned the succession of Alexander, and how eager he was
to thrust fame and power into the boy's hands. He was think-
ing of the political structure he was building but the mother
was thinking of the glory and pride of that wonderful lady,
Olympias. She masked her hatred of her husband under the
cloak of a mother's solicitude for her son's future. When in
337 B.C. Philip, after the fashion of kings in those days, mar-
ried a second wife who was a native Macedonian, Cleopatra, "of
whom he was passionately enamoured," Olympias made much
trouble.
Plutarch tells of a pitiful scene that occurred at Philip's
marriage to Cleopatra. There was much drinking of wine at
the banquet, and Attains, the father of the bride, being "in-
toxicated with liquor," betrayed the general hostility to
Olympias and Epirus by saying he hoped there would be a
child by the marriage to give them a truly Macedonian heir.
Whereupon Alexander, taut for such an insult, cried out,
"What then am I?" and hurled his cup at Attalus. Philip,
enraged, stood up and, says Plutarch, drew his sword, only to
stumble and fall. Alexander, blind with rage and jealousy,
taunted and insulted his father.
"Macedonians," he said. "See there the general who would
go from Europe to Asia ! Why ! he cannot get from one table
to another!"
How that scene lives still, the sprawl, the flushed faces, the
angry voice of the boy! Next day Alexander departed with
his mother and Philip did nothing to restrain them. Olympias
went home to Epirus; Alexander departed to Illyria, Thence
Philip persuaded him to return.
318 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Fresh trouble arose. Alexander had a brother of weak inr
tellect, Aridseus, whom the Persian governor of Caria sought
as a son-in-law. " Alexanders friends and his mother now
infused notions into him again, though perfectly groundless,
that by so noble a match, and the support consequent upon it,
Philip designed the crown for Aridseus, Alexander, in the
uneasiness these suspicions gave him, sent one Thessalus, a
player, into Caria, to desire the grandee to pass by Aridseus,
who was of spurious birth, and deficient in point of under-
standing, and to take the lawful heir to the crown into his
alliance. Pixcdarus was infinitely more pleased with this pro-
posal. But Philip no sooner had intelligence of it, than he
went to Alexander's apartment, taking along with him Philotas,
the son of Parmenio, one of his most intimate friends and
companions, and, in his presence, reproached him with his
degeneracy and meanness of spirit, in thinking of being son-
in-law to a man of Caria, one of the slaves of a barbarian king.
At the same time he wrote to the Corinthians, insisting that they
should send Thessalus to him in chains. Harpalus and
Niarchus, Phrygius and Ptolemy, some of the other companions
of the prince, he banished. But Alexander afterwards recalled
them, and treated them with great distinction."
There is something very touching in this story of the father
pleading with the son he manifestly loved, and baffled by the
web of mean suggestion which had been spun about the boy's
imagination.
It was at the marriage of his daughter to her uncle, the king
of Epirus and the brother of Olympias, that Philip was stabbed.
He was walking in a procession into the theatre unarmed, in
a white robe, and he was cut down by one of his bodyguard.
The murderer had a horse waiting, and would have got away,
but the foot of his horse caught in a wild vine and he was
thrown from the saddle by the stumble and slain by his
pursuers. . . .
So at the age of twenty Alexander was at the end of
his anxiety about the succession, and established king in
Macedonia.
Olympias then reappeared in Macedonia, a woman proudly
vindicated. It is said that she insisted upon paying the same
funeral honours to the memory of the murderer as to Philip.
In Greece there were great rejoicings over this auspicious
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 319
event, and Demosthenes, when he had the news, although it
was but seven days after the death of his own daughter, went
into the public assembly at Athens in gay attire wearing a
chaplet.
Whatever Olympias may have done about her husband's
assassin, history does not doubt about her treatment of her sup-
planter, Cleopatra. So soon as Alexander was out of the way
and a revolt of the hillmen in the north called at once for
his attention Cleopatra's newly born child was killed in its
mother's arms, and Cleopatra no doubt after a little taunting
was then strangled. These excesses of womanly feeling are
said to -have shocked Alexander, but they did not prevent him
from leaving his mother in a position of considerable authority
in Macedonia. She wrote letters to him upon religious and
political questions, and he showed a dutiful disposition in send-
ing her always a large share of the plunder he made.
These stories have to be told because history cannot be un-
derstood without them. Here was the great world of men be-
tween India and the Adriatic ready for union, ready as it had
never been before for a unifying control. Here was the wide
order of the Persian empire with its roads, its posts, its gen-
eral peace and prosperity, ripe for the fertilizing influence of
the Greek mind. And these stories display the quality of
the human beings to whom those great opportunities came.
Here was this Philip who was a very great and noble man, and
yet he was drunken, he could keep no order in his household.
Here was Alexander in many ways gifted above any man
of his time, and he was vain, suspicious, and passionate, with
a mind set awry by his mother.
We are : beginning to understand something of what the
world might be, something of what our race might become,
Were it not for our still raw humanity. It is barely a matter
of seventy generations between ourselves and Alexander ; and
between ourselves and the savage hunters, our ancestors, who
charred their food in the embers or ate it raw, intervene some
four or five hundred generations. There is not much scope for
the modification of a species in four or five hundred gen-
erations. Make men and women only sufficiently jealous or
320 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
fearful or drunken or angry, and the hot red eyes of the cave-
men will glare out at us to-day. We have writing and teach-
ing, science and .power ; we have tamed the beasts and schooled
the lightning ; but we are still only shambling towards the light.
We have tamed and bred the beasts, but we have still to tame
and breed ourselves.
From the very beginning of his reign the deeds of Alexander
showed how well he had assimilated his father's plans, and
how great were his own abilities. A map of the known world
is needed to show the course of his life. At first, after re-
ceiving assurances from Greece that he was to be captain-gen-
eral of the Grecian forces, he marched through Thrace to the
Danube; he crossed the river and burnt a village, the second
great monarch to raid the Scythian country beyond the Danube ;
then recrossed it and marched westward and so came down, by
Illyria. By that time the city of Thebes was in rebellion, and
his next blow was at Greece. Thebes unsupported of course
by Athens was taken and looted; it was treated with ex-
travagant violence; all its buildings, except the temple and
the house of the poet Pindar, were razed, and thirty thousand
people sold into slavery. Greece was stunned, and Alexander
was free to go on with the Persian campaign.
This destruction of Thebes betrayed a streak of violence in
the new master of human destinies. It was too heavy a blow
to have dealt. It was a barbaric thing to do. If the spirit of
rebellion was killed, so abo was the spirit of help. The Greek
states remained inert thereafter, neither troublesome nor help-
ful. They would not support Alexander with their shipping,
a thing which was to prove a very grave embarrassment to him.
There is a story told by Plutarch about this Theban massacre,
as if it redounded to the credit of Alexander, but indeed it
shows only how his saner and his crazy sides were in con-
flict. It tells of a Macedonian officer and a Theban lady. This
officer was among the looters, and he entered this woman's house,
inflicted unspeakable insults and injuries upon her, and at
last demanded whether she had gold or silver hidden. She
told him all her treasures had been put into the well, conducted
him thither, and, as he stooped to peer down, pushed him sud-
denly in and killed him by throwing great stones upon him.
Some allied soldiers came upon this scene and took her forth-
with to Alexander for judgment
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 321
She defied him. Already the extravagant impulse that had
ordered the massacre was upon the wane, and he not only
spared her, hut had her family and property and freedom re-
stored to her. This Plutarch makes out to he a generosity,
hut the issue is more complicated than that. It was Alex-
ander who was outraging and plundering and enslaving all
Thebes. That poor crumpled Macedonian brute in the well
had been doing only what he had been told he had full lib-
erty to do. Is a commander first to give cruel orders, and then
to forgive and reward those who slay his instruments? This
gleam of remorse at the instance of one woman who was not
perhaps wanting in tragic dignity and beauty, is a poor set-
off to the murder of a great city.
Mixed with the craziness of Olympias in Alexander was
the sanity of Philip and the teachings of Aristotle. This The-
ban business certainly troubled the mind of Alexander. When-
ever afterwards he encountered Thebans, he tried to show them
special favour. Thebes, to his credit, haunted him.
Yet the memory of Thebes did not save three other great
cities from, similar brain storms ; Tyre he destroyed, and Gaza,
and a city in India, in the storming of which he was knocked
down in fair fight and wounded; and of the latter place not
a soul, not a child, was spared. He must have been badly
frightened to have taken so evil a revenge.
At the outset of the war the Persians had this supreme ad-
vantage, they were practically masters of the sea. The ships
of the Athenians and their allies sulked unhelpfully. Alex-
ander, to get at Asia, had to go round by the Hellespont; and
if he pushed far into the Persian empire, he ran the risk of
being cut off completely from his base. His first task, there-
fore, was to cripple the enemy at sea, and this he could only
do by marching along the coast of Asia Minor and capturing
port after port until the Persian sea bases were destroyed. If
the Persians had avoided battle and hung upon his lengthening
line of communications they could probably have destroyed
him, but this they did not do. A Persian army not very much
greater than his own gave battle on the banks of the Granicus
(334 B.C.) and was destroyed. This left him free to take
Sardis, Ephesus, Miletus, and, after a fierce struggle, Halicar-
nassus. Meanwhile the Persian fleet was on his right flank and
322 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
between him and Greece, threatening much but accomplishing
nothing.
In 333 B.C., pursuing this attack upon the sea bases, he
marched along the coast as far as the head of the gulf now called
the Gulf of Alexandretta. A huge Persian army, under the
great king Darius III, was inland of his line of march, sep-
arated from the coast by mountains, and Alexander went right
beyond this enemy force before he or the Persians realized
their proximity. Scouting was evidently very badly done by
Greek and Persian alike. The Persian army was a vast, ill-
organized assembly of soldiers, transport, camp followers, and
so forth. Darius, for instance, was accompanied by his harem,
and there was a great multitude of harem slaves, musicians,
dancers, and cooks. Many of the leading officers had brought
their families to witness the hunting down of the Macedonian
invaders. The troops had been levied from every province in
the empire; they had no tradition or principle of combined
action. Seized by the idea of cutting off Alexander from Greece,
Darius moved this multitude over the mountains to the sea ; he
had the luck to get through the passes without opposition, and
he encamped on the plain of Issus between the mountains and
the shore. And there Alexander, who had turned back to fight,
struck him. The cavalry charge and the phalanx smashed this
great brittle host as a stone smashes a bottle. It was routed.
Darius escaped from his war chariot that out-of-date instru-
ment and fled on horseback, leaving even his harem in the
hands of Alexander.
All the accounts of Alexander after this battle show him at
his best. He was restrained and magnanimous. He treated
the Persian princesses with the utmost civility. And he kept
his head ; he held steadfastly to his plan. He let Darius escape,
unpursued, into Syria, and he continued his march upon the
naval bases of the Persians that is to say, upon the Phoenician
ports of Tyre and Sidon.
Sidon surrendered to him; Tyre resisted.
Here, if anywhere, we have the evidence of great military
ability on the part of Alexander. His army was his father's
creation, but Philip had never shone in the siege of cities.
When Alexander was a boy of sixteen, he had seen his father
repulsed by the fortified city of Byzantium upon the Bosphorus.
he was face to face with an inviolate city which had stood
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 323
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
siege after siege, which had resisted Nebuchadnezzar the Great
for fourteen years. For the standing of sieges Semitic peoples
hold the palm. Tyre was then an island half a mile from the
shore, and her fleet was unbeaten. On the other hand, Alex-
ander had already learnt much by the siege of the citadel of
Halicarnassus ; he had gathered to himself a corps of engineers
from Cyprus and Phoenicia, the Sidonian fleet was with him,
and presently the king of Cyprus came over to him with a
hundred and twenty ships, which gave him the command of the
sea. Moreover, great Carthage, either relying on the strength
of the mother city or being disloyal to her, and being further-
more entangled in a war in Sicily, sent no help.
The first measure of Alexander was to build a pier from the
mainland to the island, a dam which remains to this day ; and
on this, as it came close to the walls of Tyre, he set up his
towers and battering-rams. Against the walls he also moored
ships in which towers and rams were erected. The Tyrians
used fire-ships against this flotilla, and made sorties from their
two harbours. In a big surprise raid that they made on the
Cyprian ships they were caught and badly mauled; many of
their ships were rammed, and one big galley of five banks of
oars and one of four were captured outright. Finally a breach
in the walls was made, and the Macedonians, clambering up the
debris from their ships, stormed the city.
The siege had lasted seven months. Gaza held out for two.
In each case there was a massacre, the plundering of the city,
and the selling of the survivors into slavery. Then towards the
end of 332 B.C. Alexander entered Egypt, and the command
of the sea was assured. Greece, which all this while had been
wavering in its policy, decided now at last that it was on the
side of Alexander, and the council of the Greek states at Corinth
voted its "captain-general" a golden crown of victory. From
this time onward the Greeks were with the Macedonians.
Tho Egyptians also were with the Macedonians. But they
had been for Alexander from the beginning. They had lived
under Persian rule for nearly two hundred years, and the com-
ing of Alexander meant for them only a change of masters;
on the whole, a change for the better. The country surrendered
without a blow. Alexander treated its religious feelings with
extreme respect. He unwrapped no mummies as Cambyses
nad done; he took no liberties with Apis, the sacred bull of
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 325
Memphis. Here, in great temples and upon a vast scale, Alex-
ander found the evidences of a religiosity, mysterious and ir-
rational, to remind him of the secrets and mysteries that had
entertained his mother and impressed his childhood. During
his four months in Egypt he flirted with religious emotions.
He was still a very young man, we must rememher, divided
against himself. The strong sanity he inherited from his father
had made him a great soldier; the teaching of Aristotle had
given him something of the scientific outlook upon the world.
He had destroyed Tyre ; in Egypt, at one of the mouths of the
Nile, he now founded a new city, Alexandria, to replace that
ancient centre of trade. To the north of Tyre, near Issus, he
founded a second port, Alexandretta. Both of these cities
flourish to this day, and for a time Alexandria was perhaps
the greatest city in the world. The sites, therefore, must have
been wisely chosen. But also Alexander had the unstable emo-
tional imaginativeness of his mother, and side by side with
such creative work he indulged in religious adventures. The
gods of Egypt took possession of his mind. He travelled four
hundred miles to the remote oasis of the oracle of Ammon.
He wanted to settle certain doubts about his true parentage.
His mother had inflamed his mind by hints and vague speeches
of some deep mystery about his parentage. Was so ordinary a
humaa being as Philip of Macedon really his rather?
For nearly four hundred years Egypt had been a country
politically contemptible, overrun now by Ethiopians, now by
Assyrians, now by Babylonians, now by Persians. As the in-
dignities of the present became more and more disagreeable to
contemplate, the past and the other world became more splendid
to Egyptian eyes. It is from the festering humiliations of peo-
ples that arrogant religious propagandas spring. To the tri-
umphant the downtrodden can say, "It is naught in the sight
of the true gods." So the son of Philip of Macedon, the master-
general of Greece, was made to feel a small person amidst the
gigantic temples. And he had an abnormal share of youth's
normal ambition to impress everybody. How gratifying then
for him to discover presently that he was no mere successful
mortal, not one of these modern vulgar Greekish folk, but an-
cient and divine, the son of a god, the Pharaoh god, son of
Ammon Ha!
326 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Already in. a previous chapter we have given a description
of that encounter in the desert temple.
Not altogether was the young man convinced. He had his
moments of conviction ; he had his saner phases when the thing
was almost a jest. In the presence of Macedonians and Greeks
he doubted if he was divine. When it thundered loudly, the
ribald Aristarchus could ask him: "Won't you do something
of the sort, oh Son of Zeus ?" But the crazy notion was, never-
theless, present henceforth in his brain, ready to be inflamed
by wine or flattery.
Next spring (331 B.C.) he returned to Tyre, and marched
thence round towards Assyria, leaving the Syrian desert on his
right. Near the ruins of forgotten Nineveh he found a great
Persian army, that had been gathering since the battle of Issus,
awaiting him. It was another huge medley of contingents, and
it relied for its chief force upon that now antiquated weapon,
the war chariot. Of these Darius had a force of two hundred,
and each chariot had scythes attached to its wheels and to the
pole and body of the chariot. There seem to have been four
horses to each chariot, and it will be obvious that if one of those
horses was wounded by javelin or arrow, that chariot was held
up. The outer horses acted chiefly as buffers for the inner
wheel horses ; they were hitched to the chariot by a single out-
side trace which could be easily cut away, but the loss of one
of the wheel horses completely incapacitated the whole affair.
Against broken footmen or a crowd of individualist fighters
such vehicles might be formidable; but Darius began the battle
by flinging them against the cavalry and light infantry. Few
reached their objective, and those that did were readily disposed
of. There was some manoeuvring for position. The well-drilled
Macedonians moved obliquely across the Persian front, keeping
good order ; the Persians, following this movement to the flank,
opened gaps in their array. Then suddenly the disciplined
Macedonian cavalry charged at one of these torn places and
smote the centre of the Persian host The infantry followed
close upon their charge. The centre and left of the Persians
crumpled up. For a while the light cavalry on the Persian right
gained ground against Alexander's left, only to be cut to pieces
by the cavalry from Thessaly, which by this time had become
almost as good as its Macedonian model. The Persian forces
ceased to resemble an army. They dissolved into a vast multi-
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 327
tude of fugitives streaming under great dust clouds and without
a single rally across the hot plain towards Arbela. Through
the dust and the flying crowd rode the victors, slaying and
slaying until darkness stayed the slaughter. Darius led the
retreat.
Such was the battle of Arbela. It was fought on October
the 1st, 331 B.C. We know its date so exactly, because it is
recorded that, eleven days before it began, the soothsayers on
both sides had been greatly exercised by an eclipse of the moon.
Darius fled to the north into the country of the Medes. Alex-
ander marched on to Babylon. The ancient city of Hammurabi
(who had reigned seventeen hundred years before) and of
Nebuchadnezzar the Great and of Nabonidus was still, unlike
Nineveh, a prosperous and important centre. Like the Egyp-
tians, the Babylonians were not greatly concerned at a change
of rule to Macedonian from Persian. The temple of Bel-
Marduk was in ruins, a quarry for building material, but the
tradition of the Chaldean priests still lingered, and Alexander
promised to restore the building.
Thence he marched on to Susa, once the chief city of the van-
ished and forgotten Elamites, and now the Persian capital.
He went on to Persepolis, where, as the climax of a drunken
carouse, he burnt down the great palace of the king of kings.
This he afterwards declared was the revenge of Greece for the
burning of Athens by Xerxes.
And now begins a new phase in the story of Alexander. For
the next seven years he wandered with an army chiefly of Mace-
donians in the north and east of what was then the known world.
At first it was a pursuit of Darius. Afterwards it became - ?
Was it -a systematic survey of a world he meant to consolidate
into one great order, or was it a wild-goose chase ? His own
soldiers, his own intimates, thought, the latter, and at last stayed
his career beyond the Indus. On the map it looks very like a
wild-goose chase; it seems to aim at nothing in particular and
to get nowhere.
The pursuit of Darius III soon came to a pitiful end. After
the battle of Arbela his own generals seem to have revolted
against his weakness and incompetence; they made him a pris-
328 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
oner, and took him with them in spite of his desire to throw
himself upon the generosity of his conqueror. Bessus, the
satrap of Bactria, they made their leader. There was at last a
hot and exciting chase of the flying caravan which conveyed the
captive king of kings. At dawn, after an all-night pursuit, it
was sighted far ahead. The flight became a headlong bolt.
Baggage, women, everything was abandoned by Bessus and
his captains; and one other impediment also they left behind.
By the side of a pool of water far away from the road a Mace-
donian trooper presently found a deserted mule-cart with its
mules still in the traces. In this cart lay Darius, stabbed in a
score of places and bleeding to death. He had refused to go on
with Bessus, refused to mount the horse that was brought to
him. So his captains had run him through with their spears and
left him. . . . He asked his captors for water. What else he
may have said we do not know. The historians have seen fit
to fabricate a quite impossible last dying speech for him. Prob-
ably he said very little. . . .
When, a little after sunrise, Alexander came up, Darius was
already dead. . . .
To the historian of the world the wanderings of Alexander
have an interest of their own quite apart from the light they
throw upon his character. Just as the campaign of Darius I
lifted the curtain behind Greece and Macedonia, and showed us
something of the silent background to the north of the audible
and recorded history of the early civilizations, so now Alex-
ander's campaigns take us into regions about which there had
hitherto been no trustworthy record made.
We discover they were not desert regions, but full of a
gathering life of their own.
He marched to the shores of the Caspian, thence he travelled
eastward across what is now called Western Turkestan. He
founded a city that is now known as Herat; whence he went
northward by Cabul and by what is now Samarkand, right up
into the mountains of Central Turkestan. He returned south-
ward, and came down into India by the Khyber Pass. He
fought a great battle on the Upper Indus against a very tall
and chivalrous king, Porus, in which the Macedonian infantry
encountered an array of elephants and defeated them. Possi-
bly he would have pushed eastward across the deserts to the
Ganges valley, but his troops refused to go further. Possibly,
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 329
had they not done so, then or later he would have gone on until
he vanished eastward out of history. But he was forced to turn
about. He built a fleet and descended to the mouth of the Indus.
There he divided his forces. The main army he took along
the desolate coast back to the Persian Gulf, and on the way it
suffered dreadfully and lost many men through thirst. The
fleet followed him by sea, and rejoined him at the entrance to
the Persian Gulf. In the course of this six-year tour he fought
battles, received the submission of many strange peoples, and
founded cities. He saw the dead body of Darius in June, 330
B.C. ; he returned to Susa in 324 B.C. He found the empire in
disorder: the provincial satraps raising armies of their own,
Bactria and Media in insurrection, and Olympias making gov-
ernment impossible in Macedonia. Harpalus, the royal treas-
urer, had bolted with all that was portable of the royal treas-
ure, and was making his way, bribing as he went, towards
Greece. Some of the Harpalus money is said to have reached
Demosthenes.
But before we deal with the closing chapter of the story of
Alexander, let us say a word or so about these northern regions
into which he wandered. It is evident that from the Danube
region right across South Russia, right across the country to
the north of the Caspian, right across the country to the east of
the Caspian, as far as the mountain masses of the Pamir
Plateau and eastward into the Tarim basin of Eastern Turkes-
tan, there spread then a series of similar barbaric tribes and
peoples all at about the same stage of culture, and for the most
part Aryan in their language and possibly Nordic in their race.
They had few cities, mostly they were nomadic ; at times they
settled temporarily to cultivate the land. They were certainly
already mingling in Central Asia with Mongolian tribes, but
the Mongolian tribes were not then prevalent there.
An immense process of drying up and elevation has been
going on 'in these parts of the world during the last ten thou-
sand years. Ten thousand years ago there was probably a con-
tinuous water barrier between the basin of the Obi and the
Aral-Caspian sea. As this had dried up and the marshy land
had become steppe-like country, Nordic nomads from the west
and Mongolian nomads from the east had met and mixed,
and the riding horse had come back into the western world.
It is evident this great stretch of country was becoming a region
330 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
of accumulation for these barbaric peoples. They were very
loosely attached to the lands they occupied. They lived in tents
and wagons rather than houses. A brief cycle of plentiful and
healthy years, or a cessation of tribal warfare under some strong
ruler, would lead to considerable increases of population; then
two or three hard years would suffice to send the tribes wander-
ing again in search of food.
From before the dawn of recorded history this region of
human accumulation between the Danube and China had been,
as it were, intermittently raining out tribes southward and
westward. It was like a cloud bank behind the settled landscape
that accumulated and then precipitated invaders. We have
noted how the Keltic peoples drizzled westward, how the Ital-
ians, the Greeks, and their Epirote, Macedonian, and Phrygian
kindred came : outh. We have noted, too, the Cimmerian drive
from the east, like a sudden driving shower of barbarians across
Asia Minor, the southward coming of the Scythians and Medes
and Persians, and the Aryan descent into India. About a cen-
tury before Alexander there had been a fresh Aryan invasion
of Italy by a Keltic people, the Gauls, who had settled in the
valley of the Po. Those various races came down out of their
northern obscurity into the light of history; and meanwhile
beyond that light the reservoir accumulated for fresh discharges.
Alexander's march in Central Asia brings now into our history
names that are fresh to us; the Parthians, a race of mounted
bowmen who were destined to play an important role in history
a century or so later, and the Bactrians who lived in the sandy
native land of the camel. Everywhere he seems to have met
Aryan-speaking peoples. The Mongolian barbarians to the
north-eastward were still unsuspected, no one imagined there
was yet another great cloud bank of population beyond the
Scythians and their kind, in the north of China, that was pres-
ently also to begin a drift westward and southward, mixing as it
came with the Nordic Scythians and every other people of
kindred habits that it encountered. As yet only China knew
of the Huns ; there were no Turks in Western Turkestan or any-
where else then, no Tartars in the world.
This glimpse of the state of affairs in Turkestan in the fourth
century B.C. is one of the most interesting aspects of the wan-
derings of Alexander; another is his raid through the Punjab.
From the point of view of the teller of the human story it is
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 331
provocative that he did not go on into the Ganges country, and
that consequently we have no independent accounts by Greek
writers of the life in ancient Bengal. But there is a consider-
able literature in various Indian languages dealing with Indian
history and social life -that still needs to be made accessible to
European readers.
5
Alexander had been in undisputed possession of the Persian
empire for six years. He was now thirty-one. In those six
years he had created very little. He had retained most of the
organization of the Persian provinces, appointing fresh satraps
or retaining the former ones ; the roads, the ports, the organiza-
tion of the empire was still as Cyrus, his greater predecessor,
had left them ; in Egypt he had merely replaced old provincial
governors by new ones; in India he had defeated Porus, and
then left him in power much as he found him, except that Porus
was now called a satrap by the Greeks. Alexander had, it is
true, planned out a number of towns, and some of them were
to grow into great towns ; seventeen Alexandrias he founded al-
together; 1 but he had destroyed Tyre, and with Tyre the se-
curity of the sea routes which had hitherto been the chief west-
ward outlet for Mesopotamia. Historians say that he Hellenized
the east. But Babylonia and Egypt swarmed with Greeks
before his time; he was not the cause, he was a part of the
Hellenizat.ion. For a time the whole world, from the Adriatic
to the Indus, was under one ruler; so far he had realized the
dreams of Isocrates and Philip his father. But how far was
he making this a permanent and enduring union ? How far as
yet was it anything more than a dazzling but transitory flourish
of his own magnificent self ?
He was making no great roads, setting up no sure sea com-
munications. It is idle to accuse him of leaving education alone,
because the idea that empires must be cemented by education
was still foreign to human thought. But he was forming no
group of statesmen about him ; he was thinking of no successor ;
he was creating no tradition nothing more than a personal
legend. The idea that the world would have to go on after
1 Mahaffy. Their names have undergone various changes e.g., Candahar
(Iskender) and Secunderabad.
332 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Alexander, engaged in any other employment than the discus-
sion of his magnificence, seems to have been outside his mental
range. He was still young, it is true, but well before Philip
was one and thirty he had been thinking of the education of
Alexander.
Was Alexander a statesman at all ?
Some students of his career assure us that he was ; that now
at Susa he planned a mighty world empire, seeing it not simply
as a Macedonian conquest of the world, but as a melting to-
gether of racial traditions. He did one thing, at any rate,
that gives colour to this idea; he held a great marriage feast,
in which he and ninety of his generals and friends were mar-
ried to Persian brides. He himself married a daughter of
Darius, though already he possessed an Asiatic wife in Roxana,
the daughter of the king of Samarkand. This wholesale wed-
ding was made a very splendid festival, and at the same time
all of his Macedonian soldiers, to the number of several thou-
sands, who had married Asiatic brides, were given wedding
gifts. This has been called the Marriage of Europe and Asia ;
the two continents were to be joined, wrote Plutarch, "in lawful
wedlock and by community of offspring." And next he began
to train recruits from Persia and the north, Parthians, Bac-
trians, and the like, in the distinctive disciplines of the phalanx
and the cavalry. Was that also to assimilate Europe and Asia,
or was it to make himself independent of his Macedonians?
They thought the latter, at any rate, and mutinied, and it was
with some difficulty that he brought them to a penitent mood
and induced them to take part in a common feast with the Per-
sians. The historians have made a long and eloquent speech
for him on this occasion, but the gist of it was that he bade his
Macedonians begone, and gave no sign of how he proposed they
should get home out of Persia. After three days of dismay they
submitted to him and begged his forgiveness.
Here is the matter for a very pretty discussion. Was Alex-
ander really planning a racial fusion or had he just fallen in
love with the pomp and divinity of an Oriental monarch, and
wished to get rid of these Europeans to whom he was only a
king-leader ? The writers of his own time : and those who lived
near to his time, lean very much to the latter alternative. They
insist upon his immense vanity. They relate how he began
to wear the robes and tiara of a Persian monarch. "At first
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
333
only before the barbarians and privately, but afterwards lie
came to wear it in public when he sat for the dispatch of busi-
ness." And presently he demanded Oriental prostrations from
his friends.
One thing seems to support the suggestion of great personal
vanity in Alexander. His portrait was painted and sculptured
frequently, and always he is represented as a beautiful youth,
with wonderful locks flowing backward from a broad forehead.
Previously most, men had worn beards. But Alexander, en-
amoured of his own
youthful loveliness,
would not part with
it; he remained a
sham boy at thirty-
two; he shaved his
face, and so set a
fashion in Greece
and Italy that lasted
many centuries.
The stories of vio-
lence and vanity in
his closing years
cluster thick upon his
memory. He listened
to tittle-tattle about
Philotas, the son of
Parmenio, one of his
most trusted and 'Alexander the
faithful generals, (sfoer coui of Lqsimadms , 321- 281 B.C)
Philotas, it was said,
had boasted to some woman he was making love to that Alex-
ander was a mere boy ; that, but for such men as his father and
himself, there would have been no conquest of Persia, and the
like. Such assertions had a certain element of truth in them.
The woman was brought to Alexander, who listened to her
treacheries. Presently Philotas was accused of conspiracy, and,
upon very insufficient evidence, tortured and executed. Then
Alexander thought of Parmenio, whose other two sons had
died for him in battle. He sent swift messengers to assas-
sinate the old man before he could hear of his son's death!
Now Parmenio had een one of the most trusted of Philip's
3S4, THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
generals ; it was Pannenio who had led the Macedonian armies
into Asia before the murder of Philip. There can be little
doubt of the substantial truth of this story, nor about the
execution of Callisthenes, the nephew of Aristotle, who re-
fused Alexander divine honours, and "went about with as
much pride as if he had demolished a tyranny, while the young
men followed him as the only freeman among thousands."
Mixed with such incidents we have the very illuminating story
of the drunken quarrel in which he killed Clitus. The monarch
and his company had been drinking hard, and the drink had
made the talk loud and free. There was much flattery of the
"young god, 77 much detraction of Philip, at which Alexander
had smiled with satisfaction. 1 This drunken self-complacency
was more than the Macedonians could stand ; it roused Clitus,
his foster-brother, to a frenzy. Clitus reproached Alexander
with his Median costume and praised Philip, there was a loud
quarrel, and, to end it, Clitus was hustled out of the room by
his friends. He was, however, in the obstinate phase of drunk-
enness, and he returned by another entrance. He was heard
outside quoting Euripides "in a bold and disrespectful tone":
"Are these your customs ? Is it thus that Greece
Rewards her combatants? Shall one man claim
The trophies won by thousands?"
Whereupon Alexander snatched a spear from one of his
guards and ran Clitus through the body as he lifted the curtain
to come in. ...
One is forced to believe that this was the real atmosphere of
the young conqueror's life. Then the story of his frantic and
cruel display of grief for Hepha3stion can scarcely be all in-
vention. If it is true, or in any part true, it displays a mind
ill-balanced and altogether wrapped up in personal things, to
whom empire was no more than opportunity for egoistic display,
and all the resources of the world, stuff for freaks of that sort
of "generosity" which robs a thousand people to extort the ad-
miration of one astounded recipient.
HephaBstion, being ill, was put upon a strict diet, but in the
absence of his physician at the theatre he ate a roasted fowl and
drank a flagon of iced wine, in consequence of which he died.
1 D. G. Hogarth.
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
335
336 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Thereupon Alexander decided upon a display of grief. It was
the grief of a lunatic. He had the physician crucified! He
ordered every horse and mule in Persia to be shorn, and pulled
down the battlements of the neighbouring cities. He prohibited
all music in his camp for a long time, and, having taken certain
villages of the Cusseans, he caused all the adults to be massacred,
as a sacrifice to the manes of Hephasstion. Finally he set aside
ten thousand talents (a talent = 240) for a tomb. For those
days this was an enormous sum of money. None of which
things did any real honour to Hephaastion, but they served to
demonstrate to an awe-stricken
world what a tremendous thing
the sorrow of Alexander could be.
This last story and many such
stories may be lies or distortions or
exaggerations. But they have a
vein in common. After a bout of
hard drinking in Babylon a sud-
den fever came upon Alexander
(323 B.C.), and he sickened and
died. He was still only thirty-
three years of age. Forthwith the
world empire he had snatched at
I. and held in his hands, as a child
might snatch at and hold a precious
vase, fell to the ground and was shattered to pieces.
Whatever appearance of a worldwide order may have gleamed
upon men's imaginations, vanished at his death. The story be-
comes the story of a barbaric autocracy in confusion. Every-
where the provincial rulers set up for themselves. In the course
of a few years the entire family of Alexander had been de-
stroyed. Roxana, his barbarian wife, was prompt to murder,
as a rival, the daughter of Darius. She herself presently bore
Alexander a posthumous son, who was also called Alexander.
He was murdered, with her, a few years later (311 B.C.). Her-
cules, the only other son of Alexander, was murdered also. So,
too, was Arida3us, the weak-minded half-brother (see 2).
Plutarch gives a last glimpse of Olympias during a brief in-
terval of power in Macedonia, accusing first this person and
then that of poisoning her wonderful son. Many she killed in
her fury. The bodies of some of his circle who had died after
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 337
his death she caused to be dug up, but we do not know if any
fresh light was shed upon his death by these disinterments.
Finally Olympias was killed in Macedonia by the friends of
those she had slain.
e
From this welter of crime there presently emerged three
leading figures. Much of the old Persian empire, as far as
the Indus eastward and almost to Lydia in the west, was held
by one general Seleucus, who founded a dynasty, the Seleucid
Dynasty; Macedonia fell to another Macedonian general, Anti-
gonus; a third Macedonian, Ptolemy, secured Egypt, and
making Alexandria his chief city, established a sufficient naval
ascendancy to keep also Cyprus and most of the coast of
Phoenicia and Asia Minor. The Ptolemaic and Seleucid em-
pires lasted for a considerable time ; the forms of government in
Asia Minor and the Balkans were more unstable. Two maps
will help the reader to a sense of the kaleidoscopic nature of
the political boundaries of the third century B.C. Antigonus
was defeated and killed at the battle of Ipsus (301), leaving
Lysimachus, the governor of Thrace, and Cassander, of Mace-
donia and Greece, as equally transitory successors. Minor gov-
ernors carved out smaller states. Meanwhile the barbarians
swung down into the broken-up and enfeebled world of civiliza-
tion from the west and from the east. From the west came the
Gauls, a people closely related to the Kelts. They raided down
through Macedonia and Greece to Delphi, and (227 B.C.) two
sections of them crossed the Bosphorus into Asia Minor, being
first employed as mercenaries and then setting up for them-
selves as independent plunderers; and after raiding almost to
the Taurus, they settled in the old Phrygian land, holding the
people about them to tribute. (These Gauls of Phrygia be-
came the Galatians of St. Paul's Epistle.) Armenia and the
southern shores of the Black Sea became a confusion of chang-
ing rulers. Kings with Hellenistic ideas appeared in Cappa-
docia, in Pontus (the south shore of the Black Sea), in Bithynia,
and in Pergamum. From the east the Scythians and the
Parthians and Bactrians also drove southward. . . . For a time
there were Greek-ruled Bactrian states becoming more and more
Orientalized; in the second century B.C. Greek adventurers from
338 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Bactria raided down into North India and founded short-lived
kingdoms there, the last eastward fling of the Greek; then
gradually barbarism fell again like a curtain between the West-
ern civilizations and India.
7
Amidst all these shattered fragments of the burst bubble of
Hellenic empire one small state stands out and demands at
least a brief section to itself, the kingdom of Pergamum. We
hear first of this town as an independent centre during the
struggle that ended in the battle of Ipsus. While the tide of
the Gaulish invasion swirled and foamed to and fro about Asia
Minor between the years 277 and 241, Pergamum for a time
paid them tribute, but she retained her general independence,
and at last, under Attains I, refused her tribute and defeated
them in two decisive battles. For more than a century there-
after (until 133 B.C.) Pergamum remained free, and was per-
haps during that period the most highly civilized state in the
world. On the hill of the Acropolis was reared a rich group of
buildings, palaces, temples, a museum, and a library, rivals of
those of Alexandria of which we shall presently tell, and almost
the first in the world. Under the princes of Pergamum, Greek
art blossomed afresh, and the reliefs of the altar of the temple
of Zeus and the statues of the fighting and dying Gauls which
were made there, are among the great artistic treasures of
mankind.
In a little while, as we shall tell later, the influence of a
new power began to be felt in the Eastern Mediterranean, the
power of the Roman republic, friendly to Greece and to Greek
civilization; and in this power the Hellenic communities of
Pergamum and Rhodes found a natural and useful ally and
supporter against the Galatians and against the Orientalized
Seleucid empire. We shall relate how at last the Roman power
came into Asia, how it defeated the Seleucid empire at the
battle of Magnesia (190 B.C.), and drove it out of Asia Minor
and beyond the Taurus mountains, and how finally in 133 B.C.
Attalus III, the last king of Pergamum, bowing to his sense of
an inevitable destiny, made the Roman republic the heir to
his kingdom, which became then the Roman province of "Asia."
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 339
340 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
8
Nearly all historians are disposed to regard the career of
Alexander the Great as marking an epoch in human affairs.
It drew together all the known world, excepting only the west-
ern Mediterranean, into one drama. But the opinions men
have formed of Alexander himself vary enormously. They
fall, most of them, into two main schools. One type of scholar
is fascinated by the youth and splendour of this young man.
These Alexander-worshippers seem disposed to take him at his
own valuation, to condone every crime and folly either as the
mere ebullience of a rich nature or as the bitter necessity to
some gigantic scheme, and to regard his life as framed v^pon a
design, a scheme of statesmanship, such as all the wider knowl-
edge and wider ideas of these later times barely suffice to bring
into the scope of our understanding. On the other hand, there
are those who see him only as a wrecker of the slowly maturing
possibilities of a free and tranquil Hellenized world.
Before we ascribe to Alexander or to his father Philip
schemes of world policy such as a twentieth-century historian-
philosopher might approve, we shall do well to consider very
carefully the utmost range of knowledge and thought that was
possible in those days. The world of Plato, Isocrates, and
Aristotle had practically no historical perspective at all; there
had not been such a thing as history in the world, history, that
is, as distinguished from mere priestly chronicles, until the last
couple of centuries. Even highly educated men had the most
circumscribed ideas of geography and foreign countries. For
most men the world was still flat and limitless. The only sys-
tematic political philosophy was based on the experiences of
minute city states, and took no thought of empires. Nobody
knew anything of the origins of civilization. No one had specu-
lated upon economics before that time. No one had worked
out the reaction of one social class upon another. We are too
apt to consider the career of Alexander as the crown of some
process that had long been afoot; as the climax of a crescendo.
In . a sense, no doubt, it was that ; but much more true is it
that it was not so much an end as a beginning ; it was the first
revelation to the human imagination of the. oneness of human
affairs. The utmost reach of the thought of Greece before his
time was of a Persian empire Hellenized, a predominance in
CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 341
the world of Macedonians and Greeks. But before Alexander
was dead, and much more after he was dead and there had
been time to think him over, the conception of a world law
and organization was a practicable and assimilable idea for
the minds of men.
Fo-r some generations Alexander the Great was for mankind
the symbol and embodiment of world order and world dominion.
He became a fabulous being. His head, adorned with the
divine symbols of the demi-god Hercules or the god Ammon
Ra, appears on the coins of such among his successors as could
claim to be his heirs. Then the idea of world dominion was
taken up by another great people, a people who for some cen-
turies exhibited considerable political genius, the Romans ; and
the figure of another conspicuous adventurer, CaBsar, eclipsed
for the western half of the old world the figure of Alexander.
So by the beginning of the third century B.C. we find already
arisen in the Western civilization of the old world three of the
great structural ideas that rule the mind of contemporary man-
kind. We have already traced the escape of writing and knowl-
edge from the secrets and mysteries and initiations of the old-
world priesthoods, and the development of the idea of a uni-
versal knowledge, of a universally understandable and com-
municable history and philosophy. We have taken the figures
of Herodotus and Aristotle as typical exponents of this first
great idea, the idea of science using the word science in its
widest and properest sense, to include history and signify a
clear vision of man in relation to the things about him. We
have traced also the generalization of religion among the Baby-
lonians, Jews, and other Semitic peoples, from the dark worship
in temples and consecrated places of some local or tribal god
to the open service of one universal God of Righteousness,
whose temple is the whc^e world. And now we have traced
also the first germination of the idea of a, world polity. The
rest of the history of mankind is very largely the history of
those three ideas of science, of a universal righteousness, and
of a human commonweal, spreading out from the minds of the
rare and exceptional persons and peoples in which they first
originated, into the general consciousness of the race, and giving
first a new colour, then a new spirit, and then a new direction
to human affairs.
XXIV
SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA
1. The Science of Alexandria. 2. Philosophy of Alexan-
dria. 3. Alexandria as a Factory of Religions.
ONE of the most prosperous fragments of the brief world
empire of Alexander the Great was Egypt, which fell
to the share of the Ptolemy whose name we have al-
ready noted as one of the associates of Alexander whom King
Philip had banished. The country was at a secure distance
from plundering Gaul or Parthian, and the destruction of Tyre
and the Phoenician navy, and the creation of Alexandria gave
Egypt a temporary naval ascendancy in the Eastern Mediter-
ranean. Alexandria grew to proportions that rivalled Car-
thage; eastward she had an overseas trade through the Red Sea
with Arabia and India ; and westward her traffic competed with
the Carthaginian. In the Macedonian and Greek governors of
the Ptolemies, the Egyptians found a government more sympa-
thetic and tolerable than any they had ever known since they
ceased to be a self-governing empire. Indeed it is rather that
Egypt conquered and annexed the Ptolemies politically, than
that the Macedonians ruled Egypt.
There was a return to Egyptian political ideas, rather than
any attempt to Hellenize the government of the country.
Ptolemy became Pharaoh, the god-king, and his administration
continued the ancient tradition of Pepi, Thotmes, Rameses,
and Necho. Alexandria, however, for her town affairs, and
subject to the divine overlordship of Pharaoh, had a constitu-
tion of the Greek city type. And the language of the court and
administration was Attic Greek. Greek became so much the
general language of educated people in Egypt that the Jewish
community there found it necessary to translate their Bible into
the Greek language, many men of their own people being no
342
SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 343
longer able to understand Hebrew. Attic Greek for some cen-
turies before and after Christ was the language of all educated
men from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf.
Of all Alexander's group of young men, Ptolemy seems to
have done most to carry out those ideas of a systematic organi-
zation of knowledge with which Aristotle had no doubt
familiarized the court of Philip of Macedon. Ptolemy was a
man of very extraordinary intellectual gifts, at once creative
and modest, with a certain understandable cynicism towards
the strain of Olympias in the mind of Alexander. His contem-
porary history of Alexander's campaigns has perished; but it
was a source to which all the surviving accounts are deeply
indebted.
The Museum he set up in Alexandria was in effect the first
university in the world. As its name implies, it was dedicated
to the service of the Muses, which was also the case with the
Peripatetic school at Athens. It was, however, a religious body
only in form, in order to meet the legal difficulties of endow-
ment in a world that had never foreseen such a thing as a
secular intellectual process. It was essentially a college of
learned men engaged chiefly in research and record, but also
to a certain extent in teaching. At the outset, and for two or
three generations, the Museum at Alexandria presented such a
scientific constellation as even Athens at its best could not rival.
Particularly sound and good was the mathematical and geo-
graphical work. The names of Euclid, familiar to every school-
boy, Eratosthenes, who measured the size of the earth and came
within fifty miles of the true diameter, Apollonius, who wrote
on conic sections, stand out. Hipparchus made the first attempt
to catalogue and map the stars with a view to checking any
changes that might be occurring in the heavens. Hero devised
the first steam engine. Archimedes came to Alexandria to
study, and remained a frequent correspondent of the Museum.
The medical school of Alexandria was equally famous. For
the first time in the world's history a standard of professional
knowledge was set up. Herophilus, the greatest of the Alexan-
drian anatomists, is said to have conducted vivisections upon
condemned criminals. Other teachers, in opposition to Hero-
philus, condemned the study of anatomy and developed the sci-
ence of drugs. But this scientific blaze at Alexandria did not
endure altogether for more than a century. The organization
344,
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
of the Museum was not planned to ensure its mental continuity.
It was a "royal" college ; its professors and fellows (as we may
call them) were appointed and paid by Pharaoh. "The repub-
lican character of the
private corporations
called the schools or
academies at Athens
was far more stable
and independent."
Royal patronage was
all very well so long
as Pharaoh was Ptol-
emy I, or Ptolemy
II, but the strain de-
generated, and the
long tradition o f
Egyptian priestcraft
presently swallowed
up the Ptolemies
and destroyed the
Aristotelian mental-
ity of the Museum
altogether. The
Museum had not ex-
isted for a hundred
years before its sci-
entific energy was
extinct.
Side by side with
the Museum, Ptol-
emy I created a more
enduring monument
to himself in the
great library. This
was a combination of
state library and
state publishing upon
a scale hitherto unheard of. It was to be altogether encyclopa>
dic. If any stranger brought an unknown book to Egypt, he
had to have it copied for the collection, and a considerable staff
of copyists was engaged continually in making duplicates of all
SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 345
the more popular and necessary works. The library, like a
university press, had an outward trade. It was a book-selling
affair. Under Callimachus, the head of the library during the
time of Ptolemy II and III, the arrangement and cataloguing
of the accumulations was systematically undertaken. In those
days, it must be remembered, books were not in pages, but rolled
like the music-rolls of the modern piano-player, and in order
to refer to any particular passage, a reader had to roll back
or roll forward very tediously, a process which wore out books
and readers together. One thinks at once of a simple and
obvious little machine by which such a roll could have been
quickly wound to and fro for reference, but nothing of the sort
seems to have been used. Every time a roll was read it was
handled by two perspiring hands. It was to minimize the waste
of time and trouble that Callimachus broke up long works, such
as the History of Herodotus, into "books" or volumes, as we
should call them, each upon a separate roll. The library of
Alexandria drew a far vaster crowd of students than the teachers
of the Museum. The lodging and catering for these visitors
from all parts of the world became a considerable business
interest for the Alexandrian population.
It is curious to note how slowly the mechanism of the in-
tellectual life improves. Contrast the ordinary library facilities
of a middle-class English home, such as the present writer is
now working in, with the inconveniences and deficiencies of
the equipment of an Alexandrian writer, and one realizes the
enormous waste of time, physical exertion, and attention that
went on through all the centuries during which that library flour-
ished. Before the present writer lie half a dozen books, and
there are good indices to three of them. He can pick up any
one of these six books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a
quotation, and go on writing. Contrast with that the tedious
unfolding of a rolled manuscript. Close at hand are two
encyclopaedias, a dictionary, an atlas of the world, a biograph-
ical dictionary, and other books of reference. They have no
marginal indices, it is true ; but that perhaps is asking for toe
much at present. There were no such resources in the world in
300 B.C. Alexandria had still to produce the first grammar
and the first dictionary. This present book is being written in
manuscript; it is then taken by a typist and typewritten very
accurately. It can then, with the utmost convenience, be read
346
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
over, corrected amply, rearranged freely, retyped, and recor-
rected. The Alexandrian author had to dictate or recopy every
word he wrote. Before he could turn back to what he had
written previously, he had to dry his last words hy waving them
in the air or pouring sand over them ; he had not even blotting-
paper. Whatever an author wrote had to be recopied again
and again before it could reach any considerable circle of
readers, and every copyist introduced some new error. When-
ever a need for maps or diagrams arose, there were fresh diffi-
culties. Such a science as anatomy, for example, depending as
it does upon accurate drawing, must have been enormously
hampered by the natural limitations of the copyist. The trans-
mission of geographical fact again must have been almost in-
credibly tedious. No doubt a day will come when a private
SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 347
library and writing-desk of the year A.D. 1919 wil] seem quaintly
clumsy and difficult; but, measured by the standards of Alex-
andria, they are astonishingly quick, efficient, and economical
of nervous and mental energy.
No attempt seems to have been made at Alexandria to print
anything at all. That strikes one at first as a very remarkable
fact. The world was crying out for books, and not simply for
books. There was an urgent public need for notices, proclama-
tions, and the like. Yet there is nothing in the history of
the Western civilizations that one can call printing until the
fifteenth century A.D. It is not as though printing was a
recondite art or dependent upon any precedent and preliminary
discoveries. Printing is the most obvious of dodges. In prin-
ciple it has always been known. As we have already stated,
there is ground for supposing that the Paleolithic men of the
Magdalenian period may have printed designs on their leather
garments. The "seals" of ancient Sumeria again were printing
devices. Coins are print. Illiterate persons in all ages have
used wooden or metal stamps for their signatures; William I,
the Norman Conqueror of England, for example, used such a
stamp with ink to sign documents. In China the classics were
being printed by the second century A.D. Yet either because of
a complex of small difficulties about ink or papyrus or the form
of books, or because of some protective resistance on the part
of the owners of the slave copyists, or because the script was
too swift and easy to set men thinking how to write it still more
easily, as the Chinese character or the Gothic letters did, or
because of a gap in the social system between men of thought
and knowledge and men of technical skill, printing was not used
not even used for the exact reproduction of illustrations.
The chief reason for this failure to develop printing sys-
tematically lies, no doubt, in the fact that there was no abundant
supply of printable material of a uniform texture and con-
venient form. The supply of papyrus was strictly limited,
strip had to be fastened to strip, and there was no standard size
of sheet. Paper had yet to come from China to release the
mind of Europe. Had there been presses, they would have
had to stand idle while the papyrus rolls were slowly made.
But this explanation does not account for the failure to use
block printing in the case of illustrations and diagrams.
These limitations enable us to understand why it was that
348 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Alexandria could at once achieve the most extraordinary intel-
lectual triumphs for such a feat as that of Eratosthenes, for
instance, having regard to his poverty of apparatus, is suffi-
cient to put him on a level with Newton or Pasteur and yet
have little or no effect upon the course of politics or the lives
and thoughts of people round about her. Her Museum and
library were a centre of light, but it was light in a dark lantern
hidden from the general world. There were no means of carry-
ing its results even to sympathetic men abroad except by tedious
letter-writing. There was no possibility of communicating what
was known there to the general body of men. Students had to
come at great cost to themselves to this crowded centre because
there was no other way of gathering even scraps of knowledge.
At Athens and Alexandria there were bookstalls where manu-
script note-books of variable quality could be bought at reason-
able prices, but any extension of education to larger classes and
other centres would have produced at once a restrictive shortage
of papyrus. Education did not reach into the masses at all;
to become more than superficially educated one had to abandon
the ordinary life of the times and come for long years to live a
hovering existence in the neighbourhood of ill-equipped and
overworked sages. Learning was not indeed so complete a
withdrawal from ordinary life as initiation into a priesthood,
but it was still something in that nature.
And very speedily that feeling of freedom, that openness and
directness of statement which is the vital air of the true intel-
lectual life, faded out of Alexandria. From the first the patron-
age even of Ptolemy I set a limit to political discussion. Pres-
ently the dissensions of the schools let in the superstitions and
prejudices of the city mob to scholastic affairs.
Wisdom passed away from Alexandria and left pedantry be-
hind. For the use of books was substituted the worship of
books. Very speedily the learned became a specialized queer
class with unpleasant characteristics of its own. The Museum
had not existed for half a dozen generations before Alexandria
was familiar with a new type of human being; shy, eccentric,
unpractical, incapable of essentials, strangely fierce upon trivi-
alities of literary detail, as bitterly jealous of the colleague
within as of the unlearned without, the bent Scholarly Man.
He was as intolerant as a priest, though he had no altar; as
obscurantist as a magician, though he had no cave. For him
SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 349
no method of copying was sufficiently tedious and no rare book
sufficiently inaccessible. He was a sort of by-product of the
intellectual process of mankind. For many precious genera-
tions the new-lit fires of the human intelligence were to be seri-
ously banked down by this by-product.
Right thinking is necessarily an open process, and the only
science and history of full value to men consist of what is gen-
erally and clearly known ; this is surely a platitude, but we have
still to discover how to preserve our centres of philosophy and
research from the caking and darkening accumulations of nar-
row and dingy-spirited specialists. We have still to ensure that
a man of learning shall be none the less a man of affairs, and
that all that can be thought and known is kept plainly, honestly,
and easily available to the ordinary men and women who are
the substance of mankind.
2
At first the mental activities of Alexandria centred upon
the Museum, and were mainly scientific. Philosophy, which in
a more vigorous age had been a doctrine of power over self and
the material world, without abandoning these pretensions, be-
came in reality a doctrine of secret consolation. The stimulant
changed into an opiate. The philosopher let the world, as the
vulgar say, rip, the world of which he was a part, and consoled
himself by saying in very beautiful and elaborate forms that the
world was illusion and that there was in him something quintes-
sential and sublime, outside and above the world. Athens,
politically insignificant, but still a great and crowded mart
throughout the fourth century, decaying almost imperceptibly
so far as outer seeming went, and treated with a strange respect
that was half contempt by all the warring powers and adven-
turers of the world, was the fitting centre of such philosophical
teaching. It was quite a couple of centuries before the schools
of Alexandria became as important in philosophical discussion.
3
If Alexandria was late to develop a distinctive philosophy,
she was early prominent as a great factory and exchange of
religious ideas.
350 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
The Museum and Library represented only one of the three
sides of the triple city of Alexandria. They represented the
Aristotelian, the Hellenic, and Macedonian element. But
Ptolemy I had brought together two other factors to this strange
centre. First there was a great number of Jews, brought partly
from Palestine, but largely also from those settlements in Egypt
which had never returned to Jerusalem; these latter were the
Jews of the Diaspora or Dispersion, a race of Jews who, as we
have already noted in Chapter XIX, had not shared the Baby-
lonian Captivity, but who were nevertheless in possession of the
Bible and in close correspondence with their co-religionists
throughout the world. These Jews populated so great a quarter
of Alexandria that the town became the largest Jewish city
in the world, with far more Jews in it than there were in
Jerusalem. We have already noted that they had found
it necessary to translate their scriptures into Greek. And,
finally, there was a great population of native Egyptians, also
for the most part speaking Greek, but with the superstitious
temperament of the dark whites and with the vast tradition of
forty centuries of temple religion and temple sacrifices at the
back of their minds. In Alexandria three types of mind and
spirit met, the three main types of the white race, the clear-
headed criticism of the Aryan Greek, the moral fervour and
monotheism of the Semitic Jew, and the deep Mediterranean
tradition of mysteries and sacrifices that we have already seen
at work in the secret cults and occult practices of Greece, ideas
which in Hamitic Egypt ruled proudly in great temples in the
open light of day.
These three were the permanent elements of the Alexandrian
blend. But in the seaport and markets mingled men of every
known race, comparing their religious ideas and customs. It
is even related that in the third century B.C. Buddhist mis-
sionaries came from the court of King Asoka in India. Aris-
totle remarks in his Politics that the religious beliefs of men
are apt to borrow their form from political institutions, "men
assimilate the lives no less than the bodily forms of the gods
to their own/ 7 and this age of Greek-speaking great empires
under autocratic monarchs was bearing hardly upon those merely
local celebrities, the old tribal and city deities. Men were
requiring deities with an outlook at least as wide as the em-
pires, and except where the interests of powerful priesthood^
SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 351
Iffiff and
Horug
stood in the way, a curious process of assimilation of gods was
going on. Men found that though there were many gods, they
were all very much alike. Where there had been many gods,
men came to think there must be really only one god under a
diversity of names. He had been everywhere under an alias.
The Roman Jupiter, the Greek Zeus, the Egyptian Ammon, the
putative father of Alexander and the old antagonist of Ameno-
phis IV the Babylonian Bel-Marduk, were all sufficiently sim-
ilar to be identified.
"Father of all in every age, in every clime adored
By saint, by savage and by sage, Jehovah, Jove
or Lord."
Where there were distinct differences, the difficulty was met
by saying that these were different aspects of the same god.
Bel-Marduk, however, was now a very decadent god indeed,
who hardly survived as a pseudonym;
Assur, Dagon, and the like, poor old gods
of fallen nations, had long since passed
out of memory, and did not come into the
amalgamation. Osiris, a god popular
with the Egyptian commonalty, was al-
ready identified with Apis, the sacred
bull in the temple of Memphis, and some-
what confused with Ammon. Under the
name of Serapis he became the great
god of Hellenic Alexandria. He was
Jupiter-Serapis. The Egyptian cow
goddess, Hathor or Isis, was also repre-
sented now in human guise as the wife
of Osiris, to whom she bore the infant
Horus, who grew up to be Osiris again.
These bald statements sound strange,
no doubt, to a modern mind, but these
identifications and mixing up of one god
with another are very illustrative of the
struggle the quickening human intelligence was making to cling
still to religion and its emotional bonds and fellowship, while
making its gods more reasonable and universal.
This fusing of one god with another is called tlieocrasia, and
nowhere was it more vigorously going on than in Alexandria.
352
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Only two peoples resisted it in this period: the Jews, who al-
ready had their faith in the One God of Heaven and Earth,
Jehovah, and the Persian who had a monotheistic sun worship.
It was Ptolemy I who set up
not only the Museum in Alex-
andria, but the Serapeum, de-
voted to the worship of a trinity
of god which represented the re-
sult of a process of theocrasia ap-
plied more particularly to the
gods of Greece and Egypt.
This trinity consisted of the
god Serapis (= Osiris + Apis),
the goddess Isis (= Hathor, the
cow-moon goddess), and the child-
god Horus. In one way or an-
other almost every other god was
identified with one or other of
these three aspects of the one
God, even the sun god Mithras of
the Persians. And they were
each other; they were three, but
they were also one. They were
worshipped with great fervour,
and the jangling of a peculiar in-
strument, the sistrum, a frame set with bells and used rather
after the fashion of the tambourine in the proceedings of the
modern Salvation Army, was a distinctive accessory to the cere-
monies. And now for the first time we find the idea of immor-
tality becoming the central idea of a religion that extended be-
yond Egypt. Neither the early Aryans nor the early Semites
seem to have troubled very much about immortality, it has af-
fected the Mongolian mind very little, but the continuation of
the individual life after death had been from the earliest times
an intense preccupation of the Egyptians. It played now a
large part in the worship of Serapis. In the devotional litera-
ture of his cult he is spoken of as "the saviour and leader of
souls, leading souls to the light and receiving them again." It
is stated that "he raises the dead, he shows forth the longed-for
\ight of the sun to those who see, whose holy tombs contain multi-
tudes of sacred books' 7 ; and again, "we never can escape him,
Serapis
SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 353
he will save us, after death we shall still be the care of his
providence." l
The ceremonial burning, of candles and the offering of ex-
votos, that is to say of small models of parts of the human body
in need of succour, was a part of the worship of the Serapeum.
Isis attracted many devotees, who vowed their lives to her.
Her images stood in the temple, crowned as the Queen of
Heaven and bearing the infant Horus in .her arms. The candles
flared and guttered before her, and the wax ex-votos hung about
the shrine. The novice was put through a long and careful prep-
aration, he took vows of celibacy, and when he was initiated his
head was shaved and he was clad in a linen garment. . . .
In this worship of Serapis, which spread very widely through-
out the civilized world in the third and second centuries B.C.,
we see the most remarkable anticipations of usages and forms
of expression that were destined to dominate the European
world throughout the Christian era. The essential idea, the
living spirit, of Christianity was, as we shall presently show,
a new thing in the history of the mind and will of man; but
the garments of ritual and symbol and formula that Christianity
has worn, and still in many countries wears to this day, were
certainly woven in the cult and temples of Jupiter, Serapis, and
Isis that spread now from Alexandria throughout the civilized
world in the age of theocrasia in the second and first centuries
before Christ.
1 Legge, Forerunners and Rivals oj Christianity.
XXV
THE KISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM
1. The Story of Gautama. 2. Teaching and Legend in
Conflict. 3. The Gospel of Gautama Buddha, 4. Bud-
dhism and AsoJca. 1 5. Two Great Chinese Teachers. 6.
The Corruptions of Buddhism. 7. The Present Range of
Buddhism.
IT is interesting to turn from the mental and moral activities
of Athens and Alexandria, and the growth of human ideas
in the Mediterranean world, to the almost entirely separate
intellectual life of India. Here was a civilization which from
the first seems to have grown up upon its own roots and with a
character of its own. It was cut off from the civilizations to
the west and to the east hy vast mountain barriers and desert
regions. The Aryan tribes who had come down into the penin-
sula soon lost touch with their kindred to the west and north,
and developed upon lines of their own. This was more particu-
larly the case with those who had passed on into the Ganges
country and beyond. They found a civilization already scat-
tered over India, the Dravidian civilization. This had arisen
independently, just as the Sumerian, Cretan, and Egyptian
civilizations seem to have arisen, out of that widespread de-
velopment of the neolithic culture, the heliolithic culture, whose
characteristics we have already described. They revived and
changed this Dravidian civilization much as the Greeks did the
^Egean or the Semites the Sumerian.
These Indian Aryans were living under different conditions
from those that prevailed to the north-west. They were living
in a warmer climate, in which a diet of beef and fermented
liquor was destructive; they were forced, therefore, to a gen-
erally vegetarian dietary, and the prolific soil, almost unasked,
gave them all the food they needed. There was no further
1 Pronounced Ashoka.
354
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 355
reason for them to wander; the crops and seasons were trust-
worthy. They wanted little clothing or housing. They wanted
so little that trade was undeveloped. There was still land for
every one who desired to cultivate a patch and a little patch
sufficed. Their political life was simple and comparatively
secure ; no great conquering powers had arisen as yet in India,
and her natural barriers sufficed to stop the early imperialisms
to the west of her and to the east. Thousands of comparatively
pacific little village republics and chieftainships were spread
over the land. There was no sea life, there were no pirate
raiders, no strange traders. One might write a history of India
coming down to four hundred years ago and hardly mention
the sea.
The history of India for many centuries had been happier,
less fierce, and more dreamlike than any other history. The
noblemen, the rajahs, hunted; life was largely made up of love
stories. Here and there a maharajah arose amidst the rajahs
and built a city, caught and tamed many elephants, slew many
tigers, and left a tradition of his splendour and his wonderful
processions.
It was somewhen between 500 and 600 B.C., when Croasus
was flourishing in Lydia and Cyrus was preparing to snatch
Babylon from Nabonidus, that the founder of Buddhism was
born in India. He was born in a small republican 'tribal com-
munity in the north of Bengal under the Himalayas, in what is
now overgrown jungle country on the borders of Nepal. The
little state was ruled by a family, the Sakya clan, of which
this man, Siddhattha Gautama, was a member. Siddhattha
was his personal name, like Caius or John; Gautama, or
Gotama, his family name, like Caesar or Smith ; Sakya his clan
name, like Julius. The institution of caste was not yet fully
established in India, and the Brahmins, though they were privi-
leged and influential, had not yet struggled to the head of the
system; but there were already strongly marked class distinc-
tions and a practically impermeable partition between the noble
Aryans and the darker common people. Gautama belonged to
the former race. His teaching, we may note, was called the
Aryan Path, the Aryan Truth.
It is only within the last half-century that the increasing
study of the Pali language, in which most of the original sources
were written, has given the world a real knowledge of the life
356 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
and actual thought of Gautama. Previously his story was over-
laid by monstrous accumulations of legend, and his teaching
violently misconceived. But now we have a very human and
understandable account of him.
He was a good-looking, capable young man of fortune, and
until he was twenty-nine he lived the ordinary aristocratic life
of his time. It was not a very satisfying life intellectually.
There was no literature except the oral tradition of the Vedas,
and that was chiefly monopolized by the Brahmins; there was
even less knowledge. The world was bound by the snowy
Himalayas to the north and spread indefinitely to the south.
The city of Benares, which had a king, was about a hundred
miles away. The chief amusements were hunting and love-
making. All the good that life seemed to offer, Gautama en-
joyed. He was married at nineteen to a beautiful cousin. For
some years they remained childless. He hunted and played and
went about in his sunny world of gardens and groves and
irrigated rice-fields. And it was amidst this life that a great
discontent fell upon him. It was the unhappiness of a fine
brain that seeks employment. He lived amidst plenty and
beauty, he passed from gratification to gratification, and his soul
was not satisfied. It was as if he heard the destinies of the
race calling to him. He felt that the existence he was leading
was not the reality of life, but a holiday a holiday that had
gone on too long.
While he was in this mood he saw four things that served to
point his thoughts. He was driving on some excursion of
pleasure, when he came upon a man dreadfully broken down
by age. The poor bent, enfeebled creature struck his imagina-
tion. "Such is the way of life," said Channa, his charioteer,
and "to that we must all come." While this was yet in his mind
he chanced upon a man suffering horribly from some loathsome
disease. "Such is the way of life," said Channa. The third
vision was of an unburied body, swollen, eyeless, mauled by
passing birds and beasts and altogether terrible. "That is the
way of life," said Channa.
The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the
unsatisfactoriness of all happiness, descended upon the mind of
Gautama. And then he and Channa saw one of those wander-
ing ascetics who already existed in great numbers in India.
These men lived under severe rules, spending much time in
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 357
meditation and in religious discussion. For many men before
Gautama in that land of uneventful sunshine had found life
distressing and mysterious. These ascetics were all supposed
to be seeking some deeper reality in life, and a passionate desire
to do likewise took possession of Gautama.
He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when
the news was brought to him that his wife had been delivered
of his first-born son. "This is another tie to break," said
Gautama.
He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fel-
low clansmen. There was a great feast and a ISTautch dance
to celebrate the birth of this new tie, and in the night Gautama
awoke in a great agony of spirit, "like a man who is told that
his house is on fire." In the ante-room the dancing girls were
lying in strips of darkness and moonlight. He called Channa,
and told him to prepare his horse. Then he went softly to the
threshold of his wife's chamber, and saw her by the light of a
little oil lamp, sleeping sweetly, surrounded by flowers, with
his infant son in her arm. He felt a great craving to take up
the child in one first and last embrace before he departed, but
the fear of waking his wife prevented him, and at last he
turned away and went out into the bright Indian moonshine to
Channa waiting with the horses, and mounted and stole away.
As he rode through the night with Channa, it seemed to him
that Mara, the Tempter of Mankind, filled the sky and disputed
with him. "Return," said Mara, "and be a king, and I will
make you the greatest of kings. Go on, and you will fail.
Never will I cease to dog your footsteps. Lust or malice or
anger will betray you at last in some unwary moment; sooner
or later you will be mine."
Very far they rode that night, and in the morning he stopped
outside the lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a sandy
river. There he cut off his flowing locks with his sword, re-
moved all his ornaments, and sent them and his horse and sword
back to his house by Channa. Then going on he presently met
a ragged man and exchanged clothes with him, and so having
divested himself of all worldly entanglements, he was free to
pursue his search after wisdom. He made his way southward
to a resort of hermits and teachers in a hilly spur running into
Bengal northward from the Vindhya Mountains, close to the
town of Rajgir. There a number of wise men lived in a warren
358
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
BUDDHISM
AsoJra.'5*capital.J
of caves, going into the town for their simple supplies and
imparting their knowledge by word of mouth to such as cared
to come to them.
This instruction must have been very much in the style of
the Socratic discussions that were going on in Athens a couple
of centuries later. Gautama became versed in all the meta-
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 359
physics of his age. But his acute intelligence was dissatisfied
with the solutions offered him.
The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that
power and knowledge may be obtained by extreme asceticism,
by fasting, sleeplessness, and self-torment, and these ideas Gau-
tama now put to the test. He betook himself with five disciple
companions to the jungle in a gorge in the Vindhya Mountains,
and there he gave himself up to fasting and terrible penances.
His fame spread, "like the sound of a great bell hung in the
canopy of the skies." l But it brought him no sense of truth
achieved. One day he was walking up and down, trying to
think in spite of his enfeebled state. Suddenly he staggered
and fell unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness
of these semi-magic ways of attempting wisdom was plain to
him.
He amazed and horrified his five companions by demanding
ordinary food and refusing to continue his self-mortifications.
He had realized that whatever truth a man may reach is reached
best by a nourished brain in a healthy body. Such a conception
was absolutely foreign to the ideas of the land and age. His
disciples deserted him, and went off in a melancholy state to
Benares. The boom of the great bell ceased. Gautama the
wonderful had fallen.
For a time Gautama wandered alone, the loneliest figure in
history, battling for light.
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem,
it makes its advances, it secures its positions step by step, with
but little realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly,
with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory. So
it would seem it happened to Gautama. He had seated himself
under a great tree by the side of a river to eat, when this sense
of clear vision came to him. It seemed to him that he saw life
plain. He is said to have sat all day and all night in profound
thought, and then he rose up to impart his vision to the world.
2
Such is the plain story of Gautama as we gather it from a
comparison of early writings. But common men must have
their cheap marvels and wonders.
*The Burmese Chronicle, quoted by Rhys Davids.
360 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
It is nothing to them that this little planet should at last pro-
duce upon its surface a man thinking of the past and the future
and the essential nature of existence. And so we must have
this sort of thing by some worthy Pali scribe, making the most
of it:
"When the conflict began between the Saviour of the World
and the Prince of Evil a thousand appalling meteors fell. . . .
Rivers flowed back towards their sources ; peaks and lofty moun-
tains where countless trees had grown for ages rolled crumbling
to the earth . . . the sun enveloped itself in awful darkness,
and a host of headless spirits filled the air." *
Of which phenomena history has preserved no authentication.
Instead we have only the figure of a lonely man walking towards
Benares.
Extraordinary attention has been given to the tree under
which Gautama had this sense of mental clarity. It was a
tree of the fig genus, and from the first it was treated with
peculiar veneration. It was called the Bo Tree. It has long
since perished, but close at hand lives another great tree which
may be its descendant, and in Ceylon there grows to this day
a tree, the oldest historical tree in the world, which we know
certainly to have been planted as a cutting from the Bo Tree
in the year 245 B.C. From that time to this it has been care-
fully tended and watered; its great branches are supported by
pillars, and the earth has been terraced up about it so that it
has been able to put out fresh roots continually. It helps us
to realize the shortness of all human history to see so many
generations spanned by the endurance of one single tree. Gau-
tama's disciples unhappily have cared more for the preservation
of his tree than of his thought, which from the first they mis-
conceived and distorted.
At Benares Gautama sought out his five pupils, who were
still leading the ascetic life. There is an account of their hesi-
tation to receive him when they saw him approaching. He was
a backslider. But there was some power of personality in him
that prevailed over their coldness, and he made them listen to
his new convictions. For five days the discussion was carried
on. When he had at last convinced them that he was now
enlightened, they hailed him as the Buddha. There was already
in those days a belief in India that at long intervals Wisdom
1 The Madhurattha Vilasvni, quoted by Rhys Davids.
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 361
returned to the earth and was revealed to mankind through
a chosen person known as the Buddha. According to Indian
belief there have been many such Buddhas; Gautama Buddha
is only the latest one of a series. But it is doubtful if he him-
self accepted that title or recognized that theory. In his dis-
courses he never called himself the Buddha.
He and his recovered disciples then formed a sort of Academy
in the Deer Park at Benares. They made themselves huts, and
accumulated other followers to the number of threescore or
more. In the rainy season they remained in discourse at this
settlement, and during the dry weather they dispersed about
the country, each giving his version of the new teachings. All
their teaching was done, it would seem, by word of mouth. There
was probably no writing yet in India at all. We must remem-
ber that in the time of Buddha it is doubtful if even the Iliad
had been committed to writing. Probably the Mediterranean
alphabet, which is the basis of most Indian scripts, had not yet
reached India. The master, therefore, worked out and com-
posed pithy and brief verses, aphorisms, and lists of "points,"
and these were expanded in the discourse of his disciples. It
greatly helped them to have these points and aphorisms num-
bered. The modern mind is apt to be impatient of the tendency
of Indian thought to a numerical statement of things, the Eight-
fold Path, the Four Truths, and so on, but this enumeration
was a mnemonic necessity in an undocumented world.
3
The fundamental teaching of Gautama, as it is now being
made plain to us by the study of original sources, is clear and
simple and in the closest harmony with modern ideas. It is
beyond all dispute the achievement of one of the most penetrat-
ing intelligences the world has ever known.
We have what are almost certainly the authentic heads of
his discourse to the five disciples which embodies his essential
doctrine. All the miseries and discontents of life he traces to
insatiable selfishness. Suffering, he teaches, is due to the
craving individuality, to the torment of greedy desire. Until a
man has overcome every sort of personal craving his life is
trouble and his end sorrow. There are three principal forms
the craving of life takes, and all are evil. The first is the desire
362 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
to gratify the senses, sensuousness. The second is the desire
for personal immortality. The third is the desire for prosperity,
worldliness. All these must be overcome that is to say, a man
must no longer be living for himself before life can become
serene. But when they are indeed overcome and no longer rule
a man's life, when the first personal pronoun has vanished from
his private thoughts, then he has reached the higher wisdom,
Nirvana, serenity of soul. For Nirvana does not mean, as many
people wrongly believe, extinction, but the extinction of the
futile personal aims that necessarily make life base or pitiful
or dreadful.
Now here, surely we have the completest analysis of the
problem of the soul's peace. Every religion that is worth the
name, every philosophy, warns us to lose ourselves in something
greater than ourselves. " Whosoever would save his life, shall
lose it ;" there is exactly the same lesson.
The teaching of history, as we are unfolding it in this book,
is strictly in accordance with this teaching of Buddha. There
is, as we are seeing, no social order, no security, no peace or
happiness, no righteous leadership or kingship, unless men lose
themselves in something greater than themselves. The study
of biological progress again reveals exactly the same process
the merger of the narrow globe of the individual experience in
a wider being (compare what has been said in Chaps. XI and
XVI). To forget oneself in greater interests is to escape
from a prison.
The self-abnegation must be complete. From the point of
view of Gautama, that dread of death, that greed for an endless
continuation of his mean little individual life which drove the
Egyptian and those who learnt from him with propitiations and
charms into the temples, was as mortal and ugly and evil a
thing as lust or avarice or hate. The religion of Gautama is
flatly opposite to the "immortality" religions. And his teach-
ing is set like flint against asceticism, as a mere attempt to win
personal power by personal pains.
But when we come to the rule of life, the Aryan Path, by
which we are to escape from the threefold base cravings that
dishonour human life, then the teaching is not so clear. It is
not so clear for one very manifest reason, Gautama had no
knowledge nor vision of history; he had no clear sense of the
vast and many-sided adventure of life opening out in space and
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 363
time. His mind was confined within the ideas of his age and
people, and their minds were shaped into notions of perpetual
recurrence, of world following world and of Buddha following
Buddha, a stagnant circling of the universe. The idea of man-
kind as a great Brotherhood pursuing an endless destiny under
the God of Righteousness, the idea that was already dawning
upon the Semitic consciousness in Babylon at this time, did not
exist in his world. Yet his account of the Eightfold Path is,
nevertheless, within these limitations, profoundly wise.
Let us briefly recapitulate the eight elements of the Aryan
Path. First, Right Views ; Gautama placed the stern examina-
tion of views and ideas, the insistence upon truth as the first
research of his followers. There was to be no clinging to
tawdry superstitions. He condemned, for instance, the preva-
lent belief in the transmigration of souls. In a well-known
early Buddhist dialogue there is a destructive analysis of the
idea of an enduring individual soul. Next to Right Views
came Right Aspirations ; because nature abhors a vacuum, and
since base cravings are to be expelled, other desires must be
encouraged love for the service of others, desire to do and
secure justice and the like. Primitive and uncorrupted Bud-
dhism aimed not at the destruction of desire, but at the change
of desire. Devotion to science and art, or to the betterment of
things manifestly falls into harmony with the Buddhistic Right
Aspirations, provided such aims are free from jealousy or
the craving for fame. Right Speech, Right Conduct, and Right
Livelihood, need no expansion here. Sixthly in this list came
Right Effort, for Gautama had no toleration for good intentions
and slovenly application; the disciple had to keep a keenly
critical eye upon his activities. The seventh element of the
path, Right Mindfulness, is the constant guard against a lapse
into personal feeling or glory for whatever is done or not done.
And, finally, comes Right Rapture, which seems to be aimed
against the pointless ecstacies of the devout, such witless glory-
ings, for instance, as those that went to the jingle of the Alex-
andrian sistrum.
We will not discuss here the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma,
because it belongs to a world of thought that is passing away.
The good or evil of every life was supposed to determine the
happiness or misery of some subsequent life, that was in some
inexplicable way identified with its predecessor. Nowadays we
S64 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
realize that a life goes on in its consequences for ever, but we
find no necessity to suppose that any particular life resumes
again. The Indian mind was full of the idea of cyclic re-
currence ; everything was supposed to come round again. This
is a very natural supposition for men to make; so things seem
to be until we analyze them. Modern science has made clear
to us that there is no such exact recurrence as we are apt to
suppose; every day is by an infinitesimal quantity a little
longer than the day before; no generation repeats the previous
generation precisely; history never repeats itself; change, we
realize now, is inexhaustible ; all things are eternally new. But
these differences between our general ideas and those Buddha
must have possessed need not in any way prevent us from
appreciating the unprecedented wisdom, the goodness, and the
greatness of this plan of an emancipated life as Gautama laid
it down somewhen in the sixth century before Christ.
And if he failed in theory to gather together all the wills
of the converted into the one multifarious activity of our race,
battling against death and deadness in time and space, he did
in practice direct his own life and that of all his immediate
disciples into one progressive adventure, which was to preach
and spread the doctrine and methods of Nirvana or soul-
serenity throughout our fevered world. For them at least his
teaching was complete and full. But all men cannot preach or
teach ; doctrine is but one of many of the functions of life that
are fundamentally righteous. To the modern mind it seems at.
least equally acceptable that a man may, though perhaps against
greater difficulties, cultivate the soil, rule a city, make roads,
build houses, construct engines, or seek and spread knowledge,
in perfect self-forgetfulness and serenity. As much was in-
herent in Gautama's teaching, but the stress was certainly laid
upon the teaching itself, and upon withdrawal from rather than
upon the ennoblement of the ordinary affairs of men.
In certain other respects this primitive Buddhism differed
from any of the religions we have hitherto considered. It was
primarily a religion of conduct, not a religion of observances
and sacrifices. It had no temples, and since it had no sacrifices,
it had no sacred order of priests. Nor had it any theology. It
neither asserted nor denied the reality of the innumerable and
often grotesque gods who were worshipped in India at that
time. It passed them by.
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 363
4
From the very first this new teaching was misconceived. One
corruption was perhaps inherent in its teaching. Because the
world of men had as yet no sense of the continuous progressive
effort of life, it was very easy to slip from the idea of renouncing
self to the idea of renouncing active life. As Gautama's own
experiences had shown, it is easier to flee from this world than
from self. His early disciples were strenuous thinkers and
teachers, but the lapse into mere monastic seclusion was a very
easy one, particularly easy in the climate of India, where an
extreme simplicity of living is convenient and attractive, and
exertion more laborious than anywhere else in the world.
And it was early the fate of Gautama, as it has been the fate
of most religious founders since his days, -to be made into a
wonder by his less intelligent disciples in their efforts to impress
the outer world. We have already noted how one devout fol-
lower could not but believe that the moment of the master's
mental irradiation must necessarily have been marked by an
epileptic fit of the elements. This is one small sample of the
vast accumulation of vulgar marvels that presently sprang up
about the memory of Gautama.
There can be no doubt that for the great multitude of human
beings then as now the mere idea of an emancipation from self
is a very difficult one to grasp. It is probable that even among
the teachers Buddha was sending out from Benares there were
many who did not grasp it and still less were able to convey it to
their hearers. Their teaching quite naturally took on the aspect
of salvation not from oneself that idea was beyond them but
from misfortunes and sufferings here and hereafter. In the
existing superstitions of the people, and especially in the idea
of the transmigration of the soul after death, though this idea
was contrary to the Master's own teaching, they found stuff of
fear they could work upon. They urged virtue upon the people
lest they should live again in degraded or miserable forms, or fall
into some one of the innumerable hells of torment with which
the Brahminical teachers had already familiarized their minds.
They represented Buddha as the saviour from almost unlimited
torment.
There seems to be no limit to the lies that honest but stupid
disciples will tell for the glory of their master and for what they
366
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Harltl
(painting
Chinese
Turkestan,
regard as the success of their propaganda. Men who would
scorn to tell a lie in everyday life will become unscrupulous
cheats and liars when they have given themselves up to propa-
gandist work; it is one of the perplexing absurdities of our
human nature. Such honest souls, for most of them were in-
dubitably honest, were presently telling their hearers of the
miracles that attended the Buddha's birth they no longer called
him Gautama, because that was too familiar a name of his
youthful feats of
strength, of the marvels
of his everyday life,
winding up with a sort
of illumination of his
body at the moment of
death. Of course it was
impossible to believe
that Buddha was the
son of a mortal father.
He was miraculously
conceived through his
mother dreaming of a
beautiful white ele-
phant ! Previously he
had himself been a mar-
vellous elephant with
six tusks; he had gen-
erously given them all
to a needy hunter
and even helped him to
saw them off. And so
on.
Moreover, a theology
grew up about Buddha.
He was discovered to
be a god. He was one
of a series of divine beings, the Buddhas. There was an un-
dying "Spirit of all the Buddhas" ; there was a great series
of Buddhas past and Buddhas (or Buddisatvas) yet to come.
But we cannot go further into these complications of Asiatic
theology. "Under the overpowering influence of these sickly
imaginations the moral teachings of Gautama have been almost
[after Toucher]
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 367
hid from view. The theories grew and flourished; each new
step, each new hypothesis, demanded another; until the whole
sky was filled with forgeries of the brain, and the nobler and
simpler lessons of the founder of the religion were smothered
beneath the glittering mass of metaphysical subtleties." l
In the third century B.C. Buddhism was gaining wealth and
power, and the little groups of simple huts in which the teachers
of the Order gathered in the rainy season were giving place to
substantial monastic buildings. To this period belong the begin-
nings of Buddhistic art. Now if we remember how recent was
the adventure of Alexander, that all the Punjab was still under
Seleucid rule, that all India abounded with Greek adventurers,
and that there was still quite open communication by sea and
land with Alexandria, it is no great wonder to find that this
early Buddhist art was strongly Greek in character, and that the
new Alexandrian cult of Serapis and Isis was extraordinarily
influential in its development.
The kingdom of Gandhara on the north-west frontier near
Peshawar, which flourished in the third century B.C., was a typ-
ical meeting-place of the Hellenic and Indian worlds. Here are
to be found the earliest Buddhist sculptures, and interwoven
with them are figures which are recognizably the figures of
Serapis and Isis and Horus already worked into the legendary
net that gathered about Buddha. No doubt the Greek artists
who came to Gandhara were loth to relinquish a familiar theme.
But Isis, we are told, is no longer Isis but Hariti, a pestilence
goddess whom Buddha converted and made benevolent. Foucher
traces Isis from this centre into China, but here other influences
were also at work, and the story becomes too complex for us
to disentangle in this Outline. 2 China had a Taoist deity, the
Holy Mother, the Queen of Heaven, who took on the name
(originally a male name) of Kuan-yin and who came to re-
semble the Isis figure very closely. The Isis figures, we feel,
must have influenced the treatment of Kuan-yin. Like Isis
she was also Queen of the Seas, Stella Maris. In Japan she
was called Kwannon. There seems to have been a constant
exchange of the outer forms of religion between east and west.
We read in Hue's Travels how perplexing he and his fellow
a Rhys Davids, Buddhism.
2 See K. F. Johnston, Buddhist China. L. C. B.
368 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
missionary found this possession of a common tradition of wor-
ship. "The cross," he says, "the mitre, the dalmatica, the cope,
which the Grand Lamas wear on their journeys, or when they are
performing some ceremony out of the temple; the service with
double choirs, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer, suspended
from five chains, which you can open or close at pleasure; the
benedictions given by the Lamas by extending the right hand
over the heads of the faithful ; the chaplet, ecclesiastical celibacy,
spiritual retirement, the worship of the saints, the fasts, the
processions, the litanies, the holy water, all these are analogies
between the Buddhists and ourselves." l
The cult and doctrine of Gautama, gathering corruptions and
variations from Brahminism and Hellenism alike, was spread
throughout India by an increasing multitude of teachers in the
fourth and third centuries B.C. For some generations at least
it retained much of the moral beauty and something of the
simplicity of the opening phase. Many people who have no
intellectual grasp upon the meaning of self-abnegation and dis-
interestedness have nevertheless the ability to appreciate a splen-
dour in the reality of these qualities. Early Buddhism was
certainly producing noble lives, and it is not only through rea-
son that the latent response to nobility is aroused in our minds.
It spread rather in spite of than because of the concessions that
it made to vulgar imaginations. It spread because many of
the early Buddhists were sweet and gentle, helpful and noble
and admirable people, who compelled belief in their sustaining
faith.
Quite early in its career Buddhism came into conflict with
the growing pretensions of the Brahmins. As we have already
noted, this priestly caste was still only struggling to dominate
Indian life in the days of Gautama. They had already great
advantages. They had the monopoly of tradition and religious
sacrifices. But their power was being challenged by the de-
velopment of kingship, for the men who became clan leaders and
kings were usually not of the Brahminical caste.
Kingship received an impetus from the Persian and Greek
invasions of the Punjab. We have already noted the name of
King Porus whom, in spite of his elephants, Alexander de-
feated and turned into a satrap. There came also to the Greek
camp upon the Indus a certain adventurer named Chandra-
1 Hue's Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China.
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM
369
gupta Maurya, whom the Greeks called Sandracottus, with a
scheme for conquering the Ganges country. The scheme was
not welcome to the Macedonians, who were in revolt against
marching any further into India, and he had to fly the camp.
He wandered among the tribes upon the north-west frontier, se-
cured their support, and after Alexander
had departed, overran the Punjab, ousting
the Macedonian representatives. He then
conquered the Ganges country (321 B.C.),
waged a successful war (03 B.C.) against
Seleucus (Seleucus I) when the latter at-
tempted to recover the Punjab, and con-
solidated a great empire reaching across
all the plain of northern India from the
western to the eastern sea. And this King
Chandragupta came into much the same
conflict with the growing power of the
Brahmins, into the conflict between crown
and priesthood, that we have already noted
as happening in Babylonia and Egypt and
China. He saw in the spreading doctrine
of Buddhism an ally against the growth
of priestcraft and caste. He supported
and endowed the Buddhistic Order, and
encouraged its teachings.
He was succeeded by his son, who con-
quered Madras and was in turn succeeded by Asoka (264 to
227 B.C.), one of the great monarchs of history, whose do-
minions extended from Afghanistan to Madras. He is the only
military monarch on record who abandoned warfare after vic-
tory. He had invaded Kalinga (255 B.C.), a country along the
east coast of Madras, perhaps with some intention of completing
the conquest of the tip of the Indian peninsula. The expedi-
tion was successful, but he was disgusted by what he saw of
the cruelties and horrors of war. He declared, in certain in-
scriptions that still exist, that he would no longer seek conquest
by war, but by religion, and the rest of his life was devoted to
the spreading of Buddhism throughout the world.
He seems to have ruled his vast empire in peace and with
great ability. He was no mere religious fanatic. But in the
CHINESE IMAGE
KUAN-YIN
370
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
year of his one and only war he joined the Buddhist community
as a layman, and some years later he became a full member
of the Order, and devoted himself to the attainment of Nirvana
by the Eightfold Path. How entirely compatible that way of
living then was with the most useful and beneficent activities his
life shows. Right Aspiration, Right Effort, and Right Liveli-
"Map to illustrate
tKc .spreacL cf "
BUDDHISM
Present extent of
Buddhism,.
. (after 1?hys Davids
hood distinguished his career. He organized a great digging &5
wells in India, and the planting of trees for shade. He ap-
pointed officers for the supervision of charitable works. He
founded hospitals and public gardens. He had gardens made
for the growing of medicinal herbs. Had he had an Aristotle to
inspire him, he would no doubt have endowed scientific research
upon a great scale. He created a ministry for the care of the
aborigines and subject races. He made provision for the educa-
tion of women. He made, he was the first monarch to make,
an attempt to educate his people into a common view of the ends
and way of life. He made vast benefactions to the Buddhist
teaching orders, and tried to stimulate them to a better study
of their own literature. All over the land he set up long inscrip-
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 371
tions rehearsing the teaching of Gautama, and it is the simple
and human teaching and not the preposterous accretions. Thir-
ty-five of his inscriptions survive to this day. Moreover, he sent
missionaries to spread the nohle and reasonable teaching of his
master throughout the world, to Kashmir, to Ceylon, to the
Seleucids, and the Ptolemies. It was one of these missions which
carried that cutting of the Bo Tree, of which we have already
told, to Ceylon.
For eight and twenty years Asoka worked sanely for the real
needs of men. Amidst the tens of thousands of names of mon-
archs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and
graciousnesses and serenities and royal highnesses and the like,
the name of Asoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star. From
the Volga to Japan his name is still honoured. China, Tibet,
and even India, though it has left his doctrine, preserve the
tradition of his greatness. More living men cherish his memory
to-day than have ever heard the names of Constantino or
Charlemagne.
It is thought that the vast benefactions of Asoka finally cor-
rupted Buddhism by attracting to its Order great numbers of
mercenary and insincere adherents, but there can be no doubt
that its rapid extension throughout Asia was very largely due
to his stimulus.
It made its way into Central Asia through Afghanistan and
Turkestan, and so reached China. Buddhist teaching had
spread widely in China before 200 B.C. Buddhism found there
a popular and prevalent religion, Taoism, a development of very
ancient and primitive magic and occult practices. It was reor-
ganized as a distinctive cult by Chang Daoling in the days
of the Han dynasty. Tao means the Way, which corresponds
closely with the idea of the Aryan Path. The two religions
spread side by side and underwent similar changes, so that
nowadays their outward practice is very similar. Buddhism
also encountered Confucianism, which was even less theological
and even more a code of personal conduct. And finally it en-
countered the teachings of Lao Tse, "anarchist, evolutionist,
pacifist and moral philosopher," l which were not so much a
1 S. N. Fu.
372 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
religion as a philosophical rule of life. The teachings of this
Lao Tse were later to become incorporated with the Taoist re-
ligion by Chen Tuan, the founder of modern Taoism.
Confucius, the founder of Confucianism, like the great south-
ern teacher Lao Tse and Gautama, lived also in the sixth cen-
tury B.C. His life has some interesting parallelisms with that
of some of the more political of the Greek philosophers of the
fifth and fourth. The sixth century B.C. falls into the period
assigned hy Chinese historians to the Chow Dynasty, but in those
days the rule of that dynasty had become little more than
nominal ; the emperor conducted the traditional sacrifices of the
Son of Heaven, and received a certain formal respect. Even
his nominal empire was not a sixth part of the China of to-day.
In Chapter XIV we have already glanced at the state of affairs
in China at this time; practically China was a multitude of
warring states open to the northern barbarians. Confucius was
a subject in one of those states, Lu ; he was of aristocratic birth,
but poor; and, after occupying various official positions, he set
up a sort of Academy in Lu for the discovery and imparting
of Wisdom. And we also find Confucius travelling from state
to state in China, seeking a prince who would make him his
counsellor and become the centre of a reformed world. Plato,
two centuries later, in exactly the same spirit, went as ad-
viser to the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, and we have already
noted the attitudes of Aristotle and Isocrates towards Philip
of Macedonia.
The teaching of Confucius centred upon the idea of a noble
life which he embodied in a standard or ideal, the Aristocratic
Man. This phrase is often translated into English as the
Superior Person, but as "superior" and "person," like "re-
spectable" and "genteel," have long become semi-humorous
terms of abuse, this rendering is not fair to Confucianism. He
did present to his time the ideal of a devoted public man. The
public side was very important to him. He was far more
of a constructive political thinker than Gautama or Lao Tse.
His mind was full of the condition of China, and he sought to
call the Aristocratic Man into existence very largely in order
to produce the noble state. One of his sayings may be quoted
here: "It is impossible to withdraw from the world, and asso-
ciate with birds and beasts that have no affinity with us. With
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 373
whom should I associate hut with suffering men ? The disorder
that prevails is what requires my efforts. If right principles
ruled through the kingdom, there would he no necessity for me
to change its state."
The political basis of his teaching seems to he characteristic
of Chinese moral ideas ; there is a much directer reference to
the State than is the case with most Indian and European moral
and religious doctrine. For a time he was appointed magis-
trate in Chung-tu, a city of the dukedom of Lu, and here he
sought to regulate life to an extraordinary extent, to subdue
every relationship and action indeed to the rule of an elaborate
etiquette. "Ceremonial in every detail, such as we are wont
to see only in the courts of rulers and the households of high
dignitaries, became obligatory on the people at large^ and all
matters of daily life were subject to rigid rule. Even the food
which the different classes of people might eat was regulated;
males and females were kept apart in the streets ; even the thick-
ness of coffins and the shape and situation of graves were made
the subject of regulations. 1
This is all, as people say, very Chinese. No other people
have ever approached moral order and social stability through
the channel of manners. Yet in China, at any rate, the methods
of Confucius have had an enormous effect, and no nation in the
world to-day has such a universal tradition of decorum and
self-restraint.
Later on the influence of Confucius over his duke was under-
mined, and he withdrew again into private life. His last days
were saddened by the deaths of some of his most promising
disciples. "~No intelligent ruler," he said, "arises to take me
as his master, and my time has come to die." . . .
But he died to live. Says Hirth, "There can be no doubt
that Confucius has had a greater influence 011 the development
of the Chinese national character than many emperors taken
together. He is, therefore, one of the essential figures to be
considered in connection with any history of China. That he
could influence his nation to such a degree was, it appears to me,
due more to the peculiarity of the nation than to that of his
own personality. Had he lived in any other part of the world,
his name would perhaps be forgotten. As we have seen, he had
1 Hirth's The Ancient History of China.
374
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 375
formed his character and his personal views on man's life from
a careful study of documents closely connected with the moral
philosophy cultivated hy former generations. What he preached
to his contemporaries was, therefore, not all new to them ; hut,
having himself, in the study of old records, heard the dim voice
of the sages of the past, he became, as it were, the megaphone
phonograph through which were expressed to the nation those
views which he had derived from the early development of the
nation itself. . . . The great influence of Confucius's person-
ality on national life in China was due not only to his writings
and his teachings as recorded by others, but also to his doings.
His personal character, as described by his disciples and in the
accounts of later writers, some of which may be entirely legen-
dary, has become the pattern for millions of those who are bent
on imitating the outward manners of a great man. . . . What-
ever he did in public was regulated to the minutest detail by
ceremony. This was no invention of his own, since ceremonial
life had been cultivated many centuries before Confucius ; but
his authority and example did much to perpetuate what he con-
sidered desirable social practices."
The Chinese speak of Buddhism and the doctrines of Lao
Tse and Confucius as the Three Teachings. Together they con-
stitute the basis and point of departure of all later Chinese
thought. Their thorough study is a necessary preliminary to
the establishment of any real intellectual and moral commu-
nity between the great people of the East and the Western
world.
There are certain things to be remarked in common of all
these three teachers, of whom Gautama was indisputably the
greatest and profoundest, whose doctrines to this day dominate
the thought of the great majority of human beings ; there are
certain features in which their teaching contrasts with the
thoughts and feelings that were soon to take possession of the
Western world. Primarily they are personal and tolerant doc-
trines; they are doctrines of a Way, of a Path, of a Nobility,
and not doctrines of a church or a general rule. And they
offer nothing either for or against the existence and worship
of the current gods. The Athenian philosophers, it is to be
noted, had just the same theological detachment ! Socrates was
quite willing to bow politely or sacrifice formally to almost any
divinity, reserving his private thoughts. This attitude is flatly
376 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
antagonistic to the state of mind that was growing up in the
Jewish communities of Judea, Egypt, and Babylonia, in
which the thought of the one God was first and foremost, Neither
Gautama nor Lao Tse nor Confucius had any inkling of thin
idea of a jealous God, a God who would have "none other gods,"
a God of terrible Truth, who would not tolerate any lurking be-
lief in magic, witchcraft, or old customs, or any sacrificing to
the god-king or any trifling with the stern unity of things.
6
The intolerance of the Jewish mind did keep its essential faith
clear and clean. The theological disregard of the great Eastern
teachers, neither assenting nor denying, did on the other hand
permit elaborations of explanation and accumulations of ritual
from the very beginning. Except for Gautama's insistence
upon Right Views, which was easily disregarded, there was no
self -cleansing element in either Buddhism, Taoism, or Confu-
cianism. There was no effective prohibition of superstitious
practices, spirit raising, incantations, prostrations, and sup-
plementary worships. At an early stage a process of encrusta-
tion began, and continued. The new faiths caught almost every
disease of the corrupt religions they sought to replace; they
took over the idols and the temples, the altars and the censers.
Tibet to-day is a Buddhistic country, yet Gautama, could he
return to earth, might go from end to end of Tibet seeking his
own teaching in vain. He would find that most ancient type
of human ruler, a god-king, enthroned, the Dalai Lama, the
"living Buddha." At Lhassa he would find a huge temple filled
with priests, abbots, and lamas he whose only buildings were
huts and who made no priests and above a high altar he would
behold a huge golden idol, which he would learn was called
"Gautama Buddha" ! He would hear services intoned before
this divinity, and certain precepts, which would be dimly famil-
iar to him, murmured as responses. Bells, incense, prostrations,
would play their part in these amazing proceedings. At one
point in the service a bell would be rung and a mirror lifted up,
while the whole congregation, in an access of reverence, bowed
lower. . . .
About this Buddhist countryside he would discover a num-
ber of curious little mechanisms, little wind-wheels and water-
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 377
O
378 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
wheels spinning, on which brief prayers were inscribed. Every
time these things spin, he would learn, it counts as a prayer.
"To whom ?" he would ask. Moreover, there would be a number
of flagstaffs in the land carrying beautiful silk flags, silk flags
which bore the perplexing inscription, "Om Mani padme hum/'
"the jewel is in the lotus." Whenever the flag flaps, he would
learn, it was a prayer also, very beneficial to the gentleman who
paid for the flag and to the land generally. Gangs of workmen,
employed by pious persons, would be going about the country
cutting this precious formula on cliff and stone. And this, he
would realize at last, was what the world had made of his re-
ligion ! Beneath this gaudy glitter was buried the Aryan Way
to serenity of soul.
We have already noted the want of any progressive idea in
primitive Buddhism. In that again it contrasted with Judaism.
The idea of a Promise gave to Judaism a quality no previous
or contemporary religion displayed ; it made Judaism historical
and dramatic. It justified its fierce intolerance because it
pointed to an aim. In spite of the truth and profundity of the
psychological side of Gautama's teaching, Buddhism stagnated
and corrupted for the lack of that directive idea. Judaism, it
must be confessed, in its earlier phases, entered but little into
the souls of men ; it let them remain lustful, avaricious, worldly
or superstitious ; but because of its persuasion of a promise and
of a divine leadership to serve divine ends, it remained in
comparison with Buddhism bright and expectant, like a cared-
for sword.
For some time Buddhism flourished in India. But Brahmin-
ism, with its many gods and its endless variety of cults, always
flourished by its side, and the organization of the Brahmins grew
more powerful, until at last they were able to turn upon this
caste-denying cult and oust it from India altogether. The story
of that struggle is not to be told here; there were persecutions
and reactions, but by the eleventh century, except for Orissa,
Buddhist teaching was extinct in India. Much of its gen-
tleness and charity had, however, become incorporated with
Brahminism.
Over great areas of the world, as our map has shown, it still
survives; and it is quite possible that in contact with western
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 379
science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teach-
ing of Gautama, revived and purified, may yet play a large part
in the direction of human destiny.
But with the loss of India the Aryan Way ceased to rule the
lives of any Aryan peoples. It is curious to note that while the
one great Aryan religion is now almost exclusively confined to
Mongolian peoples, the Aryans themselves are under the sway of
two religions, Christianity and Islam, which are, as we shall see,
essentially Semitic. And both Buddhism and Christianity wear
garments of ritual and formula that seem to be derived through
Hellenistic channels from that land of temples and priestcraft,
Egypt, and from the more primitive and fundamental mentality
of the brown Hamitic peoples.
XXVI
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS
1. The Beginnings of the Latins. 2. A New Sort of
State. 3. The Carthaginian Republic of Rich Men. 4.
The First Punic War.- 5. Cato the Elder and the Spirit
of Cato. 6. The Second Punic War. 7. The Third
Punic War. 8. How the Punic War Undermined Roman
Liberty. 9. Comparison of the Roman Republic with a,
Modern State.
IT is now necessary to take up the history of the two great
republics of the Western Mediterranean, Rome and Car-
thage, and to tell how Rome succeeded in maintaining for
some centuries an empire even greater than that achieved by
the conquests of Alexander. But this new empire was, as we
shall try to make clear, a political structure differing very pro-
foundly in its nature from any of the great Oriental empires
that had preceded it. Great changes in the texture of human
society and in the conditions of social interrelations had been
going on for some centuries. The flexibility and transferability
of money was becoming a power and, like all powers in inexpert
hands, a danger in human affairs. It was altering the relations
of rich men to the state and to their poorer fellow citizens. This
new empire, the Roman empire, unlike all the preceding em-
pires, was not the creation of a great conqueror. No Sargon,
no Thothmes, no Nebuchadnezzar, no Cyrus nor Alexander nor
Chandragupta, was its fountain head. It was made by a repub-
lic. It grew by a kind of necessity through new concentrating
and unifying forces that were steadily gathering power in human
affairs.
But first it is necessary to give some idea of the state of affairs
in Italy in the centuries immediately preceding the appearance
of Rome in the world's story.
380
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS
381
Before 1200 B.C., that is to say before the rise of the Assyrian
empire, the siege of Troy, and the final destruction of Cnossos,
but after the time of Amenophis IV, Italy, like Spain, was
probably still inhabited mainly by dark white people of the
more fundamental Iberian or Mediterranean race. This ab-
original population was probably a thin and backward one.
But already in Italy, as in Greece, the Aryans were coming
southward. By 1000 B.C. immigrants from the north had set-
tled over most of the north and centre of Italy, and, as in
Greece, they had intermarried with their darker predecessors
WE5TEKN MEDITERRANEAN, 800-600B.C.
Greeks.
Latins & other
Italians.
Etruscans
R. C A
and established a group of Aryan languages, the Italian group,
more akin to the Keltic (Gaelic) than to any other, of which the
most interesting from the historical point of view was that
spoken by the Latin tribes in the plains south and east of the
river Tiber. Meanwhile the Greeks had been settling down in
Greece, and now they were taking to the sea and crossing over
to South Italy and Sicily and establishing themselves there.
Subsequently they established colonies along the French Riviera
and founded Marseilles upon the site of an older Phoenician
colony. Another interesting people also had come into Italy by
sea. These were a brownish sturdy people, to judge from the
382
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
pictures they have left of themselves ; very probably they were
a tribe of those ^Egean "dark whites" who were being driven out
of Greece and Asia Minor and the islands in between by the
Greeks. We have already told the tale of Cnossos (Chapter
XV) and of the settlement of the kindred Philistines in Pales-
tine (Chapter XIX, 1). These Etruscans, as they were
EARLY
LATIUM
called in Italy, were known even in ancient times to be of
Asiatic origin, and it is tempting, but probably unjustifiable, to
connect this tradition with the JEneid, the sham epic of the
Latin poet Virgil, in which the Latin civilization is ascribed
to Trojan immigrants from Asia Minor. (But the Trojans
themselves were probably an Aryan people allied to the Phry-
gians.) These Etruscan people conquered most of Italy north
of the Tiber from the Aryan tribes who were scattered over
that country. Probably the Etruscans ruled over a subjugated
Italian population, so reversing the state of affairs in Greece^
in which the Aryans were uppermost.
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 383
Our map, which may be taken to represent roughly the state
of affairs about 750 B.C., also shows the establishments of the
Phoenician traders, of which Carthage was the chief, along
the shores of Africa and Spain.
Of all the peoples actually in Italy, the Etruscans were by
far the most civilized. They built sturdy fortresses of the
Mycaenean type of architecture; they had a metal industry;
they used imported Greek pottery of a very fine type. The
Latin tribes on the other side of the Tiber were by comparison
barbaric.
The Latins were still a rude farming people. The centre of
their worship was a temple to the tribal god Jupiter, upon the
Alban Mount. There they gathered for their chief festivals
very much after the fashion of the early tribal gathering we
have already imagined at Avebury. This gather ing- place was
not a town. It was a high place of assembly. There was no
population permanently there. There were, however, twelve
townships in the Latin league. At one point upon the Tiber
there was a ford, and here there was a trade between Latins
and Etruscans. At this ford Rome had its beginnings. Trad-
ers assembled there, and refugees from the twelve towns found
an asylum and occupation at this trading centre. Upon the
seven hills near the ford a number of settlements sprang up,
which finally amalgamated into one city.
Most people have heard the story of the two brothers Romulus
and Remus, who founded Rome, and the legend of how they
were exposed as infants and sheltered and suckled by a wolf.
Little value is now attached to this tale by modern historians.
The date 753 B.C. is given for the founding of Rome, but there
are Etruscan tombs beneath the Roman Forum of a much
earlier date than that, and the so-called tomb of Romulus bears
an indecipherable Etruscan inscription.
The peninsula of Italy was not then the smiling land of
vineyards and olive orchards it has since become. It was still
a rough country of marsh and forest, in which the farmers grazed
their cattle and made their clearings. Rome, on the boundary
between Latin and Etruscan, was not in a very strong position
for defence. At first there were perhaps Latin kings in Rome,
then it would seem the city fell into the hands of Etruscan
rulers whose tyrannous conduct led at last to their expulsion,
and Rome became a Latin-speaking republic. The Etruscan
384 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
kings were expelled from Rome in the sixth century B.C., while
the successors of Nebuchadnezzar were ruling by the sufferance
of the Medes in Babylon, while Confucius was seeking a king
to reform the disorders of China, and while Gautama was
teaching the Aryan Way to his disciples at Benares.
Etruscan painting of a. CecemordaiL Burning- of tha. Pcad~"
Of the struggle between the Romans and the Etruscans we
cannot tell in any detail here. The Etruscans were the better
armed, the more civilized, and the more numerous, and it would
probably have gone hard with the Romans if they had had to
fight them alone. But two disasters happened to the Etruscans
which so weakened them that the Romans were able at last to
master them altogether. The first of these was a war with
the Greeks of Syracuse in Sicily which destroyed the Etruscan
fleet (474 B.C.)-, and the second was a great raid of the Gauls
from the north into Italy. These latter people swarmed into
N'orth Italy and occupied the valley of the Po towards the end
of the fifth century B.C., as a couple of centuries later their
kindred were to swarm down into Greece and Asia Minor and
settle in Galatia. The Etruscans were thus caught between
hammer and anvil, and after a long and intermittent war the
Romans were able to capture Veil, an Etruscan fortress, a few
miles from Rome, which had hitherto been a great threat and
annoyance to them.
It is to this period of struggle against the Etruscan monarchs,
the Tarquins, that Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, familiar
to every schoolboy, refer.
But the invasion of the Gauls was one of those convulsions
of the nations that leave nothing as it has been before. They
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 385
carried their raiding right down the Italian peninsula, devastat-
ing all Etruria. They took and sacked Rome (390 B.C.).
According to Roman legends an which doubt is thrown -the
citadel on the Capitol held out, and this also the Gauls would
have taken by surprise at night, if certain geese had not been
awakened by their stealthy movements and set up such a cack-
ling as to arouse the garrison. After that the Gauls, who were
ill-equipped for siege operations, and perhaps suffering from dis-
ease in their camp, were bought off, and departed to the north-
ward again, and, though they made subsequent raids, they never
again reached Rome.
The leader of the Gauls who sacked Rome was named Bren-
nus. It is related of him that as the gold of the ransom was
being weighed, there was some dispute about the justice of the
counterpoise, whereupon he flung his sword into the scale, saying,
"Vce viciisl" ("Woe to the vanquished!") a phrase that has
haunted the discussions of all subsequent ransoms and indem-
nities down to the present time.
For half a century after this experience Rome was engaged
in a series of wars to establish herself at the head of the Latin
tribes. For the burning of the chief city seems to have stim-
ulated rather than crippled her energies. However much she
had suffered, most of her neighbours seem to have suffered
more. By 290 B.C. Rome was the mistress city of all Central
Italy from the Arno to south of Naples. She had conquered
the Etruscans altogether, and her boundaries marched with
those of the Gauls to the north and with the regions of Italy
under Greek dominion (Magna Graecia) to the south. Along
the Gaulish boundary she had planted garrisons and colonial
cities, and no doubt it was because of that, line of defence that
the raiding enterprises of the Gauls were deflected eastward
into the Balkans.
After what we have already told of the history of Greece
and the constitutions of her cities, it will not surprise the reader
to learn that the Greeks of Sicily and Italy were divided up
into a number of separate city governments, of which Syracuse
and Tarentum (the modern Taranto) were the chief, and that
they had no common rule of direction or policy. But now,
alarmed at the spread of the Roman power, they looked across
the Adriatic for help, and found it in the ambitions of Pyrrhus,
386
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the king of Epirus. Between the Romans and Pyrrhus these
Greeks of Magna Grfecia were very much in the same position
that Greece proper had been in, between the Macedonians and
the Persians half a century before.
The reader will remember that Epirus, the part of Greece
POWER a&r the SAMIsTI' ; g WARS
[Beginning of tin.
Century.. Compare with.
contemporary map of
the. Break-op of Alex-
amdzr's Empire J
that is closest to the heel of Italy, was the native land of
Olympias, the mother of Alexander. In the kaleidoscopic
changes of the map that followed the death of Alexander,
Epirus was sometimes swamped by Macedonia, sometimes in-
dependent. This Pyrrhus was a kinsman of Alexander the
Great, and a monarch of ability and enterprise, and he seems
to have planned a career of conquest in Italy and Sicily. He
commanded an admirable army, against which the compara-
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS
387
tively inexpert Roman levies could at first do little. His army
included all the established military devices of the time, an
infantry phalanx, Thessalian cavalry, and twenty fighting ele-
phants from the east. He routed the Romans at Heraclea (280
B.C.), and, pressing after them, defeated them again at Auscu-
lum (279 B.C.) in their own territory. Then, instead of pursu-
ing the Romans further, he made a truce with them, turned his
attention to the subjugation of Sicily, and so brought the sea
power of Carthage into alliance against him. For Carthage
could not afford to have a strong power established so close to
her as Sicily. Rome in those days seemed to the Carthaginians
a far less serious threat than the possibility of another Alexan-
der the Great ruling Sicily. A Carthaginian fleet appeared off
the mouth of the Tiber, therefore, to encourage or induce the
388 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Romans to renew the struggle, and Rome and Carthage were
definitely allied against the invader.
This interposition of Carthage was fatal to Pyrrhus. With-
out any decisive battle his power wilted, and, after a disastrous
repulse in an attack upon the Roman camp of Beneventum, he
had to retire to Epirus (275 B.C.).
It is recorded that when Pyrrhus left Sicily, he said he left
it to be the battleground of Rome and Carthage. He was
killed three years later in a battle in the streets of Argos. The
war against Pyrrhus was won by the Carthaginian fleet, and
Rome reaped a full half of the harvest of victory. Sicily fell
completely to Carthage, and Rome came down to the toe and
heel of Italy, and looked across the Straits of Messina at her
new rival. In eleven years' time (264 B.C.) the prophecy of
Pyrrhus was fulfilled, and the first war with Carthage, the first
of the three Punic 1 Wars, had begun.
2
But we write "Rome" and the "Romans," and we have still
to explain what manner of people these were who were playing
a role of conquest that had hitherto been played only by able
and aggressive monarchs.
Their state was, in the fifth century B.C., a republic of the
Aryan type very similar to a Greek aristocratic republic. The
earliest accounts of the social life of Rome give us a picture
of a very primitive Aryan community "In the second half
of the fifth century before Christ, Rome was still an aristocratic
community of free peasants, occupying an area of nearly 400
square miles, with a population certainly not exceeding 150,000,
almost entirely dispersed over the country-side and divided into
seventeen districts or rural tribes. Most of the families had a
small holding and a cottage of their own, where father and
sons lived and worked together, growing corn for the most part,
with here and there a strip of vine or olive. Their few head of
cattle were kept at pasture on the neighbouring common land ;
their clothes and simple implements of husbandry they made
for themselves at home. Only at rare intervals and on special
1 Latin Pceni Carthaginians. Punicus ( adj. ) = Carthaginian, i.e.
Phoenician.
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS
389
ROMAN COIN STRUCK TO COMMEMO-
RATE THE VICTORY OVER PYRRHUS
AND His ELEPHANTS.
occasions would they make their way into the fortified town,
which was the centre at once of their religion and their govern-
ment. Here were the temples of the gods, the houses of the
wealthy, and the shops of the
artizans and traders, where
corn, oil, or wine could he
hartered in small quantities
for salt or rough tools and
weapons of iron." *
This community followed
the usual tradition of a di-
vision into aristocratic and
common citizens, who were
called in Rome patricians
and plebeians. These were the citizens; the slave or out-
lander had no more part in the state than he had in Greece.
But the constitution differed from any Greek constitution in the
fact that a great part of the ruling power was gathered into
the hands of a body called the Senate, which was neither purely
a body of hereditary members nor directly an elected and rep-
resentative one. It was a nominated one, and in the earlier
period it was nominated solely from among the patricians. It
existed before the expulsion of the kings, and in the time of the
kings it was the king who nominated the senators. But after
the expulsion of the kings (510 B.C.), the supreme government
was vested in the hands of two elected rulers, the consuls; and
it was the consuls who took over the business of appointing
senators. In the early days of the Republic only patricians
were eligible as consuls or senators, and the share of the plebeians
in the government consisted merely in a right to vote for the
consuls and other public officials. Even for that purpose their
votes did not have the same value ag. those of their patrician
fellow citizens. But their votes had at any rate sufficient
weight to induce many of the patrician candidates to profess
a more or less sincere concern for plebeian grievances. In the
early phases of the Roman state, moreover, the plebeians were
not only excluded from public office, but from intermarriage
with the patrician class. The administration was evidently
primarily a patrician affair.
1 Ferrero, The Greatness and Decline of Rome.
390 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
The early phase of Roman affairs was therefore an aristocracy
of a very pronounced type, and the internal history of Rome
for the two centuries and a half between the expulsion of the
last Etruscan king, Tarquin the Proud, and the beginning of
the first Punic War (264 B.C.), was very largely a struggle for
mastery between those two orders, the patricians and the plebe-
ians. It was, in fact, closely parallel with the struggle of
aristocracy and democracy in the city states of Greece, and,
as in the case of Greece, there were whole classes in the com-
munity, slaves, freed slaves, unpropertied free men, outlanders,
and the like, who were entirely outside and beneath
the struggle. We have already noted the essential differ-
ence of Greek democracy and what is called democracy in
the world to-day. Another misused word is the Roman term
proletariat, which in modern jargon means all the unpropertied
people in a modem state. In Rome the proletarii were a vot-
ing division of fully qualified citizens whose property was less
than 10,000 copper asses (= 275). They were an enrolled
class ; their value to the state consisted in their raising families
of citizens (proles = offspring), and from their ranks were
drawn the colonists who went to form new Latin cities or to
garrison important points. But the proletarii were quite dis-
tinct in origin from slaves or freedmen or the miscellaneous
driftage of a town slum, and it is a great pity that modern po-
litical discussion should be confused by an inaccurate use of a
term which has no exact modern equivalent and which expresses
nothing real in modern social classification.
The mass of the details of this struggle between patricians
and plebeians we can afford to ignore in this outline. It was
a struggle which showed the Romans to be a people of a
curiously shrewd character, never forcing things to a destruc-
tive crisis, but being within the limits of their discretion grasp-
ing hard dealers. The patricians made a mean use of their
political advantages to grow rich through the national conquests
at the expense not only of the defeated enemy, but of the poorer
plebeian, whose farm had been neglected and who had fallen
into debt during his military service. The plebeians were ousted
from any share in the conquered lands, which the patricians
divided up among themselves. The introduction of money
probably increased the facilities of the usurer and the difficulties
of the borrowing debtor.
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS
391
rom a "Roman
bronze!)
Three sorts of pressure won the plebeians a greater share in
the government of the country and the good things that were
coming to Rome as she grew powerful. The first of these (1)
was the general strike of plebeians. Twice they actually
marched right out of Rome, threatening to make a new city
higher up the Tiber, and
twice this threat proved con-
clusive. The second method
of pressure (2) was the threat
of a tyranny. Just as in
Attica (the little state of
which Athens was the capi-
tal), Peisistratus raised him-
self to power on the support
of the poorer districts, so
there was to be found in most
periods of plebeian discontent
some ambitious man ready to
figure as a leader and wrest
power from the Senate. For
a long time the Roman patri-
cians were clever enough to
beat every such potential tyrant by giving in to a certain extent
to the plebeians. And finally (3) there were patricians big-
minded and far-seeing enough to insist upon the need of
reconciliation with the plebeians.
Thus in 509 B.C., Valerius Poplicola (3), the consul, enacted
that whenever the life or rights of any citizen were at stake,
there should be an appeal from the magistrates to the general
assembly. This Lex Valeria was "the Habeas Corpus of
Rome," and it freed the Roman plebeians from the worst dan-
gers of class vindictiveness in the law courts.
In 494 B.C. occurred a strike (1). "After the Latin war the
pressure of debt had become excessive, and the plebeians saw
with indignation their friends, who had often served the state
bravely in the legions, thrown into chains and reduced to
slavery at the demand of patrician creditors. War was raging
against the Volscians; but the legionaries, on their victorious
return, refused any longer to obey the consuls, and marched,
though without any disorder, to the Sacred Mount beyond the
Anio (up the Tiber). There they prepared to found a new city,
392 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
since the rights of citizens were denied to them in the old one.
The patricians were compelled to give way, and the plebeians,
returning to Rome from the "First Secession," received the privi-
lege of having officers of their own, tribunes and sediles." l
In 486 B.C. arose Spurius Cassius (2), a consul who carried
an Agrarian Law securing public land for the plebeians. But
the next year he was accused of aiming at ryal power, and
condemned to death. His law never came into operation.
There followed a long struggle on the part of the plebeians
to have the laws of Rome written down, so that they would
no longer have to trust to patrician memories. In 451-450 B.C.
the law of the Twelve Tables was published, the basis of all
Roman law.
But in order that the Twelve Tables should be formulated,
a committee of ten (the decemvirate) was appointed in the
place of the ordinary magistrates. A second decemvirate, ap-
pointed in succession to the first, attempted a sort of aristocratic
counter-revolution under Appius Claudius. The plebeians
withdrew again a second time to the Sacred Mount, and Appius
Claudius committed suicide in prison.
In 440 came a famine, and a second attempt to found a pop-
ular tyranny upon the popular wrongs, by Spurius Ma3lius, a
wealthy plebeian, which ended in his assassination.
After the sack of Rome by the Gauls (390 B.C.), Marcus
Manlius, who had been in command of the Capitol when the
geese had saved it, came forward as a popular leader. The
plebeians were suffering severely from the after-war usury and
profiteering of the patricians, and were incurring heavy debts
in rebuilding and restocking their farms. Manlius spent his
fortune in releasing debtors. He was accused by the patricians
of tyrannous intentions, condemned, and suffered the fate of
condemned traitors in Rome, being flung from the Tarpeian
Rock, the precipitous edge of that same Capitoline Hill he
had defended.
In 376 B.C., Licinius, who was one of the ten tribunes for
the people, began a long struggle with the patricians by making
certain proposals called the Licinian Rogations, that there
should be a limit to the amount of public land taken by any
single citizen, so leaving some for everybody, that outstanding
*5. Wells, Short History of Rome to the Death of Augustus.
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 393
debts should be forgiven without interest upon the repayment
of the principal, and that henceforth one at least of the two con-
suls should be a plebeian. This precipitated a ten-year strug-
gle. The plebeian power to stop business by the veto- of their
representatives, the tribunes, was fully exercised. In cases of
national extremity it was the custom to set all other magistrates
aside and appoint one leader, the Dictator. Rome had done
such a thing during times of military necessity before, but now
the patricians set up a Dictator in a time of profound peace,
with the idea of crushing Licinius altogether. They appointed
Camillus, who had besieged and taken Veii from the Etruscans.
But Camillus was a wiser man than his supporters ; he brought
about a compromise between the two orders in which most of
the demands of the plebeians were conceded (366 B.C.), dedi-
cated a temple to Concord, and resigned his power.
Thereafter the struggle between the orders abated. It abated
because, among other influences, the social differences between
patricians and plebeians were diminishing. Trade was coming
to Rome with increasing political power, and many plebeians
were growing rich and many patricians becoming relatively
poco". Intermarriage had been rendered possible by a change
in the law, and social intermixture was going on. While the
rich plebeians were becoming, if not aristocratic, at least oligar-
chic in habits and sympathy, new classes were springing up
in Rome with fresh interests and no political standing. Par-
ticularly abundant were the freedmen, slaves set free, for the
most part artisans, but some of them traders, who were grow-
ing wealthy. And the Senate, no longer a purely patrician
body since various official positions were now open to plebe-
ians, and such plebeian officials became senators was becoming
now an assembly of all the wealthy, able, energetic, and influen-
tial men in the state. The Roman power was expanding, and
as it expanded these old class oppositions of the early Latin
community were becoming unmeaning. They were being re-
placed by new associations and new antagonisms. Rich men
of all origins were being drawn together into a common interest
against the communistic ideas of the poor.
In 390 B.C. Rome was a miserable little city on the borders
of Etruria, being sacked by the Gauls ; in 275 B.C. she was ruling
and unifying all Italy, from the Arno to the Straits of Mes-
394 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
sina. The compromise of Camillas (367 B.C.) had put an end
to internal dissensions, and left her energies free for expansion.
And the same queer combination of sagacity and aggressive
selfishness that had distinguished the war of her orders at home
and enabled her population to worry out a balance of power
without any catastrophe, marks her policy abroad. She under-
stood the value of allies; she could assimilate; abroad as at
home she could in those days at least "give and take" with a
certain fairness and sanity. There lay the peculiar power of
Rome. By that it was she succeeded where Athens, for example,
had conspicuously failed.
The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrow-
ness of "patriotism," which is the ruin of all nations. Athens
was disliked and envied by her own empire because she domi-
nated it in a spirit of civic egotism ; her disasters were not felt
and shared as disasters by her subject-cities. The shrewder,
nobler Roman senators of the great years of Rome, before
the first Punic War overstrained her moral strength and began
her degeneration, were not only willing in the last resort to
share their privileges with the mass of their own people, but
eager to incorporate their sturdiest antagonists upon terms of
equality with themselves. They extended their citizenship
cautiously but steadily. Some cities became Roman, with even
a voting share in the government. Others had self-government
and the right to trade or marry in Rome, without full Roman
citizenship. Garrisons of full citizens were set up at strategic
points, and colonies with variable privileges established amidst
the purely conquered peoples. The need to keep communica-
tions open in this great and growing mass of citizenship was
evident from the first. Printing and paper were not yet avail-
able for intercourse, but a system of high roads followed the
Latin speech and the Roman rule. The first of these, the Appian
Way, ran from Rome ultimately into the heel of Italy. It was
begun by the censor Appius Claudius (who must not be con-
fused with the decemvir Appius Claudius of a century earlier)
in 312 B.C.
According to a census made in 265 B.C., there were already in
the Roman dominions, that is to say in Italy south of the Arno,
-300,000 citizens. They all had a common interest in the wel-
fare of the state ; they were all touched a little with the diffused
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 395
kingship of the republic. This was, we have to note, an abso-
lutely new thing in the history of mankind. All considerable
states and kingdoms and empires hitherto had been communities
by mere obedience to some head, some monarch, upon whose
moods and character the public welfare was helplessly depend-
ent. No republic had hitherto succeeded in being anything more
than a city state. The so-called Athenian "empire" was simply
a city state directing its allies and its subjugated cities. In a
few decades the Roman republic was destined to extend its
citizenship into the valley of the Po, to assimilate the kindred
Gauls, replacing their language by Latin, and to set up a Latin
city, Aquileia, at the very head of the Adriatic Sea. In 89 B.C.
all free inhabitants of Italy became Roman citizens ; in 212 A.D.
the citizenship was extended to all free men in the empire.
This extraordinary political growth was manifestly the pre-
cursor of all modern states of the western type. It is as inter-
esting to the political student, therefore, as a carboniferous
amphibian or an archceopteryx to the student of zoological de-
velopment. It is the primitive type of the now dominant order.
Its experiences throw light upon all subsequent political history.
One natural result of this growth of a democracy of hun-
dreds of thousands of citizens scattered over the greater part of
Italy was the growth in power of the Senate. There had been
in the development of the Roman constitution a variety of
forms of the popular assembly, the plebeian assembly, the
assembly by tribes, the assembly by centuries, and the like, into
which variety we cannot enter here with any fullness ; but the
idea was established that with the popular assembly lay the
power of initiating laws. It is to be noted that there was a sort
of parallel government in this system. The assembly by tribes
or by centuries was an assembly of the whole citizen body,
patrician and plebeian together; the assembly of the plebeians
was of course an assembly only of the plebeian class. Each as-
sembly had its own officials ; the former, the consuls, etc. ; the
latter, the tribunes. While Rome was a little state, twenty
miles square, it was possible to assemble something like a repre-
sentative gathering of the people, but it will be manifest that
with the means of communication existing in Italy at that time,
it was now impossible for the great bulk of the citizens even
to keep themselves informed of what was going on at Rome,
396 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
much less to take any effective part in political life there.
Aristotle in his Politics had already pointed out the virtual
disenfranchisement of voters who lived out of the city and were
preoccupied with agricultural pursuits, and this sort of disen-
franchisement by mechanical difficulties applied to the vast
majority of Eoman citizens. With the growth of Eome an
unanticipated weakness crept into political life through these
causes, and the popular assembly became more and more a
gathering of political hacks and the city riffraff, and less and
less a representation of the ordinary worthy citizens. The
popular assembly came nearest to power and dignity in the
fourth century B.C. From that period it steadily declined in
influence, and the new Senate, which was no longer a patrician
body, with a homogeneous and on the whole a noble tradition,
but a body of rich men, ex-magistrates, powerful officials, bold
adventurers and the like, pervaded by a strong disposition to
return to the idea of hereditary qualification, became for three
centuries the ruling power in the Roman world.
There are two devices since known to the world which might
have enabled the popular government of Rome to go on de-
veloping beyond its climax in the days of Appius Claudius the
Censor, at the close of the fourth century B.C., but neither of
them occurred to the Roman mind. The first of these devices
was a proper use of print. In our account of early Alexandria
we have already remarked upon the strange fact that printed
books did not come into the world in the fourth or third cen-
tury B.C. This account of Roman affairs forces us to repeat
that remark. To the modern mind it is clear that a widespread
popular government demands, as a necessary condition for
health, a steady supply of correct information upon public
affairs to all the citizens and a maintenance of interest. The
popular governments in the modern states that have sprung
up on either side of the Atlantic during the last two centuries
have been possible only through the more or less honest and
thorough ventilation of public affairs through the press. But
in Italy the only way in which the government at Rome could
communicate with any body of its citizens elsewhere was by
sending a herald, and with the individual citizen it could hold
no communication by any means at all.
The second device, for which the English are chiefly respon-
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 397
sible in the history of mankind, which the Romans never used,
was the almost equally obvious one of representative govern-
ment. For the old Popular Assembly (in its threefold form) it
would have been possible to have substituted a gathering of
delegates. Later on in history, the English did, as the state
grew, realize this necessity. Certain men, the Knights of the
Shire, were called up to Westminster to speak and vote for
local feeling, and were more or less formally elected for that
end. The Roman situation seems to a modern mind to have
called aloud for such a modification. It was never made.
The method of assembling the comitia tinbuia (one of the
three main forms of the Popular Assembly) was by the proc-
lamation of a herald, who was necessarily inaudible to most of
Italy, seventeen days before the date of the gathering. The
augurs, the priests of divination whom Rome had inherited from
the Etruscans, examined the entrails of sacrificial beasts on the
night before the actual assembly, and if they thought fit to say
that these gory portents were unfavourable, the comitia tributa
dispersed. But if the augurs reported that the livers were
propitious, there was a great blowing of horns from the Capitol
and from the walls of the city, and the assembly went on. It
was held in the open air, either in the little Forum beneath the
Capitol or in a still smaller recess opening out of the Forum,
or in the military exercising ground, the Campus Martius, now
the most crowded part of modern Rome, but then an open space.
Business began at dawn with prayer. There were no seats,
and this probably helped to reconcile the citizen to the rule that
everything ended at sunset.
After the opening prayer came a discussion of the measures
to be considered by the assembly, and the proposals before the
meeting were read out. Is it not astonishing that there were no
printed copies distributed ? If any copies were handed about,
they must have been in manuscript, and each copy must have
been liable to errors and deliberate falsification. K"o questions
seem to have been allowed, but private individuals might ad-
dress the gathering with the permission of the presiding magis-
trate.
The multitude then proceeded to go into enclosures like cattle-
pens according to their tribes, and each tribe voted upon the
measure under consideration. The decision was then taken
398 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
not by the majority of the citizens, but by the majority of tribes,
and it was announced by the heralds.
The Popular Assembly by centuries, comitia centuriata, was
very similar in its character, except that instead of thirty-five
tribes there were, in the third century B.C., 373 centuries, and
there was a sacrifice as well as prayer to begin with. The cen-
turies, originally military (like the "hundreds" of primitive
English local government), had long since lost any connection
with the number one hundred. Some contained only a few
people; some very many. There were eighteen centuries of
knights (equites), who were originally men in a position to
maintain a horse and serve in the cavalry, though later the
Roman knighthood, like knighthood in England, became a vul-
gar distinction of no military, mental, or moral significance.
(These equites became a very important class as Rome traded
and grew rich ; for a time they were the real moving class in the
community. There was as little chivalry left among them at
last as there is in the "honours list" knights of England of
to-day. The senators from about 200 B.C. were excluded from
trade. The equites became, therefore, the great business men,
negotiator es f and as publicani they farmed the taxes.) There
were, in addition, eighty ( !) centuries of wealthy men (worth
over 100,000 asses), twenty-two of men worth over 75,000 asses,
and so on. There were two centuries each of mechanics and
musicians, and the proletarii made up one century. The deci-
sion in the comitia centuriata was by the majority of centuries.
Is it any wonder that with the growth of the Roman state
and the complication of its business, power shifted back from
such a Popular Assembly to the Senate, which was a compara-
tively compact body varying between three hundred as a mini-
mum, and, at the utmost, nine hundred members (to which
it was raised by Caesar), men who had to do with affairs and
big business, who knew each other more or less, and had a
tradition of government and policy ? The power of nominating
and calling up the senators vested in the Republic first with the
consuls, and when, some time after, "censors" were created, and
many of the powers of the consuls had been transferred to
them, they were? also given this power. Appius Claudius, one
of the first of the censors to exercise it, enrolled freedmen in
the tribes and called sons of freedmen to the Senate. But this
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 899
was a shocking arrangement to the conservative instincts of the
time ; the consuls would not recognize his Senate, and the next
censors (304 B.C.) set aside his invitations. His attempt, how-
ever, serves to show how far the Senate had progressed from
its original condition as a purely patrician body. Like the con-
temporary British House of Lords, it had become a gathering
of big business men, energetic politicians, successful adven-
turers, great landowners, and the like ; its patrician dignity was
a picturesque sham; but, unlike the British House of Lords,
it was unchecked legally by anything but the inefficient Popular
Assembly we have already described, and by the tribunes elected
by the plebeian assembly. Its legal control over the consuls
and proconsuls was not great; it had little executive power;
but in its prestige and experience lay its strength and influence.
The interests of its members were naturally antagonistic to
the interests of the general body of citizens, but for some genera-
tions that great mass of ordinary men was impotent to express
its dissent from the proceedings of this oligarchy. Direct pop-
ular government of a state larger than a city state had already
failed therefore in Italy, because as yet there was no public
education, no press, and no representative system ; it had failed
through these mere mechanical difficulties, before the first Punic
War. But its appearance is of enormous interest, as the first
appearance of a set of problems with which the whole political
intelligence of the world wrestles at the present time.
The Senate met usually in a Senate House in the Forum,
but on special occasions it would be called to meet in this or
that temple ; and when it had to deal with foreign ambassadors
or its own generals (who were not allowed to enter the city
while in command of troops), it assembled in the Campus
Martius outside the walls.
3
It has been necessary to deal rather fully with the political
structure of the Roman republic because of its immense im-
portance to this day. The constitution of Carthage need not
detain us long.
Italy under Rome was a republican country; Carthage was
that much older thing, a republican city. She had an "em-
pire," as Athens had an "empire," of tributary states which
400
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
did not love her, and she had a great and naturally disloyal
industrial slave population.
In the city there were two elected "kings," as Aristotle calls
them, the suffetes, who were really equivalent to the Roman
censors ; their Sem-
itic name was the
same as that used
for the Jewish
judges. There was
an impotent public
assembly and a sen-
ate of leading per-
sonages ; but two
committees of this
senate, nominally
elected, but elected
by easily controlled
methods, the Hun-
dred and Four and
the Thirty, really
constituted a close
oligarchy of the rich-
est and most influen-
tial men. They told as little as they could to their allies and
fellow citizens, and consulted them as little as possible. They
pursued schemes in which the welfare of Carthage was no
doubt subordinated to the advantage of their own group. They
were hostile to new men or novel measures, and confident that
a sea ascendancy that had lasted two centuries must be in the
very nature of things.
4
It would be interesting, and not altogether idle, to speculate
what might have happened to mankind if Rome and Carthage
could have settled their differences and made a permanent
alliance in the Western world. If Alexander the Great had
lived, he might have come westward and driven these two pow-
ers into such a fusion of interests. But that would not have
suited the private schemes and splendours of the Carthaginian
oligarchy, and the new Senate of greater Rome was now grow-
ing fond of the taste of plunder and casting covetous eyes across
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 401
the Straits of Messina upon the Carthaginian possessions in
Sicily. ^ They were covetous, but they were afraid of the
Carthaginian sea-power. Roman popular "patriotism," how-
ever, was also jealous and fearful of these Carthaginians, and
less inclined to count the cost of a conflict. The alliance
Pyrrhus had forced upon Rome and Carthage held good for
eleven years, but Rome was ripe for what is cabled in modern
political jargon an "offensive defensive" war. The occasion
arose in 264 B.C.
At that time Sicily was not completely in Carthaginian hands.
The eastward end was still under the power of the Greek king
of Syracuse, Hiero, a successor of that Dionysius to whom
Plato had gone as resident court philosopher. A band of
mercenaries who had been in the service of Syracuse seized
upon Messina (289 B.C.), and raided the trade of Syracuse so
that at last Hiero was forced to take measures to suppress them
(270 B.C.). Thereupon Carthage, which was also vitally con-
cerned in the suppression of piracy, came to his aid, and put
in a Carthaginian garrison at Messina. This was an alto-
gether justifiable proceeding. Now that Tyre had been de-
stroyed, the only capable guardian of sea law in the Mediter-
ranean was Carthage, and the suppression of piracy was her
task by habit and tradition.
The pirates of Messina appealed to Rome, and the accumu-
lating jealousy and fear of Carthage decided the Roman people
to help them. An expedition was dispatched to Messina under
the consul Appius Claudius (the third Appius Claudius we
have had to mention in this history).
So began the first of the most wasteful and disastrous series
of wars that has ever darkened the history of mankind. But
this is how one historian, soaked with the fantastic political
ideas of our times, is pleased to write of this evil expedition.
"The Romans knew they were entering on war with Carthage ;
but the political instincts of the people were right, for a Car-
thaginian garrison on the Sicilian Straits would have been a
dangerous menace to the peace of Italy." So they protected
the peaee of Italy from this "menace" by a war that lasted
nearly a quarter of a century. They wrecked their own slowly
acquired political raoraZ.in the process.
The Romans captured Messina, and Hiero deserted from
the Carjhaginians to the Romans. Then for some time the
402 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
struggle centred upon the town Agrigentum. This the Romans
besieged, and a period of trench warfare ensued. Both sides
suffered greatly from plague and irregular supplies; the
Eomans lost 30,000 men; but in the end (261 B.C.) the Car-
thaginians evacuated the place and retired to their fortified
towns on the western coast of the island of which Lilybseum
was the chief. These they could supply easily from the African
mainland, and, as long as .their sea ascendancy held, they could
exhaust any Roman effort against them.
And now a new and very extraordinary phase of the war
began. The Romans came out upon the sea, and to the aston-
ishment of the Carthaginians and themselves defeated the
Carthaginian fleet. Since the days of Salamis there had been
a considerable development of naval architecture. Then the
ruling type of battleship was a trireme, a galley with three
banks (rows) of oars; now the leading Carthaginian battleship
was a quinquereme, a much bigger galley with five banks of
oars, which could ram jr shear the oars of any feebler vessel.
The Romans had come into the war with no such shipping. NOW
they set to work to build quinqueremes, being helped, it is said,
in their designing by one of these Carthaginian vessels coming
ashore. In two months they built a hundred quinqueremes and
thirty triremes. But they had no skilled navigators, no experi-
enced oarsmen, and these deficiencies they remedied partly
with the assistance of their Greek allies and partly by the in-
vention of new tactics. Instead of relying upon ramming or
breaking the oars of the adversary, which demanded more sea-
manship than they possessed, they decided to board the enemy,
and they constructed a sort of long draw-bridge on their ships,
held up to a mast by a pulley and with grappling-hooks and
spikes at the end. They also loaded their galleys with soldiers.
Then as the Carthaginian rammed or swept alongside, this
corpus, as it was called, could be let down and the boarders
could swarm aboard him.
Simple as this device was, it proved a complete success. It
changed the course of the war and the fate of the world. The
small amount of invention needed to counteract the corvus
was not apparently within the compass of the Carthaginian
rulers. At the battle of Mylse (260 B.C.) the Romans gained
their firt naval victory and captured or destroyed fifty vessels.
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 403
At the great battle of Ecnomus (256 B.C.), "probably the
greatest naval engagement of antiquity/' 1 in which seven or
eight hundred big ships were engaged, the Carthaginians
showed that they had learnt nothing from their former dis-
aster. According to rule they outmanoeuvred and defeated the
Romans, but the corvus again defeated them. The Romans
sank thirty vessels and captured sixty-four.
Thereafter the war continued with violent fluctuations of
fortune, but with a continuous demonstration of the greater
energy, solidarity, and initiative of the Romans. After
Ecnomus the Romans invaded Africa by sea, and sent an in-
sufficiently supported army, which after many successes and
the capture of Tunis (within ten miles of Carthage) was com-
pletely defeated. They lost their sea ascendancy through a
storm, and regained it by building a second fleet of two hun-
dred and twenty ships within three months. They captured
Palermo, and defeated a great Carthaginian army there (251
B.C.), capturing one hundred and four elephants, and making
such a triumphal procession into Rome as that city had never
seen before. They made an unsuccessful siege of Lilybseum,
the chief surviving Carthaginian stronghold in Sicily. They
lost their second fleet in a great naval battle at Drepanum (249
B.C.), losing one hundred and eighty out of two hundred and
ten vessels ; and a third fleet of one hundred and twenty battle-
ships and eight hundred transports was lost in the same year
partly in battle and partly in a storm.
For seven years a sort of war went on between the nearly
exhausted combatants, a war of raids and feeble sieges, during
which the Carthaginians had the best of it at sea. Then by a
last supreme effort Rome launched a fourth fleet of two hun-
dred keels, and defeated the last strength of the Carthaginians
at the battle of the J^gatian Isles (241 B.C.), after which Car-
thage (240 B.C.) sued for peace.
By the terms of this peace, all Sicily, except for the do-
minions of Hiero of Syracuse, became an "estate" of the Roman
people. There was no such process of assimilation as had been
practised in Italy ; Sicily became a conquered province, paying
tribute and yielding profit like the provinces of the older em-
pires. And, in addition, Carthage paid a war indemnity of
3,200 talents (=788,000).
J. Wells, op. tit.
404
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
5
For twenty-two years there was peace between Rome and
Carthage. It was peace without prosperity. Both combatants
were suffering from the want and disorganization that follow
naturally and necessarily upon all great wars. The territories
of Carthage seethed with violent disorder; the returning sol-
diers could not get their pay, and mutinied and looted ; the
land went uncultivated. We read of horrible cruelties in the
suppression of these troubles by Hamilcar, the Carthaginian
general; of men
being crucified
by the thousand.
Sardinia and
Corsica revolted.
The "peace of
Italy" was
scarcely happier.
The Gauls rose
and marched
south; they were
defeated, and
40,000 of them
killed at Telamon. It is manifest that Italy was incomplete
until it reached the Alps. Roman colonies were planted in
the valley of the Po, and the great northward artery, the Via
Flaminia, was begun. But it shows the moral and intellectual
degradation of this post-war period that when the Gauls were
threatening Rome, human sacrifices were proposed and carried
out. The old Carthaginian sea law was broken up it may
have been selfish and monopolistic, but it was at least orderly
the Adriatic swarmed with Illyrian pirates, and as the result
of a quarrel arising out of this state of affairs, Illyria, after
two wars, had to be annexed as a second "province." By send-
ing expeditions to annex Sardinia and Corsica, which were
Carthaginian provinces in revolt, the Romans prepared the way
for the Second Punic War.
The First Punic War had tested and demonstrated the rela-
tive strength of Rome and Carthage. With a little more wis-
dom on either side, with a little more magnanimity on the part
of Rome, there need never have been a renewal of the struggle.
But Rome was an ungracious conqueror. She seized Corsica
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 405
and Sardinia on no just grounds, she increased the indemnity
by 1,200 talents, she set a limit, the Ebro, to Carthaginian de-
velopments in Spain. There was a strong party in Carthage,
led by Hanno, for the propitiation of Home ; but it was natural
that many Carthaginians should come to regard their national
adversary with a despairing hatred.
Hatred is one of the passions that can master a life, and
there is a type of temperament very prone to it, ready to see
life in terms of vindictive melodrama, ready to find stimulus
and satisfaction in frightful demonstrations of " justice" and
revenge. The fears and jealousies of the squatting-place and
the cave still bear their dark blossoms in our lives ; we are not
four hundred generations yet from the old Stone Age. Great
wars, as all Europe knows, give this "hating" temperament the
utmost scope, and the greed and pride and cruelty that the First
Punic War had released were now producing a rich crop of
anti-foreign monomania. The outstanding figure upon the
side of Carthage was a great general and administrator, Hamil-
car Barca, who now set himself to circumvent and shatter
Rome. He was the father-in-law of Hasdrubal and the father
of a boy Hannibal, destined to be the most dreaded enemy that
ever scared the Roman Senate. The most obvious course be-
fore Carthage was the reconstruction of its fleet and naval
administration, and the recovery of sea power, but this, it
would seem, Hamilcar could not effect. As an alternative he
resolved to organize Spain as the base of a land attack upon
Italy. He went to Spain as governor in 236 B.C., and Hannibal
related afterwards that his father then he was a boy of eleven
made him vow deathless hostility to the Roman power.
This quasi-insane concentration of the gifts and lives of the
Barca family upon revenge is but one instance of the narrow-
ing and embitterment of life that the stresses and universal
sense of insecurity of this great struggle produced in the minds
of men. A quarter of a century of war had left the whole
western world miserable and harsh. While the eleven-year-old
Hannibal was taking his vow of undying hatred, there was run-
ning about a farmhouse of Tusculum a small but probably very
disagreeable child of two named Marcus Porcius Cato. This
boy lived to be eighty-five years old, and his ruling passion
seems to have been hatred for any human happiness but his
own. He was a good soldier, and had a successful political
406 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
career. He held a command in Spain, and distinguished him-
self by his cruelties. He posed as a champion of religion and
public morality, and under this convenient cloak carried on a
lifelong war against everything that was young, gracious, or
pleasant. Whoever roused his jealousy incurred his moral dis-
approval. He was energetic in the support and administration
of all laws against dress, against the personal adornment of
women, against entertainments and free discussion. He was
so fortunate as to be made censor, which gave him great power
over the private lives of public people. He was thus able to
ruin public opponents through private scandals. He expelled
Manlius from the Senate for giving his wife a kiss in the day-
time in the sight of their daughter. He persecuted Greek
literature, about which, until late in life, he was totally igno-
rant. Then he read and admired Demosthenes. He wrote in
Latin upon agriculture and the ancient and lost virtues of
Rome. From these writings much light is thrown upon his
qualities. One of his maxims was that when a slave was not
sleeping he should be working. Another was that old oxen
and slaves should be sold off. He left the war horse that had
carried him through his Spanish campaigns behind him when
he returned to Italy in order to save freight. He hated other
people's gardens, and cut off the supply of water for garden
use in Rome. After entertaining company, when dinner was
over he would go out to correct any negligence in the service
with a leather thong. He admired his own virtues very greatly,
and insisted upon them in his writings. There was a battle at
Thermopylae against Antiochus the Great, of which he wrote,
"those who saw him charging the enemy, routing and pursuing
them, declared that Cato owed less to the people of Rome, than 1
the people of Rome owed to Cato." 1 In his old age Cato be-
came lascivious and misconducted himself with a woman slave.
Finally, when his son protested against this disorder of their
joint household, he married a young wife, the daughter of
his secretary, who was not in a position to refuse his offer.
(What became of the woman slave is not told. Probably he
sold her.) This compendium of all the old Roman virtues
died at an advanced age, respected and feared. Almost his
last public act was to urge on the Third Punic War and the
final destruction of Carthage. He had gone to Carthage as a
Plutarch, Life of Cato.
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 407
commissioner to settle certain differences between Carthage
and Numidia, and he had been shocked and horrified to find
some evidences of prosperity and even of happiness in that
country.
From the time of that visit onward Cato concluded every
speech he made in the Senate by croaking out "Dele-nda est
Carthago" ("Carthage must be destroyed").
Such was the type of man that rose to prominence in Home
during the Punic struggle, such was the protagonist of Hanni-
bal and the Carthaginian revanche, and by him and by Hannibal
we may judge the tone and quality of the age.
The two groat western powers, and Rome perhaps more
than Carthage, were strained mentally and morally by the
stresses of the First War. The evil side of life was uppermost.
The history of the Second and Third Punic Wars (219 to 201
and 149 to 146 B.C.), it is plain, is not the history of perfectly
sane peoples. It is nonsense for historians to write of the
"political instincts'' of the Romans or Carthaginians. Quite
other instincts were loose. The red eyes of the ancestral ape
had come back into the world. It was a time when reasonable
men were howled down or murdered; the true spirit of the
age is shown in the eager examination for signs and portents
of the still quivering livers of those human victims who were
sacrificed in Rome during the panic before the battle of 'Tela-
mon. The western world was indeed black with homicidal
monomania. Two great peoples, both very necessary to the
world's development, fell foul of one another, and at last Rome
succeeded in murdering Carthage.
6
We can only tell very briefly here of the particulars of the
Second and Third Punic Wars. We have told how Hamilcar
began to organize Spain, and how the Romans forbade him
to cross the Ebro. He died in 228 B.C., and was followed by
his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who was assassinated in 221 B.C. and
succeeded by Hannibal, who was now twenty-six. The actual
war was precipitated by the Romans making a breach of their
own regulations, and interfering with affairs south of the Ebro.
Whereupon Hannibal marched straight through the south of
Gaul, and crossed the Alps (218 B.C.) into Italy.
408 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
The history of the next fifteen years is the story of the most
brilliant and futile raid in history. For fifteen years Hannibal
held out in Italy, victorious and unconquered. The Roman
generals were no match for the Carthaginian, and whenever
they met him they were beaten. But one Roman general, P.
Cornelius Scipio, had the strategic sense to take a course that
robbed all Hannibal's victories of fruit. At the outbreak of
the war he had been sent by sea to Marseilles to intercept
Hannibal ; he arrived three days late, and, instead of pursuing
him, he sent on his army into Spain to cut up Hannibal's sup-
plies and reinforcements. Throughout all the subsequent war
there remained this Roman army of Spain between Hannibal
and his base. He was left "in the air," incapable of conducting
sieges or establishing conquests.
Whenever he met the Romans in open fight he beat them.
He gained two great victories in North Italy, and won over
the Gauls to his side. He pressed south into Etruria, and am-
bushed, surrounded, and completely destroyed a Roman army
at Lake Trasimene. In 216 B.C. he was assailed by a vastly
superior Roman force under Yarro at Canna3, and destroyed
it utterly. Fifty thousand men are said to have been killed
and ten thousand prisoners taken. He was, however, unable to
push on and capture Rome because he had no siege equipment.
But Cannae produced other fruits. A large part of Southern
Italy came over to Hannibal, including Capua, the city next
in size to Rome, and the Macedonians allied themselves with
him. Moreover, Hiero of Syracuse, the faithful ally of Rome,
was now dead, and his successor Hieronymus turned over to
the Carthaginians. The Romans carried on the war, however,
with great toughness and resolution ; they refused to treat with
Hannibal after Canna?, they pressed a slow but finally suc-
cessful blockade and siege of Capua, and a Roman army set
itself to reduce Syracuse. The siege of Syracuse is chiefly
memorable for the brilliant inventions of the philosopher Archi-
medes, which long held the Romans at bay. We have already
named this Archimedes as one of the pupils and correspondents
of the school of the Alexandrian Museum. He was killed
in the final storm of the town. Tarentum (209 B.C.), Hanni-
bal's chief port and means of supply from Carthage, at last fol-
lowed Syracuse (212 B.C.) and Capua (211 B.C.), and his com-
munications became irregular.
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 409
Spain also was wrested bit by bit from the Carthaginian
grip. When at last reinforcements for Hannibal under his
brother Hasdrubal (not to be confused with his brother-in-
law of the same name who was assassinated) struggled through
into Italy, they were destroyed at the battle of the Metaurus
(207 B.C.), and the first news that came to Hannibal of the
disaster was the hacked-off head of his brother thrown into his
camp.
Thereafter Hannibal was blockaded into Calabria, the heel
of Italy. He had no forces for further operations of any magni-
tude, and he returned at last to Carthage in time to command
the Carthaginians in the last battle of the war.
This last battle, the battle of Zama (202 B.C.), was fought
close to Carthage.
It was the first defeat Hannibal experienced and so it is
well to give a little attention to the personality of his con-
queror, Scipio Africanus the Elder, who stands out in history
as a very fine gentleman indeed, a great soldier and a generous
man. We have already mentioned a certain P. Cornelius Scipio
who struck at Hannibal's base in Spain ; this was his son ; until
after Zama this son bore the same name of P. Cornelius Scipio,
and then the surname of Africanus was given him. (The
younger Scipio Africanus, Scipio Africanus Minor, who was
later to end the Third Punic War, was the adopted son of the
son of this first Scipio Africanus the Elder. ) Scipio Africanus
was everything that aroused the distrust, hatred, and opposi-
tion of old-fashioned Romans of the school of Cato. He was
young, he was happy and able, he spent money freely, he was
well versed in Greek literature, and inclined rather to Phrygian
novelties in religion than to the sterner divinities of Rome.
And he did not believe in the extreme discretion that then ruled
Roman strategy.
After the early defeats of the Second Punic War, Roman
military operations were dominated by the personality of a
general, Fabius, who raised the necessity of avoiding battle
with Hannibal into a kind of sacred principle. For ten years
"Fabian tactics" prevailed in Italy. The Romans blockaded,
cut up convoys, attacked stragglers, and ran away whenever
Hannibal appeared. ~No doubt it was wise for a time after their
first defeats to do this sort of thing, but the business of the
stronger power, and Rome was the stronger power throughout
410 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the Second Punic War, is not to tolerate an interminable war,
but to repair losses, discover able generals, train better armies,
and destroy the enemy power. Decision is one of the duties
of strength.
To such men as young Scipio, the sly, ineffective artfulness
of Fabianism, which was causing both Italy and Carthage to
bleed slowly to death, was detestable. He clamoured for an
attack upon Carthage itself.
"But Fabius, on this occasion, filled the city with alarms,
as if the commonwealth was going to be brought into the most
extreme danger by a rash and indiscreet young man; in short,
he scrupled not to do or say anything he thought likely to dis-
suade his countrymen from embracing the proposal. With the
Senate he carried his point. But the people believed that his
opposition to Scipio proceeded either from envy of his success,
or from a secret fear that if this young hero should perform
some signal exploit, put an end to the war, or even remove it
out of Italy, his own slow proceedings through the course of
so many years might be imputed to indolence or timidity. . . .
He applied to Crassus, the colleague of Scipio, and endeavoured
to persuade him not to yield that province to Scipio, but, if
he thought it proper to conduct the war in that manner, to go
himself against Carthage. Nay, he even hindered the raising
of money for that expedition, so that Scipio was obliged to find
the supplies as he could. . . . He endeavoured to prevent the
young men who offered to go as volunteers from giving in their
names, and loudly declared, both in the Senate and Forum,
'That Scipio did not only himself avoid Hannibal, but intended
to carry away with him the remaining strength of Italy, per-
suading the young men to abandon their parents, their wives,
and native city, while an unsubdued and potent enemy was
still at their doors.' With these assertions he so terrified the
people, that they allowed Scipio to take with him only the
legions that were in Sicily, and three hundred of those men
who had served him with so much fidelity in Spain. . . . After
Scipio was gone over into Africa, an account was soon brought
to Rome of his glorious and wonderful achievements. This
account was followed by rich spoils, which confirmed it. A
Xumidian king was taken prisoner; two camps were burned
and destroyed ; and in them a vast number of men, arms, and
horses; and the Carthaginians sent orders to Hannibal to quit
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 411
his fruitless hopes in Italy, and return home to defend his
own country. Whilst every tongue was applauding these ex-
ploits of Scipio, Fabius proposed that his successor should be
appointed, without any shadow of reason for it, except what
this well-known maxim implies: viz., 'That it is dangerous to
trust affairs of such importance to the fortune of one man,
because it is not likely that he will be always successful.' . . .
Nay, even when Hannibal embarked his army and quitted
Italy, Fabius ceased not to disturb the general joy and to damp
the spirits of Rome, for he took the liberty to affirm, 'That the
commonwealth was now come to her last and worst trial; that
she had the most reason to dread the efforts of Hannibal when
he should arrive in Africa, and attack her sons under the walls
of Carthage; that Scipio would have to do with an army yet
warm with the blood of so many Roman generals, dictators,
and consuls.' The city was alarmed with these declamations,
and though the war was removed into Africa, the danger seemed
to approach nearer Rome than ever."
Before the battle of Zama there were a brief truce and
negotiations, which broke down through the fault of the Car-
thaginians. As with the battle of Arbela, so the exact day of
the battle of Zama can be fixed by an eclipse, which in this
case occurred during the fighting. The Romans had been
joined by the Numidians, the hinterland people of Carthage,
under their king Massinissa, and this gave them for the first
time in any battle against Hannibal a great superiority of
cavalry. Hannibal's cavalry wings were driven off, while at
the same time the sounder discipline of Scipio's infantry en-
abled them to open lanes for the charge of the Carthaginian
war elephants without being thrown into confusion. Hannibal
attempted to extend his infantry line to envelop the Roman in-
fantry mass, but while at CannaB all the advantage of training
and therefore of manoeuvring power had been on his side, and
he had been able to surround and massacre a crowd of infantry,
he now found against him an infantry line better than his own.
His own line broke as it extended, the Roman legion charged
home, and the day was lost. The Roman cavalry came back
from the pursuit of Hannibal's horse to turn what was already
a defeat into a disastrous rout.
Carthage submitted without any further struggle. The
terms were severe, but they left it possible for her to hope for
4,12 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
an honourable future. She had to abandon Spain to Rome,
to give up all her war fleet except ten vessels, to pay 10,000
talents (2,400,000), and, what was the most difficult condi-
tion of all, to agree not to wage war without the permission of
Rome. Finally a condition was added that Hannibal, as the
great enemy of Rome, should be surrendered. But he saved his
countrymen from this humiliation by flying to Asia.
These were exorbitant conditions, with which Rome should
have been content. But there are nations so cowardly that they
dare not merely conquer their enemies ; they must mak siccar
and destroy them. The generation of Romans that saw great-
ness and virtue in a man like Cato the Censor, necessarily
made their country a mean ally and a cowardly victor.
7
The history of Rome for the fifty-six years that elapsed be-
tween the battle of Zama and the last act of the tragedy, the
Third Punic War, tells of a hard ungracious expansion of
power abroad and of a slow destruction, by the usury and greed
of the rich, of the free agricultural population at home.
The spirit of the nation had become harsh and base; there
was no further extension of citizenship, no more generous at-
tempts at the assimilation of congenial foreign populations.
Spain was administered badly and settled slowly and with great
difficulty. Complicated interventions led to the reduction of
Illyria and Macedonia to the position of tribute-paying prov-
inces; Rome, it was evident, was going to "tax the foreigner"
now and release her home population from taxation. After
168 B.C. the old land tax was no longer levied in Italy, and the
only revenue derived from Italy was from the state domains
and through a tax on imports from overseas. The revenues
from the province of "Asia" defrayed the expenses of the
Roman state. At home men of the Cato type were acquiring
farms by loans and foreclosure, often the farms of men
impoverished by war service; they were driving the
free citizens off their land, and running their farms with
the pitilessly driven slave labour that was made cheap and
abundant. Such men regarded alien populations abroad merely
as unimported slaves. Sicily was handed over to the greedy
enterprise of tax-farmers. Corn could be grown there by rich
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 413
men using slaves, and imported very profitably into Rome, and
so the home land could be turned over to cattle and sheep feed-
ing. Consequently a drift of the uprooted Italian population
to the towns, and particularly to Rome, began.
Of the first conflicts of the spreading power of Rome with
the Seleucids, and how she formed an alliance with Egypt, we
can tell little here, nor of the tortuous fluctuations of the Greek
cities under the shadow of her advance until they fell into
actual subjugation. A map must suffice to show the extension
of her empire at this time.
The general grim baseness of the age was not without its
protesting voices. We have already told how the wasting dis-
ease of the Second Punic War, a disease of the state which was
producing avaricious rich men exactly as diseases of the body
will sometimes produce great pustules, was ended by the vigour
of Scipio Africanus. When it had seemed doubtful whether
the Senate would let him go as the Roman general, he had
threatened an appeal to the people. Thereafter he was a
marked man for the senatorial gang, who were steadily chang-
ing Italy from a land of free cultivators to a land of slave-
worked cattle ranches; they attempted to ruin him before ever
he reached Africa; they gave him forces insufficient, as they
hoped, for victory; and after the war they barred him strictly
from office. Interest and his natural malice alike prompted
Cato to attack him.
Scipio Africanus the Elder seems to have been of a generous
and impatient temperament, and indisposed to exploit the popu-
lar discontent with current tendencies and his own very great
popularity to his own advantage. He went as subordinate to
his brother Lucius Scipio, when the latter commanded the first
Roman army to pass into Asia. At Magnesia in Lydia a great
composite army under Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch,
suffered the fate (190 B.C.) of the very similar Persian armies
of a hundred and forty years before. This victory drew down
upon Lucius Scipio the hostility of the Senate, and he was
accused of misappropriating moneys received from Antiochus.
This filled Africanus with honest rage. As Lucius stood up
in the Senate with his accounts in his hands ready for the
badgering of his accusers, Africanus snatched the documents
from him, tore them up, and flung the fragments down. His
brother, he said, had paid into the treasury 200,000 sestertia
414
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 415
(= 2,000,000). Was he now to be pestered and tripped up
upon this or that item ? When, later on, Lucius was prosecuted
and condemned, Africanus rescued him by force. Being im-
peached, he reminded the people that the day was the anni-
versary of the battle of Zama, and defied the authorities amidst
the plaudits of the crowd.
The Roman people seem to have liked and supported Scipio
Africanus, and, after an interval of two thousand years, men
must like him still. He was able to throw torn paper in the
face of the Senate, and when Lucius was attacked again, one
of the tribunes of the people interposed his veto and quashed
the proceedings. But Scipio Africanus lacked that harder
alloy which makes men great democratic leaders. He was no
Caesar. He had none of the qualities that subdue a man to
the base necessities of political life. After these events he
retired in disgust from Rome to his estates, and there he died
in the year 183 B.C.
In the same year died Hannibal. He poisoned himself in
despair. The steadfast fear of the Roman Senate had hunted
him from court to court. In spite of the indignant protests of
Scipio, Rome in the peace negotiations had demanded his sur-
render from Carthage, and she continued to make this demand
of every power that sheltered him. When peace was made with
Antiochus III, this was one of the conditions. He was run to
earth at last in Bithynia; the king of Bithynia detained him
in order to send him to Rome, but he had long carried the
poison he needed in a ring, and by this he died.
It adds to the honour of the name of Scipio that it was an-
other Scipio, Scipio ISTasica, who parodied Cato's Delenda est
Carthago by ending all his speeches in the Senate with "Car-
thage must stand." He had the wisdom to see that the exist-
ence and stimulus of Carthage contributed to the general pros-
perity of Rome.
Yet it was the second Scipio Africanus, grandson by adoption
of Scipio Africanus the Elder, who took and destroyed Car-
thage. The sole offence of the Carthaginians, which brought
about the third and last Punic War, was that they continued
to trade and prosper. Their trade was not a trade that com-
peted with that of Rome ; when Carthage was destroyed, much
of her trade died with her, and North Africa entered upon a
phase of economic retrogression; but her prosperity aroused
41C THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
that passion of envy which was evidently more powerful even
than avarice in the "old Roman" type. The rich Equestrian
order resented any wealth in the world but its own. Rome
provoked the war by encouraging the Numidians to encroach
upon Carthage until the Carthaginians were goaded to fight in
despair. Rome then pounced upon Carthage, and declared
she had broken the treaty! She had made war without
permission.
The Carthaginians sent the hostages Rome demanded, they
surrendered their arms, they prepared to surrender territory.
But submission only increased the arrogance of Rome and the
pitiless greed of the rich Equestrian order which swayed her
counsels. She now demanded that Carthage should be aban-
doned, and the population removed to a spot at least ten miles
from the sea. This demand they made to a population that sub-
sisted almost entirely by overseas trade!
This preposterous order roused the Carthaginians to despair.
They recalled their exiles and prepared for resistance. The
military efficiency of the Romans had been steadily declining
through a half-century of narrow-minded and base-spirited gov-
ernment, and the first attacks upon the town in 149 B.C. almost
ended in disaster. Young Scipio, during these operations, dis-
tinguished himself in a minor capacity. The next year was also
a year of failure for the incompetents of the Senate. That
august body then passed from a bullying mood to one of ex-
treme panic. The Roman populace was even more seriously
scared. Young Scipio, chiefly on account of his name, although
he was under the proper age, and in other respects not qualified
for the office, was made consul, and bundled off to Africa to
save his precious country.
There followed the most obstinate and dreadful of sieges.
Scipio built a mole across the harbour, and cut off all supplies
by land or sea. The Carthaginians suffered horribly from
famine; but they held out until the town was stormed. The
street fighting lasted for six days, and when at last the citadel
capitulated, there were fifty thousand Carthaginians left alive
out of an estimated population of half a million. These sur-
vivors went into slavery, the whole city was burnt, the ruins
were ploughed to express final destruction, and a curse was
invoked with great solemnities upon anyone who might attempt
to rebuild it.
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 417
In the same year (146 B.C.) the Roman Senate and Eques-
trians also murdered another great city that seemed to limit
their trade monopolies, Corinth. They had a justification, for
Corinth had been in arms against them, but it was an inade-
quate justification.
8
We must note here, in a brief section, a change in the mili-
tary system of Rome, after the Second Punic War, that was of
enormous importance in her later development. Up to that
period the Roman armies had been levies of free citizens.
Fighting power and voting power were closely connected ; the
public assembly by centuries followed the paraphernalia of a
military mobilization, and marched, headed by the Equestrian
centuries, to the Campus Martius. The system was very like
that of the Boers before the last war in South Africa. The
ordinary Roman citizen, like the ordinary Boer, was a farmer ;
at the summons of his country he went "on commando." The
Boers were, indeed, in many respects, the last survivors of
Aryanism. They fought extraordinarily well, but at the back
of their minds was an anxious desire to go back to their farms.
For prolonged operations, such as the siege of Veii, the Romans
reinforced and relieved their troops in relays; the Boers did
much the same at the siege of Ladysmith.
The necessity for subjugating Spain after the Second Punic
War involved a need for armies of a different type. Spain
was too far off for periodic reliefs, and the war demanded a
more thorough training than was possible with these on and off
soldiers. Accordingly men were enlisted for longer terms and
paid. So the paid soldier first appeared in Roman affairs.
And to pay was added booty. Cato distributed silver treasure
among his command in Spain ; and it is also on record that he
attacked Scipio Africanus for distributing booty among his
troops in Sicily. The introduction of military pay led on to a
professional army, and this, a century later, to the disarma-
ment of the ordinary Roman citizen, who was now drifting in
an? impoverished state into Rome and the larger towns. The
great wars had been won, the foundations of the empire had
been well and truly laid by the embattled farmers of Rome
418 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
before 200 B.C. In the process the embattled fanners of Rome
had already largely disappeared. The change that began after
the Second Punic War was completed towards the close of
the century in the reorganization of the army by Marius, as
we will tell in its place. After his time we shall begin to write
of "the army/' and then of "the legions/' and we shall find
we are dealing with a new kind of army altogether, no longer
held together in the solidarity of a common citizenship. As
that tie fails, the legions discover another in esprit de corps,
in their common difference from and their common interest
against the general community. They begin to develop a
warmer interest in their personal leaders, who secure them pay
and plunder. Before the Punic Wars it was the tendency of
ambitious men in Eome to court the plebeians ; after that time
they began to court the legions.
The history of the Roman Republic thus far, is in many
respects much more modern in flavour, especially to the Ameri-
can or Western European reader, than anything that has pre-
ceded it. For the first time we have something like a self-gov-
erning "nation," something larger than a mere city state,
seeking to control its own destinies. For the first time we
have a wide countryside under one conception of law. We get
in the Senate and the popular assembly a conflict of groups and
personalities, an argumentative process of control, far more
stable and enduring than any autocracy can be, and far more
flexible and adaptable than any priesthood. For the first time
also we encounter social conflicts comparable to our own.
Money has superseded barter, and financial capital has become
fluid and free ; not perhaps so fluid and free as it is to-day, but
much more so than it had ever been before. The Punic Wars
were wars of peoples, such as were no other wars we have yet
recorded. Indubitably the broad lines of our present world,
the main ideas, the chief oppositions, were appearing in those
days.
But, as we have already pointed out, certain of the elem^n-
tary facilities and some of the current political ideas of our
time were still wanting in the Rome of the Punic Wars. There
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 419
were no newspapers, 1 and there was practically no use of
elected representatives in the popular assemblies. And an-
other deficiency, very understandable to us nowadays, but quite
beyond the scope of anyone then, was the absence of any general
elementary political education at all. The plebeians of Rome
had shown some glimmering of the idea that without knowledge
votes cannot make men free, when they had insisted upon the
publication of the law of the Twelve Tables; but they had
never been able, it was beyond the possibilities of the time, to
imagine any further extension of knowledge to the bulk of the
people. It is only nowadays that men are beginning to under-
stand fully the political significance of the maxim that "knowl-
edge is power." Two British Trade Unions, for example, have
recently set up a Labour College to meet the special needs of
able working-men in history, political and social science, and
the like. But education in republican Rome was the freak of
the individual parent, and the privilege of wealth and leisure.
It was mainly in the hands of Greeks, who were in many cases
slaves. There was a thin small stream of very fine learning
and very fine thinking up to the first century of the monarchy,
let Lucretius and Cicero witness, but it did not spread into the
mass of the people. The ordinary Roman was not only blankly
ignorant of the history of mankind, but also of the conditions
of foreign peoples ; he had no knowledge of economic laws nor
of social possibilities. Even his own interests he did not
clearly understand.
Of course, in the little city states of Greece and in that early
Roman state of four hundred square miles, men acquired by
talk and observation a sufficient knowledge for the ordinary
duties of citizenship, but by the beginning of the Punic Wars
the business was already too big and complicated for illiterate
men. Yet nobody seems to have observed the gap that was
1 Julius Csesar (60 B.C.) caused the proceedings of the Senate to be pub-
lished by having them written up upon bulletin boards, in albo (upon
the white). It had been the custom to publish the annual edict of the
praetor in this fashion. There were professional letter-writers who sent
news by special courier to rich country correspondents, and these would
copy down the stuff upon the Album (white board). Cicero, while he
was governor in Cilicia, got the current news from such a professional
correspondent. He complains in one letter that it was not what he
wanted; the expert was too full of the chariot races and other sporting
intelligence, and failed to give any view of the political situation. Ob-
viously this news-letter system was available only for public men in pros-
perous circumstances.
420 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
opening between the citizen and his state, and so there is no
record at all of any attempt to enlarge the citizen by instruc-
tion to meet his enlarged duties. Prom the second century B.C.
and onward everyone is remarking upon the ignorance of the
common citizen and his lack of political wisdom, everything is
suffering from the lack of political solidarity due to this igno-
rance, but no one goes on to what we should now consider the
inevitable corollary, no one proposes to destroy the ignorance
complained of. There existed no means whatever for the in-
struction of the masses of the people in a common political and
social ideal. It was only with the development of the great
propagandist religions in the Eoman world, of which Chris-
tianity was the chief and the survivor, that the possibility of
such a systematic instruction of great masses of people became
apparent in the world. That very great political genius, the
Emperor Constantine the Great, six centuries later, was the
first to apprehend and to attempt to use this possibility for the
preservation and the mental and moral knitting-together of the
world community over which he ruled.
But it is not only in these deficiencies of news and of educa-
tion and of the expedient of representative government that
this political system of Rome differed from our own. True,
it was far more like a modern civilized state than any other
state we have considered hitherto, but in some matters it was
strangely primordial and "sub-civilized." Every now and then
the reader of Roman history, reading it in terms of debates
and measures, policies and campaigns, capital and labour,
comes upon something that gives him much the same shock
he would feel if he went down to an unknown caller in his
house and extended his hand to meet the misshapen, hairy paw
of Homo N eandertlialensis and looked up to see a chinless,
bestial face. We have noted the occurrence of human sacrifice
in the third century B.C., and much that we learn of the religion
of republican Rome carries us far back beyond the days of
decent gods, to the age of shamanism and magic. We talk of a
legislative gathering, and the mind flies to Westminster; but
how should we feel if we went to see the beginning of a session
of the House of Lords, and discovered the Lord Chancellor,
with bloody fingers, portentously fiddling about among the
entrails of a newly killed sheep ? The mind would recoil from
Westminster to the customs of Benin. And the slavery of
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 421
Rome was a savage slavery, altogether viler than the slavery of
Babylon. We have had a glimpse of the virtuous Cato among
his slaves in the second century B.C. Moreover, in the third
century B.C., when King Asoka was ruling India in light and
gentleness, the Romans were reviving an Etruscan sport, the
setting on of slaves to fight for their lives. One is reminded
of West Africa again in the origin of this amusement ; it grew
out of the prehistoric custom of a massacre of captives at the
(from, a waZI-pain&ig' at Pompezi)
burial of a chief. There was a religious touch about this sport ;
the slaves with hooks, who dragged the dead bodies out of the
arena, wore masks to represent the infernal ferryman-god,
Charon. In 264 B.C., the very year in which Asoka began to
reign and the First Punic War began, the first recorded gladia-
torial combat took place in the forum at Rome, to celebrate
the funeral of a member of the old Roman family of Brutus.
This was a modest display of three couples, but soon gladiators
were fighting by the hundred. The taste for these combats
grew rapidly, and the wars supplied an abundance of captives.
The old Roman moralists, who were so severe upon kissing and
women's ornaments and Greek philosophy, had nothing but
good to say for this new development. So long as pain was
inflicted, Roman morality, it would seem, was satisfied.
If republican Rome was the first of modern self-governing
national communities, she was certainly the "Neanderthal"
form of them.
In the course of the next two or three centuries the gladia-
torial shows of Rome grew to immense proportions. To begin
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
with, while wars were frequent, the gladiators were prisoners
of war. They came with their characteristic national weapons,
tattooed Britons, Moors, Scythians, negroes, and the like, and
there was perhaps some military value in these exhibitions.
Then criminals of the lower classes condemned to death were
also used. The ancient world did not understand that a crimi-
nal condemned to death still has rights, and at any rate the use
of a criminal as a gladiator was not so bad as his use as "mate-
rial" for the vivisectors of the Museum at Alexandria. But
as the profits of this sort of show business grew and the demand
for victims increased, ordinary slaves were sold to the trainers
of gladiators, and any slave who had aroused his owner's spite
might find himself in an establishment for letting out gladia-
tors. And dissipated young men who had squandered their
property, and lads of spirit would go voluntarily into the trade
for a stated time, trusting to their prowess to survive. As the
business developed, a new use was found for gladiators as
armed retainers; rich men would buy a band, and employ it
as a bodyguard or hire it out for profit at the shows. The
festivities of a show began with a ceremonial procession
(pompa) and a sham fight (prcelusio}. The real fighting was
heralded by trumpets. Gladiators who objected to fight for any
reason were driven on by whips and hot irons. A wounded
man would sometimes call for pity by holding up his forefinger.
The spectators would then either wave their handkerchiefs in
token of mercy, or condemn him to death by holding out their
clenched fists with the thumbs down. 1 The slain and nearly
dead were dragged out to a particular place, the spoliarium,
where they were stripped of their arms and possessions, and
those who had not already expired were killed.
This organization of murder as a sport and show serves to
measure the great gap in moral standards between the Roman
community and our own. No doubt cruelties and outrages
upon human dignity as monstrous as this still go on in the
world, but they do not go on in the name of the law and without
a single dissentient voice. For it is true that until the time
of Seneca (first century A.D.) there is no record of t any plain
protest against this business. The conscience of mankind was
1 Authorities differ here. Mayor says thumbs up (to the breast) meant
death and thumbs down meant "Lower that sword." The popular per-
suasion is that thumbs down meant death.
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 423
weaker and less intelligent then than now. Presently a new
power was to come into the human conscience through the
spread of Christianity. The spirit of Jesus in Christianity
became the great antagonist in the later Eoman state of these
cruel shows and of slavery, and, as Christianity spread, these
two evil things dwindled and disappeared. 1
1 "A little more needs to be said on this matter. The Greeks cited gladia-
torial shows as a reason for regarding the Romans as Barbaroi, and there
were riots when some Roman proconsul tried to introduce them in Corinth.
Among Romans, the better people evidently disliked them, but a sort of
shyness prevented them from frankly denouncing them as cruel. For
instance, Cicero, when he had to attend the Circus, took his tablets and
his secretary with him, and didn't look. He expresses particular disgust
at the killing of an elephant; and somebody in Tacitus (Drusus, Ann. 1.
76) was unpopular because he was too fond of gladiatorial bloodshed
'quamquam vili sanguine nimis gaudens' ('rejoicing too much in blood,
worthless blood though it was'). The games were unhesitatingly con-
demned by Greek philosophy, and at different times two Cynics and one
Christian gave their lives in the arena, protesting against them, before
they were abolished.
"I do not think Christianity had any such relation to slavery as is
here stated. St. Paul's action in sending back a slave to his master, and
his injunction, 'Slaves, obey your masters,' were regularly quoted on the
pro-slavery side, down to the nineteenth century; on the other hand, both
the popular philosophies and the Mystery religions were against slavery
in their whole tendency, and Christianity of course in time became the chief
representative of these movements. Probably the best test is the number
of slaves who occupied posts of honour in the religious and philosophic
systems, like Epictetus, for instance, or the many slaves who hold offices
in the Mithraic Inscriptions. I do not happen to know if any slaves
were made Christian bishops, but by analogy I should think it likely that
some were. In all the Mystery religions, as soon as you entered the
community, and had communion with God. earthly distinctions shrivelled
away." G. M.
XXVII
FROM TIBEBIUS GRACCHUS TO THE GOD
EMPEROR IX ROME
1. The Science of Thwarting the Common Man. 2,
Finance in the Roman State. 3. The Last Years of Re-
publican Polictics. 4. The Era of the Adventurer Gen-
erals. 5. The End of the Republic. 6. The Coming of
the Princeps. 7. Why the Roman Republic Failed.
WE have already twice likened the self-governing com-
munity of Rome to a "Neanderthal" variety of the
modern "democratic" civilized state, and we shall
recur again to this comparison. In form the two things, the
first great primitive essay and its later relations, are extraordi-
narily similar; in spirit they differ very profoundly. Roman
political and social life, and particularly Roman political and
social life in the century between the fall of Carthage and the
rise of Caesar and Csesarism, has a very marked general re-
semblance to the political and social life in such countries as
the United States of America or the British Empire to-day.
The resemblance is intensified by the common use, with a cer-
tain inaccuracy in every case, of such terms as "senate," "democ-
racy," "proletariat," and the like. But. everything in the
Roman state was earlier, cruder, and clumsier; the injustices
were more glaring, the conflicts harsher. There was compara-
tively little knowledge and few general ideas. Aristotle's sci-
entific works were only beginning to be read in Rome in the
first century B.C. ; Ferrero, 1 it is true, makes Caasar familiar
with the Politics of Aristotle, and ascribes to him the dream
of making a "Periclean Rome," but in d@ing so, Ferrero seems
to be indulging in one of those lapses into picturesque romanc-
* Greatness and Decline of Rome, bk. i. ch. xi.
424
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 425
ing which are at once the joy and the snare of all historical
writers.
Attention has already heen drawn to the profound difference
between Koman and modern conditions due to the absence of a
press, of any popular education or of the representative idea
in the popular assembly. Our world to-day is still far from
solving the problem of representation and from producing a
public assembly which will really summarize, crystallize, and
express the thought and will of the community ; our elections
are still largely an ingenious mockery of the common voter who
finds himsef helpless in the face of party organizations which
reduce his free choice of a representative to the less unpalatable
of two political hacks, but, even so, his vote, in comparison
with the vote of an ordinary honest Roman citizen, is an effec-
tive instrument. Too many of our histories dealing with this
period of Roman history write of "the popular party," and of
the votes of the people and so forth, as though such things
were as much working realities as they are to-day. But the
senators and politicians of Rome saw to it that such things
never did exist as clean and wholesome realities. These modern
phrases are very misleading unless they are carefully qualified.
We have already described the gatherings of the popular
comitia ; but that clumsy assembly in sheep pens does not con-
vey the full extent to which the gerrymandering of popular
representation could be carried in Rome. Whenever there was
a new enfranchisement of citizens in Italy, there would be the
most elaborate trickery and counter-trickery to enrol the new
voters into as few or as many of the thirty eld "tribes" as possi-
ble, or to put them into as few as possible new tribes. Since
the vote was taken by tribes, it is obvious that however great
the number of new additions made, if they were all got to-
gether into one tribe, their opinion would only count for one
tribal vote, and similarly if they were crowded into just a few
tribes, old or new. On the other hand, if they were put into
too many tribes their effect in any particular tribe might be
inconsiderable. Here was the sort of work to fascinate every
smart knave in politics. The comitia tributa could be worked
at times so as to vote right counter to the general feeling of
the people. And as we have already noted, the great mass of
voters in Italy were also disenfranchised by distance. About
the middle period of the Carthaginian wars there were upwards
426 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
of 300,000 Roman citizens; about 100 B.C. there were more
than 900,000, but in effect the voting of the popular assembly
was confined to a few score thousand resident in and near
Rome, and mostly men of a base type. And the Roman voters
were "organized'' to an extent that makes the Tammany ma-
chine of New York seem artless and honest. They belonged
to clubs, collegia sodaUcia-, having usually some elegant re-
ligious pretensions; and the rising politician working his way
to office went first to the usurers and then with the borrowed
money to these clubs. If the outside voters were moved enough
by any question to swarm into the city, it was always possible
to put off the voting by declaring the omens unfavourable. If
they came in unarmed, they could be intimidated; if they
brought in arms, then the cry was raised that there was a plot
to overthrow the republic, and a massacre would be organized.
There can be no doubt that all Italy, all the empire was
festering with discomfort, anxiety, and discontent in the cen-
tury after the destruction of Carthage; a few men were grow-
ing very rich, and the majority of people found themselves
entangled in an inexplicable net of uncertain prices, jumpy
markets, and debts ; but yet there was no way at all of stating
and clearing up the general dissatisfaction. There is no record
of a single attempt to make the popular assembly a straightfor-
ward and workable public organ. Beneath the superficial ap-
pearances of public affairs struggled a mute giant of public
opinion and public will, who sometimes made some great po-
litical effort a rush to vote or such like, and sometimes broke
into actual violence. So long as there was no actual violence,
the Senate and the financiers kept on in their own disastrous
way. Only when they were badly frightened would governing
cliques or parties desist from some nefarious policy and heed
the common good. The real method of popular expression in
Italy in those days was not the comitia inbuta, but the strike
and insurrection, the righteous and necessary methods of all
cheated or suppressed peoples. We have seen in our own days
in Great Britain a decline in the prestige of parliamentary
government and a drift towards unconstitutional methods on
the part of the masses through exactly the same cause, through
the incurable disposition of politicians to gerrymander the elec-
toral machine until the community is driven to explosion.
For insurrectionary purposes a discontented population needs
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 427
a leader, and the political history of the concluding century of
Roman republicanism is a history of insurrectionary leaders
and counter-revolutionary leaders. Most of the former are
manifestly unscrupulous adventurers who try to utilize the
public necessity and unhappiness for their own advancement.
Many of the historians of this period betray a disposition to
take sides, and are either aristocratic in tone or fiercely demo-
cratic; but, indeed, neither side in these complex and intricate
disputes has a record of high aims or clean hands. The Senate
and the rich Equestrians were vulgar and greedy spirits, hostile
and contemptuous towards the poor mob; and the populace
was ignorant, unstable, and at least equally greedy. The
Scipios in all this record shine by comparison, a group of gentle-
men. To the motives of one or the other figures of the time,
to Tiberius Gracchus, for example, we may perhaps extend
the benefit of the doubt But for the rest, they do but demon-
strate how clever and cunning men may be, how subtle in con-
tention, how brilliant in pretence, and how utterly wanting in
wisdom or grace of spirit. "A shambling, hairy, brutish, but
probably very cunning creature with a big brain behind;" so
someone, I think it was Sir Harry Johnston, has described
Homo NeandertJialensis.
To this day we must still use similar terms to describe the
soul of the politician. The statesman has still to oust the
politician from his lairs and weapon heaps. History has still
to become a record of human dignity.
2
Another respect in which the Roman system was a crude
anticipation of our own, and different from any preceding
political system we have considered, was that it was a cash
and credit-using system. Money had been in the world as yet
for only a few centuries. But its use had been growing; it
was providing a fluid medium for trade and enterprise, and
changing economic conditions profoundly. In republican Rome,
the financier and the "money" interest began to play a part
recognizably similar to their roles to-day.
We have already noted in our account of Herodotus that
a first effect of money was to give freedom of movement and
leisure to a number of people who could not otherwise have
428 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
enjoyed these privileges. And that is the peculiar value of
money to mankind. Instead of a worker or helper being paid
in kind and in such a way that he is tied as much in his en-
joyment as in his labour, money leaves him free to do as he
pleases amidst a wide choice of purchasable aids, eases, and
indulgences. He may eat his money or drink it or give it to a
temple or spend it in learning something or save it against
some unforeseen occasion. That is the good of money, the free-
dom of its universal convertibility. But the freedom money
gives the poor man is nothing to the freedom money has given
the rich man. With money rich men ceased to be tied to
lands, houses, stores, flocks and herds. They could change the
nature and locality of their possessions with an unheard-of
freedom. In the third and second century B.C., this release,
this untethering of wealth, began to tell upon the general eco-
nomic life of the Roman and Hellenized world. People began
to buy land and the like not for use, but to sell again at a profit ;
people borrowed to buy, speculation developed. No doubt there
were bankers in the Babylon of 1000 B.C., but they lent
in a far more limited and solid way, bars of metal and stocks
of goods. That earlier world was a world of barter and pay-
ment in kind, and it went slowly and much more staidly and
stably for that reason. In that state the vast realm of China
has remained almost down to the present time.
The big cities before Rome were trading and manufacturing
cities. Such were Corinth and Carthage and Syracuse. But
Rome never produced a very considerable industrial popula-
tion, and her warehouses never rivalled those of Alexandria.
The little port of Ostia was always big enough for her needs.
Rome was a political and financial capital, and in the latter
respect, at least, she was a new sort of city. She imported
profits and tribute, and very little went out from her in return.
The wharves of Ostia were chiefly busy unloading corn from
Sicily and Africa and loot from all the world.
After the fall of Carthage the Roman imagination went wild
with the hitherto unknown possibilities of finance. Money,
like most other inventions, had "happened" to mankind, and
men had still to develop to-day they have still to perfect
the science and morality of money. One sees the thing "catch-
ing on" in the recorded life and the writings of Cato the Censor.
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 429
In his early days he was bitterly virtuous against usury; in
his later he was devising ingenious schemes for safe usury.
In this curiously interesting century of Roman history we
find man after man asking, "What has happened to Rome?"
Various answers are made a decline in religion, a decline from
the virtues of the Roman forefathers, Greek "intellectual
poison," and the like. We who can look at the problem with a
large perspective, can see that what had happened to Rome
was "money" the new freedoms and chances and opportunities
that money opened out. Money floated the Romans off the
firm ground, everyone was getting hold of money, the majority
by the simple expedient of running into debt ; the eastward ex-
pansion of the empire was very largely a hunt for treasure in
strong rooms and temples to keep pace with the hunger of the
new need. The Equestrian order, in particular, became the
money power. Everyone was developing property. Farmers
were giving up corn and cattle, borrowing money, buying
slaves, and starting the more intensive cultivation of oil and
wine. Money was young in human experience and wild, no-
body had it under control. It fluctuated greatly. It was now
abundant and now scarce. Men made sly and crude schemes
to corner it, to hoard it, to send up prices by releasing hoarded
metals. A small body of very shrewd men was growing im-
mensely rich. Many patricians were growing poor and irritated
and unscrupulous. Among the middle sort of peoples there was
much hope, much adventure, and much more disappointment.
The growing mass of the expropriated was permeated by that
vague, baffled, and hopeless sense of being inexplicably bested,
which is the preparatory condition for all great revolutionary
movements.
3
The first conspicuous leader to appeal to the gathering revolu-
tionary feeling in Italy was Tiberius Gracchus. He looks more
like an honest man than any other figure in this period of
history, unless it be Scipio Africanus the Elder. At first
Tiberius Gracchus was a moderate reformer of a rather reac-
tionary type. He wished to restore the yeoman class to prop-
erty, very largely because he believed that class to be the back-
bone of the army, and his military experience in Spain before
430 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
and after the destruction of Carthage had impressed upon him
the declining efficiency of the legions. He was what we should
call nowadays a "Back-to-the-land" man. He did not under-
stand and few people understand to-day, how much easier it is
to shift population from the land into the towns, than to return
it to the laborious and simple routines of agricultural life. He
wanted to revive the Licinian laws, which had been established
when Camillus built his temple of Concord nearly two centuries
and a half before (see Chap, xxvi, 2), so far as they broke up
great estates and restrained slave labour.
These Licinian laws had repeatedly been revived and re-
peatedly lapsed to a dead letter again. It was only when the
big proprietors in the Senate opposed this proposal that Tibe-
rius Gracchus turned to the people and began a furious agitation
for popular government. He created a commission to inquire
into the title of all landowners. In the midst of his activities
occurred one of the most extraordinary incidents in history.
Attains, the king of the rich country of Pergamum in Asia
Minor, died (133 B.C.), and left his kingdom to the Roman
people.
It is difficult for us to understand the motives of this bequest.
Pergamum was a country allied to Rome, and so moderately
secure from aggression; and the natural consequence of such
a will was to provoke a violent scramble among the senatorial
gangs and a dispute between them and the people for the spoils
of the new acquisition. Practically Attains handed over his
country to be looted. There were of course many Italian busi-
ness people established in the country and a strong party of
native rich men in close relations with Rome. To them, no
doubt, a coalescence with the Roman system would have been
acceptable. Josephus bears witness to such a desire for an-
nexation among the rich men of Syria, a desire running counter
to the wishes of both king and people. This Pergamum bequest,
astonishing in itself, had the still more astonishing result of
producing imitations in other quarters. In 96 B.C. Ptolemy
Apion bequeathed Cyrenaica, in North Africa, to the Roman
people; in 81 B.C. Alexander II, King of Egypt, followed suit
with Egypt, a legacy too big for the courage if not for the
appetite of the Senators, and they declined it; in 74 B.C.
Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, demised Bithynia. Of these
latter testamentary freaks we will say no more here. But it
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR, 431
will be manifest how great an opportunity was given Tiberius
Gracchus by the bequest of Attalus, of accusing the rich of
greed and of proposing to decree the treasures of Attalus to
the commonalty. He proposed to use this new wealth to provide
seed, stock, and agricultural implements for the resettlement
of the land.
His movement was speedily entangled in the complexities of
the Eoman electoral system without a simple and straight-
forward electoral method, all popular movements in all ages
necessarily become entangled and maddened in constitutional
intricacies, and almost as necessarily lead to bloodshed. It was
needed, if his work was to go on, that Tiberius Gracchus should
continue to be tribune, and it was illegal for him to be tribune
twice in succession. He overstepped the bounds of legality, and
stood for the tribuneship a second time; the peasants who
came in from the countryside to vote for him came in armed;
the cry that he was aiming at a tyranny, the cry that had long
ago destroyed Mselius and Manlius, was raised in the Senate,
the friends of "law and order" went to the Capitol in state, ac-
companied by a rabble of dependents armed with staves and
bludgeons; there was a conflict, or rather a massacre of the
revolutionaries, in which nearly three hundred people were
killed, and Tiberius Gracchus was beaten to death with the
fragments of a broken bench by two Senators.
Thereupon the Senators attempted a sort of counter-revolu-
tion, and proscribed many of the followers of Tiberius Gracchus ;
but the state of public opinion was so sullen and threatening
that this movement was dropped and Scipio Nasica, who was
implicated in the death of Tiberius, though he occupied the
position of pontifex maximus and should have remained in
Rome for the public sacrifices which were the duties of that
official, went abroad to avoid trouble.
The uneasiness of Italy next roused Scipio Africanus the
Younger to propose the enfranchisement of all Italy. But he
died suddenly before he could carry the proposal into effect.
Then followed the ambiguous career of Caius Gracchus, the
brother of Tiberius, who followed some tortuous "policy" that
still exercises the mind of historians. He increased the burthens
of taxation laid upon the provinces, it is supposed with the idea
of setting the modern financiers (the Equites) against the sena-
torial landowners. He gave the former the newly bequeathed
432 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
taxes of Asia to farm, and, what is worse, he gave them control
of the special courts set up to prevent extortion. He started
enormous public works and particularly the construction of
new roads, and he is accused of making a political use of the
contracts. He revived the proposal to enfranchise Italy. He
increased the distribution of subsidized cheap corn to the Roman
citizens. . . . Here we cannot attempt to disentangle his
schemes, much less to judge him. But that his policy was offen-
sive to the groups that controlled the Senate there can be no
doubt whatever. He was massacred by the champions of "law
and order/ 7 with about three thousands of his followers, in
the streets of Rome in 121 B.C. His decapitated head was
carried to the Senate on the point of a pike.
(A reward of its weight in gold, says Plutarch, had been
offered for this trophy : and its captor, acting in the true spirit
of a champion of "big business," filled the brain-case with lead
on its way to the scales.)
"In spite of these prompt firm measures the Senate was not
to enjoy the benefits of peace and the advantages of a control
of the imperial resources for long. Within ten years the people
were in revolt again.
In 118 B.C. the throne of Numidia, the semi-barbaric king-
dom that had arisen in North Africa upon the ruins of the
civilized Carthaginian power, was seized by a certain able
Jugurtha, who had served with the Roman armies in Spain, and
had a knowledge of the Roman character. He provoked the
military intervention of Rome. But the Romans found that
their military power, under a Senate of financiers and land-
lords, was very different from what it had been even in the days
of the younger Scipio Africanus. " Jugurtha bought over the
Commissioners sent out to watch him, the Senators charged
with their prosecution, and the generals in command against
him." l There is a mistaken Roman proverb : "pecunia non
olet" (money does not stink), for the money of Jugurtha stank
even in Rome. There was an angry agitation; and a capable
soldier of lowly origin, Marius, was carried to the consulship
(107 B.C.) on the wave of popular indignation. Marius made
no attempt on the model of the Gracchi to restore the backbone
of the army by rehabilitating the yeoman class. He was a
professional soldier with a high standard of efficiency and a
1 Ferrero.
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 433
disposition to take short cuts. He simply raised troops from
among the poor, whether countrymen or townsmen, paid them
well, disciplined them thoroughly, and (106 B.C.) ended the
seven years' war with Jugurtha by bringing that chieftain in
chains to Rome. It did not occur to anybody that incidentally
Marius had also created a professional army with no interest
to hold it together but its pay. He then held on to the consul-
ship more or less illegally for several years, and in 102 and 101
B.C. repelled a threatening move of the Germans (who thus
appear in our history for the first time), who were raiding
through Gaul towards Italy. He gained two victories ; one on
Italian soil. He was hailed as the saviour of his country, a
second Camillus (100 B.C.).
The social tensions of the time mocked that comparison with
Camillus. The Senate benefited by the greater energy in for-
eign affairs and the increased military efficiency that Marius
had introduced, but the sullen, shapeless discontent of the mass
of the people was still seeking some effective outlet. The rich
grew richer and the poor poorer. It was impossible to stifle
the consequences of that process for ever by political trickery.
The Italian people were still unenfranchised. Two extreme
democratic leaders, Saturninus and Glaucia, were assassinated,
but that familiar senatorial remedy failed to assuage the popu-
lace on this occasion. In 92 B.C. an aristocratic official, Eutilius
Rufus, who had tried to restrain the exactions of the financiers
in Asia Minor, was condemned on a charge of corruption so
manifestly trumped up that it deceived no one; and in 91 B.C.,
Livius Drusus, a newly elected tribune of the people, who was
making capital out of the trial of Rutilius Rufus, was assassi-
nated. He had proposed a general enfranchisement of the
Italians, and he had foreshadowed not only another land law,
but a general abolition of debts. Yet for all this vigour on
the part of the senatorial usurers, landgrabbers, and forestallers,
the hungry and the anxious were still insurgent. The murder
of Drusus was the last drop in the popular cup ; Italy blazed into
a desperate insurrection.
There followed two years of bitter civil war, the Social War.
It was a war between the idea of a united Italy and the idea of
the rule of the Roman Senate. It was not a "social" war in
the modern sense, but a war between Rome and her Italian
allies (allies Socii). "Roman generals, trained in the tradi-
434 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
tions of colonial warfare, marched ruthlessly up and down Italy,
burning farms, sacking towns, and carrying off men, women,
and children, to sell them in the open market or work them
in gangs upon their estates." l Marius and an aristocratic gen-
eral, Sulla, who had been with him in Africa and who was
his bitter rival, both commanded on the side of Rome. But
though the insurgents experienced defeats and looting, neither
of these generals brought the war to an end. It was ended in
a manner (89 B.C.) by the practical surrender of the Roman
Senate to the idea of reform. The spirit was taken out of the
insurrection by the concession of their demands "in principle" ;
and then as soon as the rebels had dispersed, the usual cheating
of the new voters, by such methods as we have explained in 1
of this chapter, was resumed.
By the next year (88 B.C.) the old round had begun again. It
was mixed up with the personal intrigues of Marius and Sulla
against each other ; but the struggle had taken on another com-
plexion through the army reforms of Marius, which had created
a new type of legionary, a landless professional soldier with no
interest in life but pay and plunder, and with no feeling of loy-
alty except to a successful general. A popular tribune, Sul-
picius, was bringing forward some new laws affecting debt, and
the consuls were dodging the storm by declaring a suspension
of public business. Then came the usual resort to violence, and
the followers of Sulpicius drove the consuls from the forum.
But here it is that the new forces which the new army had
made possible came into play. King Mithridates of Pontus,
the Hellenized king of the southern shores of the Black Sea
east of Bithynia, was pressing Rome into war. One of the
proposed laws of Sulpicius was that Marius should command
the armies sent against this Mithridates. Whereupon Sulla
marched the army he had commanded throughout the Social
War to Rome, Marius and Sulpicius fled, and a new age, an
age of military pronunciamentos, began.
Of how Sulla had himself made commander against Mithri-
dates and departed, and of how legions friendly to Marius then
seized power, how Marius returned to Italy and enjoyed a
thorough massacre of his political opponents and died, sated,
of fever, we cannot tell in any detail. But one measure dur-
ing the Marian reign of terror did much to relieve the social
1 Ferrero.
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 435
tension, and that was the abolition of three-quarters of all out-
standing debts. Nor can we tell here how Sulla made a dis-
creditable peace with Mithridates (who had massacred a
hundred thousand Italians in Asia Minor) in order to bring his
legions back to Rome, defeat the Marians at the battle of the
Colline Gate of Home, and reverse the arrangements of Marius.
Sulla restored law and order by the proscription and execu-
tion of over five thousand people. He desolated large parts of
Italy, restored the Senate to power, repealed many of the
recent laws, though he was unable to restore the cancelled
burden of debt, and then, feeling bored by politics and having
amassed great riches, he retired with an air of dignity into
private life, gave himself up to abominable vices, and so pres-
ently died, eaten up with some disgusting disease produced
by debauchery. 1
4
Political life in Italy was not so much tranquillized as
stunned by the massacres and confiscations of Marius and Sulla.
The scale upon which this history is planned will not permit us
to tell here of the great adventurers who, relying more and
more on the support of the legions, presently began to scheme
and intrigue again for dictatorial power in Rome. In 73 B.C.
all Italy was terrified by a rising of the slaves, and particularly
of the gladiators, led by a gladiator from Thessaly, Spartacus.
He and seventy others had fled out from a gladiatorial "farm"
at Capua. Similar risings had already occurred in Sicily.
The forces under Spartacus necessarily became a miscellaneous
band drawn from east and west, without any common idea
except the idea of dispersing and getting home ; nevertheless, he
held out in southern Italy for two years, using the then ap-
parently extinct crater of Vesuvius for a time as a natural
fortress. The Italians, for all their love of gladiatorial display,
failed to appreciate this conversion of the whole country into
an arena, this bringing of the gladiatorial sword to the door,
and when at last Spartacus was overthrown, their terror changed
to frantic cruelty, six thousand of his captured followers were
1 Plutarch. To which, however, G. M. adds the following note: "It is
generally believed that Sulla died through bursting a blood-vessel in a fit
of temper. The story of abominable vices seems to be only the regular
slander of the Roman mob against anyone who did not live in public."
430 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
crucified long miles of nailed and drooping victims along
the Appian Way.
Here we cannot deal at any length with Lucullus, who in-
vaded Pontus and fought Mithridates, and brought the culti-
vated cherry-tree to Europe; nor can we tell how ingeniously
Pompey the Great stole the triumph and most of the prestige
Lucullus had won in Armenia beyond Pontus. Lucullus, like
Sulla, retired into an opulent private life, but with more ele-
gance and with a more gracious end. We cannot relate in any
detail how Julius Caesar accumulated reputation in the west,
by conquering Gaul, defeating the German tribes upon the
Rhine, and pushing a punitive raid across the Straits of Dover
into Britain. More and more important grow the legions;
less and less significant are the Senate and the assemblies of
Rome. But there is a certain grim humour about the story
of Crassus that we cannot altogether neglect.
This Crassus was a great money-lender and forestaller. He
was a typical man of the new Equestrian type, the social equiva-
lent of a modern munition profiteer. He first grew rich by
buying up the property of those proscribed by Sulla. His
earliest exploits in the field were against Spartacus, whom
finally he crushed by great payments and exertions after a
prolonged and expensive campaign. He then, as the outcome of
complicated bargains, secured the command in the east and
prepared to emulate the glories of Lucullus, who had pushed east
from Pergamum and Bithynia into Pontus, and of Pompey,
who had completed the looting of Armenia.
His experiences serve to demonstrate the gross ignorance
with which the Romans were conducting their affairs at that
time. He crossed the Euphrates, expecting to find in Persia
another Hellenized kingdom like Pontus. But, as we have
already intimated, the great reservoirs of nomadic peoples that
stretched round from the Danube across Russia into Central
Asia, had been raining back into the lands between the Caspian
Sea and the Indus that Alexander had conquered for Hellenism.
Crassus found himself against the "Scythian" again; against
mobile tribes of horsemen led by a monarch in Median costume. 1
The particular variety of " Scythian" he encountered was called
the Parthian. It is possible that in the Parthians a Mongo-
lian (Turanian) element was now mingled with the Aryan
1 Plutarch.
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 437
strain; but the campaign of Crassus beyond the Euphrates is
curiously like the campaign of Darius beyond the Danube ; there
is the same heavy thrusting of an infantry force against elu-
sive light horsemen. But Crassus was less quick than Darius
to realize the need of withdrawal, and the Parthians were bet-
ter bowmen than the Scythians Darius met. They seem to
have had some sort of noisy projectile of unusual strength and
force, something different from an ordinary arrow. 1 The cam-
paign culminated in that two days' massacre of the hot, thirsty,
hungry, and weary Roman legions which is known as the
battle of Carrha3 (53 B.C.). They toiled through the sand, charg-
ing an enemy who always evaded their charge and rode round
them and shot them to pieces. Twenty thousand of them were
killed, and ten thousand marched on eastward as prisoners into
slavery in Iran.
What became of Crassus is not clearly known. There is a
story, probably invented for our moral benefit and suggested
by his usuries, that he fell alive into the hands of the Parthians
and was killed by having molten gold poured down his throat.
But this disaster has a very great significance indeed to our
general history of mankind. It serves to remind us that from
the Rhine to the Euphrates, all along to the north of the Alps
and Danube and Black Sea, stretched one continuous cloud
of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, whom the statescraft
of imperial Rome was never able to pacify and civilize, nor
her military science subdue. We have already called atten-
tion to a map showing how the Second Babylonian Empire,
the Chaldean Empire, lay like a lamb in the embrace of the
Median power. In exactly the same way the Roman Empire
lay like a lamb in the embrace of this great crescent of outer
barbarians. Not only was Rome never able to thrust back
or assimilate that superincumbent crescent, but she was never
able to organize the Mediterranean Sea into a secure and
1 The bow was probably the composite bow, so-called because it is made
of several plates (five or so) of horn, like the springs of a carriage: it
discharges a high-speed arrow with a twang. This was the bow the Mon-
gols used. This short composite bow (it was not a long bow) was quite
old in human experience. It was the bow of Odysseus; the Assyrians had
it in a modified form. It went out in Greece, but it survived as
the Mongol bow. It was quite short, very stiff to pull, with a flat
trajectory, a remarkable range, and a great noise (cp. Homer's
reference to the twang of the bow). It went out in the Mediterranean
because the climate was not good for it, and because there were insuffi-
cient animals to supply the horn. J. L. M.
458
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 439
orderly system of communication between one part of her em-
pire and another. Quite unknown as yet to Rome, the Mon-
golian tribes from North-eastern Asia, the Huns and their
kin, walled back and driven out from China by the Tsi and
Han dynasties, were drifting and pressing westward, mixing
with the Parthians, the Scythians, the Teutons and the like,
or driving them before them.
Never at any time did the Romans succeed in pushing their
empire beyond Mesopotamia, and upon Mesopotamia their hold
was never very secure. Before the close of the republic that
power of assimilation which had been the secret of their success
was giving way to "patriotic" exclusiveness and "patriotic"
greed. Rome plundered and destroyed Asia Minor and Baby-
lonia, which were the necessary basis for an eastward extension
to India, just as she had destroyed and looted Carthage and
so had no foothold for extension into Africa, and just as she had
destroyed Corinth and so cut herself off from an easy way into
the heart of Greece. Western European writers, impressed
by the fact that later on Rome Romanized and civilized Gaul
and South Britain and restored the scene of her earlier devasta-
tions in Spain to prosperity, are apt to ignore that over far
greater areas to the south and east her influence was to weaken
and so restore to barbarism the far wider conquests of Hellenic
civilization.
5
But among the politicians of Italy in the first century B.C.
there were no maps of Germany and Russia, Africa and Cen-
tral Asia, and no sufficient intelligence to study them had they
existed. Rome never developed the fine curiosities that sent
Hanno and the sailors of Pharaoh Necho down the coasts of
Africa. When, in the first century B.C., the emissaries of the
Han dynasty reached the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, they
found only stories of a civilization that had receded. The
memory of Alexander still lived in these lands, but of Rome
men only knew that Pompey had come to the western shores
of the Caspian and gone away again, and that Crassus had
been destroyed. Rome was pre-occupied at home. What men-
tal energy remained over in the Roman citizen from the at-
tempt to grow personally rich and keep personally safe was
440 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
intent upon the stratagems and strokes and counter-strokes of
the various adventurers who were now manifestly grappling for
the supreme power.
It is the custom of historians to treat these struggles with
extreme respect. In particular the figure of Julius Caesar
is set up as if it were a star of supreme brightness and impor-
tance in the history of mankind. Yet a dispassionate considera-
tion of the known facts fails altogether to justify this demi-
god theory of Ca?sar. Not even that precipitate wrecker of
splendid possibilities, Alexander the Great, has been so magni-
fied and dressed up for the admiration of careless and uncritical
readers. There is a type of scholar who, to be plain, sits and
invents marvellous world policies for the more conspicuous
figures in history with the merest scraps of justification or with
no justification at all. We are told that Alexander planned
the conquest of Carthage and Rome and the complete subjuga-
tion of India and that only his death shattered these schemes.
What we know for certain is that he conquered the Persian
Empire, and never went far beyond its boundaries ; and that
when he was supposed to be making these vast and noble plans,
he was in fact indulging in such monstrous antics as his mourn-
ing for his favourite Hephaestion, and as his main occupation he
was drinking himself to death. So, too, Julius Caesar is cred-
ited with the intention of doing just that one not impossible
thing which would have secured the Roman Empire from its
ultimate collapse namely, the systematic conquest and civiliza-
tion of Europe as far as the Baltic and the Dnieper. He was
to have marched upon Germany, says Plutarch, through Par-
thia and Scythia, round the north of the Caspian and Black Seas.
Yet the fact we have to reconcile with this wise and magnificent
project is that at the crest of his power, Caesar, already a bald,
middle-aged man, past the graces and hot impulses of youthful
love, spent the better part of a year in Egypt, feasting and
entertaining himself in amorous pleasantries with the Egyptian
queen, Cleopatra. And afterwards he brought her with him to
Rome, where her influence over him was bitterly resented.
Such complications with a woman mark the elderly sensualist
or sentimentalist he was fifty-four at the commencement of
the affaire rather than the master-ruler of men.
On the side of the superman idea of Caesar, we have to count
a bust in the Naples Museum. It represents a fine and in-
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 441
tellectual face, very noble in its expression, and we can couple
with that the story that his head, even at birth, was unusually
large and finely formed. But there is really no satisfying
evidence that this well-known bust does represent Caesar, and
it is hard to reconcile its austere serenity with the reputation
for violent impulse and disorderliness that clung to him. Other
busts of a quite different man are also, with more probability,
ascribed to him.
There can be little doubt that he was a dissolute and extrava-
gant young man the scandals cluster thick about his sojourn
in Bithynia, whither he fled from Sulla; he was the associate
of the reprobate Clodius and the conspirator Catiline, and
there is nothing in his political career to suggest any aim
higher or remoter than his own advancement to power, and all
the personal glory and indulgence that power makes possible.
We will not attempt to tell here of the turns and devices of his
career. Although he was of an old patrician family, he came
into politics as the brilliant darling of the people. He spent
great sums and incurred heavy debts to provide public festivals
on the most lavish scale. He opposed the tradition of Sulla, and
cherished the memory of Marius, who was his uncle by mar-
riage. For a time he worked in conjunction with Crassus and
Pompey, but after the death of Crassus he and Pompey came
into conflict. By 49 B.C. he and Pompey, with their legions,
he from the west and Pompey from the east, were fighting
openly for predominance in the Eoman state. He had broken
the law by bringing his legions across the Rubicon, which was
the boundary between his command and Italy proper. At the
battle of Pharsalos in Thessaly (48 B.C.), Pompey was routed,
and, fleeing to Egypt, was murdered, leaving Csesai more
master of the Roman world than ever Sulla had been.
He was then created dictator for ten years in 46 B.C., and
early in 45 B.C. he was made dictator for life. This was mon-
archy ; if not hereditary monarchy, it was at least electoral life
monarchy. It was unlimited opportunity to do his best for the
world. And by the spirit and quality of his use of this dicta-
torial power during these four years we are bound to judge
him. A certain reorganization of local administration he ef-
fected, and he seems to have taken up what was a fairly obvi-
ous necessity of the times, a project for the restoration of the
two murdered seaports of Corinth and Carthage, whose destruc-
442
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
tion had wrecked the sea-life of the Mediterranean. But much
more evident was the influence of Cleopatra and Egypt upon
his mind. Like Alexander before him, his head seems to have
been turned by the king-god tradition, assisted no doubt in his
case by the adulation of that charming hereditary goddess,
Cleopatra. We find evidence of exactly that same conflict upon
the score of divine pretensions, between him and his personal
friends, that we have already recorded in the case of Alexander.
So far as the Hellenized east was concerned, the paying of divine
honours to rulers
was a familiar idea;
but it was still re-
pulsive to the linger-
ing Aryanism of
Rome.
Antony, who had
been his second in
command at Phar-
salos, was one of the
chief of his flat-
terers. Plutarch de-
scribes a scene at the
public games in
which Antony tried
to force a crown
upon Caeear, which
Caesar, after a little
coyness and in face
of the manifested
displeasure of the
crowd, refused. But
he had adopted the
ivory sceptre and throne, which were the traditional insignia
of the ancient kings of Rome. His image was carried amidst
that of the gods in the opening pompa of the arena, and his
statue was set up in a temple with an inscription, "To the
Unconquerable God !" Priests even were appointed for his
godhead. These things are not the symptoms of great-minded-
ness, but of a common man's megalomania. Caesar's record
of vulgar scheming for the tawdriest mockeries of personal
worship is a silly and shameful record ; it is incompatible with
JVLIVS CJESAR.
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 443
the idea that he was a wise and wonderful superman setting
the world to rights.
Finally (44 B.C.) he was assassinated by a group of his own
friends and supporters, to whom these divine aspirations had
become intolerable. He was beset in the Senate, and stabbed
in three and twenty places, dying at the foot of the statue of
his fallen rival Pompey the Great. The scene marks the com-
plete demoralization of the old Roman governing body. Brutus,
the ringleader of the murderers, would have addressed the
senators, but, confronted by this crisis, they were scuttling gff
in every direction. For the best part of a day Rome did not
know what to make of this event; the murderers marched
about with their bloody weapons through an undecided city,
with no one gainsaying them and only a few joining them;
then public opinion turned against them, some of their houses
were attacked, and they had to hide and fly for their lives.
6
But the trend of things was overwhelmingly towards mon-
archy. For thirteen years more the struggle of personalities
went on. One single man is to be noted as inspired by broad
ideas and an ambition not entirely egoistic, Cicero. He was a
man of modest origin, whose eloquence and literary power had
won him a prominent place in the Senate. He was a little
tainted by the abusive tradition of Demosthenes, nevertheless
he stands out, a noble and pathetically ineffective figure, plead-
ing with the now utterly degenerate, base, and cowardly Sen-
ate for the high ideals of the Republic. He was a writer of
great care and distinction, and the orations and private letters
he has left us make him one of the most real and living figures
of this period to the modern reader. He was proscribed and
killed in 43 B.C., the year after the murder of Julius Caesar,
and his head and hands were nailed up in the Roman forum.
Octavian, who became at last the monarch of Rome, seems to
have made an effort to save Cicero; that murder was certainly
not his crime.
Here we cannot trace out the tangle of alliances and be-
trayals that ended in the ascendancy of this Octavian, the
adopted heir of Julius Caesar. The fate of the chief figures
is interwoven with that of Cleopatra.
444 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
After the death of Caesar, she set herself to capture the emo-
tions and vanity of Antony, a much younger man than Caesar,
vith whom she was probably already acquainted. For a time
Octavian and Antony and a third figure, Lepidus, divided the
Roman world just as Caesar and Pompey had divided it before
their final conflict. Octavian took the hardier west, and con-
solidated his power; Antony had the more gorgeous east
and Cleopatra. To Lepidus fell that picked bone, Carthaginian
Africa. He seems to have been a good man of good traditions,
set upon the restoration of Carthage rather than upon wealth
or personal vanities. The mind of Antony succumbed to those
same ancient ideas of divine kingship that had already proved
too much for the mental equilibrium of Julius Caesar. In the
company of Cleopatra he gave himself up to love, amusements,
and a dream of sensuous glory, until Octavian felt that the time
was ripe to end these two Egyptian divinities.
In 32 B.C. Octavian induced the Senate to depose Antony
from the command of the east, and proceeded to attack him. A
great naval battle at Actium (31 B.C.) was decided by the un-
expected desertion of Cleopatra with sixty ships in the midst of
the fight. It is quite impossible for us to decide now whether
this was due to premeditated treachery or to the sudden whim
of a charming woman. The departure of these ships threw
the fleet of Antony into hopeless confusion, which was in-
creased by the headlong flight of this model lover in pursuit.
He went, off in a swift galley after her without informing his
commanders. He left his followers to fight and die as they
thought fit, and for a time they were incredulous that he had
gone. The subsequent encounter of the two lovers and their
reconciliation is a matter for ironical speculation on the part
of Plutarch.
Octavian's net closed slowly round his rival. It is not im-
probable that there was some sort of understanding between
Octavian and Cleopatra, as perhaps in the time of Julius Caesar
there may have been between the queen and Antony. Antony
gave way to much mournful posturing, varied by love scenes,
during this last stage of his little drama. For a time he posed
as an imitator of the cynic Timon, as one who had lost all
faith in mankind, though one may think that his deserted
sailors at Actium had better reason for such an attitude. Fi-
nally he found himself and Cleopatra besieged by Octavian in
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 445
Alexandria. There were some sallies and minor successes, and
Antony was loud with challenges to Octavian to decide the mat-
ter by personal combat. Being led to believe that Cleopatra
had committed suicide, this star of romance stabbed himself,
but so ineffectually as to die lingeringly, and he was carried
off to expire in her presence (30 B.C.).
Plutarch's account of Antony, which was derived very
largely from witnesses who had seen and known him, describes
him as of heroic mould. He is compared to the demigod Her-
cules, from whom indeed he claimed descent, and also to the
Indian Bacchus. There is a disgusting but illuminating de-
scription of a scene in the Senate when he attempted to speak
while drunk, and was overtaken by one of the least dignified
concomitants of intoxication.
For a little while Cleopatra still clung to life, and perhaps
to the hope that she might reduce Octavian to the same divine
role that had already been played by Julius Caesar and Antony.
She had an interview with Octavian, in which she presented
herself as beauty in distress and very lightly clad. But when
it became manifest that Octavian lacked the godlike spark,
and that his care for her comfort and welfare was dictated
chiefly by his desire to exhibit her in a triumphal procession
through the streets of Rome, she also committed suicide. An
asp was smuggled to her past the Roman sentries, concealed in
a basket of figs, and by its fangs she died.
Octavian seems to have been almost entirely free from the
divine aspirations of Julius Caesar and Antony. He was neither
God nor romantic hero; he was a man. He was a man of far
greater breadth and capacity than any other player in this last
act of the Republican drama in Rome. All things considered,
he was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to Rome
at that time. He "voluntarily resigned the extraordinary pow-
ers which he had held since 43, and, to quote his own words,
'handed over the republic to the control of the senate and the
people of Rome.' The old constitutional machinery was once
more set in motion; the senate, assembly, and magistrates re-
sumed their functions, and Octavian himself was hailed as the
'restorer of the commonwealth and the champion of freedom. 7
It was not so easy to determine what relation he himself, the
actual master of the Roman world, should occupy towards
this revived republic. His abdication, in any real sense of
446 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the word, would have simply thrown everything back into
confusion. The interests of peace and order required that he
shohild retain at least the substantial part of his authority ; and
this object was in fact accomplished, and the rule of the em-
perors founded in a manner which has no parallel in history.
Any revival of the kingly title was out of the question, and
Octavian himself expressly refused the dictatorship. Nor was
any new office created or any new official title invented for his
benefit. But by senate and people he was invested according
to the old constitutional forms with certain powers, as many
citizens had been before him, and so took his place by the side
of the lawfully appointed magistrates of the republic; only,
to mark his pre-eminent dignity, as the first of them all, the
senate decreed that he should take as an additional cognomen
that of 'Augustus/ while in common parlance he was hence-
forth styled Princeps, a simple title of courtesy, familiar to
republican usage and conveying no other idea than that of a
recognized primacy and precedence over his fellow-citizens.
The ideal sketched by Cicero in his De Republica, of a constitu-
tional president of a free republic, was apparently realized;
but it was only in appearance. For in fact the special preroga-
tives conferred upon Octavian gave him back in substance the
autocratic authority he had resigned, and as between the re-
stored republic and its new princeps the balance of power was
overwhelmingly on the side of the latter." *
7
In this manner it was that Roman republicanism ended in a
princeps or ruling prince, and the first great experiment in a
self-governing community on a scale larger than that of tribe
or city, collapsed and failed.
The essence of its failure was that it could not sustain unity.
In its early stages its citizens, both patrician and plebeian, had
a certain tradition of justice and good faith, and of the loyalty
of all citizens to the law, and of the goodness of the law for all
citizens ; it clung to this idea of the importance of the law and
of law-abidingness nearly into the first century B.C. But the
unforeseen invention and development of money, the tempta-
tions and disruptions of imperial expansion, the entanglement of
1 H. S. Jones in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, article "Rome."
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 447
electoral methods, weakened and swamped this tradition by pre-
senting old issues in new disguises under which the judgment
did not recognize them, and by enabling men to be loyal to the
professions of citizenship and disloyal to its spirit. The bond
of the Roman people had always been a moral rather than a
religious bond ; their religion was sacrificial and superstitious ;
it embodied no such great ideas of a divine leader and of a
sacred mission as Judaism was developing. As the idea of
citizenship failed and faded before the new occasions, there
remained no inner, that is to say no real, unity in the system
at all. Every man tended more and more to do what was right
in his own eyes.
Under such conditions there was no choice between chaos and
a return to monarchy, to the acceptance of some chosen in-
dividual as the one unifying will in the state. Of course in
that return there is always hidden the expectation that the
monarch will become as it were magic, will cease to be merely
a petty human being, and will think and feel as something
greater and more noble, as indeed a state personage; and of
course monarchy invariably fails to satisfy that expectation.
We shall glance at the extent of this failure in the brief review
we shall presently make of the emperors of Rome. We shall
find at last one of the more constructive of these emperors,
Constantine the Great, conscious of his own inadequacy as a
unifying power, turning to the faith, the organization, and
teaching network of one of the new religious movements in
the empire, to supply just that permeating and correlating
factor in men's minds that was so manifestly wanting.
With Caesar, the civilization of Europe and Western Asia
went back to monarchy, and, through monarchy, assisted pres-
ently by organized Christianity, it sought to achieve peace,
righteousness, happiness, and world order for close upon eighteen
centuries. Then almost suddenly it began reverting to repub-
licanism, first in one country and then in another, and, assisted
by the new powers of printing and the press and of organized
general education, and by the universalist religious ideas in
which the world had been soaked for generations, it seems now
to have resumed again the effort to create a republican world-
state and a world-wide scheme of economic righteousness which
the Romans had made so prematurely and in which they had
so utterly and disastrously failed.
448
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 449
Certain conditions, we are now beginning to perceive, are
absolutely necessary to such a creation; conditions which it is
inconceivable that any pre-Christian Koman could have regarded
as possible. We may still think the attainment of these condi-
tions a vastly laborious and difficult and uncertain undertaking,
but we understand that the attempt must be made because no
other prospect before us gives even a promise of happiness or
self-respect or preservation of our kind. The first of these con-
ditions is that there should be a common political idea in the
minds of all men, an idea of the state thought of as the personal
possession of each individual and as the backbone fact of his
scheme of duties. In the early days of Rome, when it was a
little visible state, twenty miles square, such notions could be
and were developed in children in their homes, and by what
they saw and heard of the political lives of their fathers ; but in
a larger country such as Rome had already become before the
war with Pyrrhus, there was a need of an organized teaching
of the history, of the main laws, and of the general intentions
of the state towards everyone if this moral unity was to be
maintained. But the need was never realized, and no attempt
at any such teaching was ever made. At the time it could
not have been made. It is inconceivable that it could have
been made. The knowledge was not there, and there existed
no class from which the needed teachers could be drawn and
no conception of an organization for any such systematic moral
and intellectual training as the teaching organization of Chris-
tianity, with its creeds and catechisms and sermons and con-
firmations, presently supplied.
Moreover, we know nowadays that even a universal education
of this sort supplies only the basis for a healthy republican
stat-e. JSText to education there must come abundant, prompt,
and truthful information of what is going on in the state, and
frank and free discussion of the issues of the time. Even nowa-
days these functions are performed only very imperfectly and
badly by the press we have and by our publicists and politicians ;
but badly though it is done, the thing is done, and the fact
that it is done at all argues that it may ultimately be done well.
In the Roman state it was not even attempted. The Roman
citizen got his political facts from rumour and the occasional
orator. He stood wedged in the forum, imperfectly hearing a
450 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
distant speaker. He probably misconceived every issue upon
which he voted.
And of the monstrous ineffectiveness of the Roman voting
system we have already written.
Unable to surmount or remove these obstacles to a sane and
effective popular government, the political instincts of the Ro-
man mind turned towards monarchy. But it was not monarchy
of the later European type, not hereditary monarchy, which
was now installed in Rome. The princeps was really like an
American war-time president, but he was elected not for four
years but for life, he was able to appoint senators instead of
being restrained by an elected senate, and with a rabble pop-
ular meeting in the place of the house of representatives. He
was also pontifex maximus, chief of the sacrificial priests, a
function unknown at Washington; and in practice it became
usual for him to designate and train his successor and to select
for that honour a son or an adopted son or a near relation whom
he could trust The power of the princeps was in itself enor-
mous to entrust to the hands of a single man without any ade-
quate checks, but it was further enhanced by the tradition of
monarch-worship which had now spread out from Egypt over
the entire Hellenized east, and which was coming to Rome in
the head of every Oriental slave and immigrant. By natural
and imperceptible degrees the idea of the god-emperor came
to dominate the whole Romanized world.
Only one thing presently remained to remind the god-emperor
that he was mortal, and that was the army. The god-emperor
was never safe upon the Olympus of the Palatine Hill at Rome.
He was only secure while he was the beloved captain of his
legions. And as a consequence only the hardworking emperors
who kept their legions active and in close touch with themselves
had long reigns. The sword overhung the emperor and spurred
him to incessant activity. If he left things to his generals, one
of those generals presently replaced him. This spur was per-
haps the redeeming feature of the Roman Imperial system. In
the greater, compacter, and securer empire of China there was
not the same need of legions, and so there was not the same
swift end for lazy or dissipated or juvenile monarchs that over-
took such types in Rome.
XXVIII
THE CAESARS BETWEEN THE SEA AND THE GREAT
PLAINS OF THE OLD WORLD
1. A Short Catalogue of Emperors. 2. Roman Civiliza-
tion at its Zenith. 3. Limitations of the Roman Mind.
4. The Stir of the Great Plains. 5. The Western (true
Roman) Empire Crumples Up. 6. The Eastern (revived
Hellenic) Empire.
WESTERN writers are apt, through their patriotic pre-
dispositions, to overestimate the organization, civiliz-
ing work, and security of the absolute monarchy that
established itself in Rome after the accession of Augustus Csesar.
From it we derive the political traditions of Britain, France,
Spain, Germany, and Italy, and these countries loom big in the
perspectives of European writers. By the scale of a world his-
tory the Roman Empire ceases to seem so overwhelmingly im-
portant. It lasted about four centuries in all before it was com-
pletely shattered. The Byzantine Empire was no genuine con-
tinuation of it ; it was a resumption of the Hellenic Empire of
Alexander ; it spoke Greek ; its monarch had a Roman title no
doubt, but so for that matter had the late Tsar of Bulgaria.
During its four centuries of life the empire of Rome had phases
of division and complete chaos ; its prosperous years, if they are
gathered together and added up, do not amount in all to a
couple of centuries. Compared with the quiet steady expan-
sion, the security, and the civilizing task of the contemporary
Chinese Empire, or with Egypt between 4000 and 1000 B.C.,
or with Sumeria before the Semitic conquest, this amounts to
a mere incident in history. The Persian Empire of Cyrus
again, which reached from the Hellespont to the Indus, had as
high a standard of civilization ; and its homelands remained un-
conquered and fair]^ prosperous for over two hundred years.
451
452 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Its predecessor, the Median Empire, had endured for half a
century. After a brief submergence by Alexander the Great,
it rose again as the Seleucid Empire, which endured for some
centuries. The Seleucid dominion shrank at last to the west
of the Euphrates, and became a part of the Koman Empire;
but Persia, revived by the Parthians as a new Persian Empire,
first under the Arsacids and then under the Sassanids, outlived
the empire of Rome. The Sassanids repeatedly carried war
into the Byzantine Empire, and held the line of the Euphrates
steadfastly. In 616 A.D. under Chosroes II, they were holding
Damascus, Jerusalem, and Egypt, and threatening the Helles-
pont. But there has been no tradition to keep alive the glories
of the Sassanids. The reputation of Rome has flourished
through the prosperity of her heirs. The tradition of Rome
is greater than its reality.
History distinguishes two chief groups of Roman emperors
who were great administrators. The first of these groups
began with:
Augustus Caesar (27 B.C. to 14 A.D.), the Octavian of the
previous section, who worked hard at the reorganization of the
provincial governments and at financial reform. He estab-
lished a certain tradition of lawfulness and honesty in the
bureaucracy, and he restrained the more monstrous corruptions
and tyrannies by giving the provincial citizen the right to ap-
peal to Caesar. But he fixed the European boundaries of the
empire along the Rhine and Danube, so leaving Germany, which
is the necessary backbone of a safe and prosperous Europe, to
barbarism ; and he made a similar limitation in the east at the
Euphrates, leaving Armenia independent, to be a constant bone
of contention with the Arsacids and Sassanids. It is doubtful
whether he considered that he was fixing the final boundaries
of the empire along these lines, or whether he thought it desir-
able to consolidate for some years before any further attempts
at expansion.
Tiberius' (14 to 37 A.D.) is also described as a capable ruler,
but he became intensely unpopular in Rome, and it would seem
that he was addicted to gross and abominable vices. But his
indulgence in these and his personal tyrannies and cruelties did
not interfere with the general prosperity of the empire. It is
difficult to judge him ; nearly all our sources of information are
manifestly hostile to him.
THE CJ3SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 453
454 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Caligula (37 to 41 A.D.) was insane, but the empire carried
on during four years of eccentricity at its head. Finally he
was murdered in his palace hy his servants, and there seems to
have been an attempt to restore the senatorial government, an
attempt which was promptly suppressed by the household
legions.
Claudius (41 to 54 A.D.), the uncle of Caligula, upon whom
the choice of the soldiers fell, was personally uncouth, but he
seems to have been a hardworking and fairly capable admin-
istrator. He advanced the westward boundary of the empire by
annexing the southern half of Britain. He was poisoned by
Agrippina, the mother of his adopted son, Nero, and a woman
of great charm and force of character.
Nero (54 to 68 A.D.), like Tiberius, is credited with mon-
strous vices and cruelties, but the empire had acquired sufficient
momentum to carry on through his fourteen years of power.
He certainly murdered his devoted but troublesome mother and
his wife, the latter as a mark of devotion to a lady, Poppsea,
who then married him; but the domestic infelicities of the
Caesars are no part of our present story. The reader greedy
for criminal particulars must go to the classical source, Sue-
tonius. These various Caesars and their successors and their
womenkind were probably no worse essentially than most weak
and passionate human beings, but they had no real religion,
being themselves gods; they had no wide knowledge on which
to build high ambitions, their women were fierce and often
illiterate, and they were under no restraints of law or custom.
They were surrounded by creatures ready to stimulate their
slightest wishes and to translate their vaguest impules into
action. What are mere passing black thoughts and
angry impulses with most of us became therefore deeds
with them. Before a man condemns Nero as a different
species of being from himself, he should examine his own secret
thoughts very carefully. Nero became intensely unpopular in
Rome, and it is interesting to note that he became unpopular
not because he murdered and poisoned his intimate relations,
but because there was an insurrection in Britain under a
certain Queen Boadicea, and the Roman forces suffered a great
disaster (61 A.D.), and because there was a destructive earth-
quake in Southern Italy. The Roman population, true to its
Etruscan streak, never religious and always superstitious, did
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 455
not mind a wicked Caesar, but it did object strongly to an
unpropitious one. The Spanish legions rose in insurrection
under an elderly general of seventy-three, Galba, whom they
acclaimed emperor. He advanced upon Rome carried in
a litter. Nero, hopeless of support, committed suicide
(68 A.D.).
Galba, however, was only one of a group of would-be em-
perors. The generals in command of the Rhine legions, the
Palatine troops, and the eastern armies, each attempted to
seize power. Rome saw four emperors in a year, Galba, Otho,
Vitellus, and Vespasian; the fourth, Vespasian (69-79 A.D.),
from the eastern command, had the firmest grip, and held and
kept the prize. But with Nero the line of Caesars born or
adopted ended. Caesar ceased to be the family name of the
Roman emperors and became a title, Divus Caesar, the Caesar
god. The monarchy took a step forward towards orientalism by
an increased insistence upon the worship of the ruler.
Vespasian (69 to 79 A.D.) and his sons Titus (79 A.D.) and
Domitian (81 A.D.) constitute, as it were, a second dynasty,
the Flavian; then after the assassination of Domitian came
a group of emperors related to one another not by blood, but
by adoption, the adoptive emperors. Nerva (96 A.D.) was the
first of this line, and Trajan (98 A.D.) the second. They were
followed by the indefatigable Hadrian (117 A.D.), Antoninus
Pius (138 A.D.), and Marcus Aurelius (161 to 180 A.D.).
Under both the Flavians and the Antonines the boun-
daries of the empire crept forward again. North Britain
was annexed in 84 A.D., the angle of the Rhine and
Danube was filled in, and what is now Transylvania was made
into a new province, Dacia. Trajan also invaded Parthia
and annexed Armenia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia. Under his
rule the empire reached its maximum extent. Hadrian, his
successor, was of a cautious and retractile disposition. He aban-
doned these new eastern conquests of Trajan's, and he also
abandoned North Britain. He adopted the Chinese idea of
the limiting wall against barbarism, an excellent idea so long
as the pressure of population on the imperial side of the wall
is greater than the pressure from without, but worthless other-
wise. He built Hadrian's wall across Britain, and a palisade
between the Rhine and the Danube. The full tide of Roman
expansion was past, and in the reign of his successor the North
456 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
European frontier was already actively on the defensive against
the aggression of Teutonic and Slavic tribes.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus is one of those figures in history
about which men differ widely and intensely. To some critics
he seems to have been a priggish person; he dabbled in re-
ligions, and took a pleasure in conducting priestly ceremonies
in priestly garments a disposition offensive to common men
and they resent his alleged failure to restrain the wickedness
of his wife Faustina. The stories of his domestic infelicity,
however, rest on no very good foundations, though certainly
his son Commodus was a startling person for a good home to
produce. On the other hand, he was unquestionably a devoted
and industrious emperor, holding social order together through
a series of disastrous years of vile weather, great floods, failing
harvests and famine, barbaric raids and revolts, and at last a
terrible universal pestilence. Says F. W. Farrar, quoted in the
Encyclopedia Britannica, "He regarded himself as being, in
fact, the servant of all. The registry of the citizens, the sup-
pression of litigation, the elevation of public morals, the care
of minors, the retrenchment of public expenses, the limitation
of gladiatorial games and shows, the care of roads, the restora-
tion of senatorial privileges, the appointment of none but worthy
magistrates, even the regulation of street traffic, these and
numberless other duties so completely absorbed his attention
that, in spite of indifferent health, they often kept him at
severe labour from early morning till long after midnight. His
position, indeed, often necessitated his presence at games and
shows; but on these occasions he occupied himself either in
reading, or being read to, or in writing notes. He was one
of those who held that nothing should be done hastily, and
that, few crimes were worse than waste of time."
But it is not by these industries that he is now remembered.
He was one of the greatest exponents of the Stoical philosophy,
and in his Meditations, jotted down in camp and court., he has
put so much of a human soul on record as to raise up for
himself in each generation a fresh series of friends and admirers.
With the death of Marcus Aurelius this phase of unity and
comparatively good government came to an end, and his son
Commodus inaugurated an age of disorder. Practically the
empire had been at peace within itself for two hundred years.
THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 457
Now for a hundred years the student of Roman history must
master the various criminology of a number of inadequate em-
perors, while the frontier crumbled and receded under bar-
barian pressure. One or two names only seem to be the names
of able men : such were Septimius Severus, Aurelian, and Pro-
bus. Septimius Severus was a Carthaginian, and his sister
was never able to master Latin. She conducted her Roman
household in the Punic language, which must have made Cato
the elder turn in his grave. The rest of the emperors of this
period were chiefly adventurers too unimportant to the general
scheme of things for us to note. At times there were separate
emperors ruling in different parts of the distracted empire.
From our present point of view the Emperor Decius, who was
defeated and killed during a great raid of the Goths into
Thrace in 251 A.D., and the Emperor Valerian, who, togethel
with the great city of Antioch, was captured by the Sassanid
Shah of Persia in 260 A.D., are worthy of notice because they
mark the insecurity of the whole Roman system, and the char-
acter of the outer pressure upon it. So, too, is Claudius, "the
Conqueror of the Goths," because he gained a great victory
over these people at Nish in Serbia (270 A.D.), and because he
died, like Pericles, of the plague.
Through all these centuries intermittent pestilences were
playing a part in weakening races and altering social condi-
tions, a part that has still to be properly worked out by histo-
rians. There was, for instance, a great plague throughout the
empire between the years 164 and 180 A.D. in the reign of the
Emperor Marcus Aurelius. It probably did much to disor-
ganize social life and prepare the way for the troubles that fol-
lowed the accession of Commodus. This same pestilence dev-
astated China, as we shall note in 4 of this chapter. Con-
siderable fluctuations of climate had also been going on in the
first and second centuries, producing stresses and shiftings of
population, whose force historians have still to appraise. But
before we go on to tell of the irruptions of the barbarians and
the attempts of such later emperors as Diocletian (284 A.D.)
and Constantine the Great (312 A.D.) to hold together the heav-
ing and splitting vessel of the state, we must describe something
of the conditions of human life in the Roman Empire during
its two centuries of prosperity.
458 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
2
The impatient reader of history may be disposed to count
the two centuries of order between 27 B.C. and 180 A.D. as
among the wasted opportunities of mankind. It was an age
of spending rather than of creation, an age of architecture and
trade in which the rich grew richer and the poor poorer and
the soul and spirit of man decayed. Looked at superficially,
as a man might have looked at it from an aeroplane a couple
of thousand feet in the air, there was a considerable flourish
of prosperity. Everywhere, from York to Cyrene and from
Lisbon to Antioch, he would have noted large and well-built
cities, with temples, theatres, amphitheatres, markets, and the
like ; thousands of such cities, supplied by great aqueducts and
served by splendid high roads, whose stately remains astonish
us to this day. He would have noted an abundant cultivation,
and have soared too high to discover that this cultivation was
the grudging work of slaves. Upon the Mediterranean and the
Red Sea a considerable traffic would be visible ; and the sight of
two ships alongside each other would not at that altitude reveal
the fact that one was a pirate and plundering the other.
And even if the observer came down to a closer scrutiny,
there would still be much accumulated improvement to note.
There had been a softening of manners and a general refinement
since the days of Julius Caesar. With this there had been a
real increase of humane feeling. During the period of the
Antonines, laws for the protection of slaves from extreme cruelty
came into existence, and it was no longer permissible to sell them
to the gladiatorial schools. Not only were the cities outwardly
more splendidly built, but within the homes of the wealthy
there had been great advances in the art of decoration. The
gross feasting, animal indulgence, and vulgar display of the
earlier days of Roman prosperity were now tempered by a
certain refinement. Dress had become richer, finer, and more
beautiful. There was a great trade in silk with remote China,
for the mulberry-tree and the silkworm had not yet begun to
move west. By the time silk had ended its long and varied
journey to Rome it was worth its weight in gold. Yet it was
used abundantly, and there was a steady flow of the precious
metals eastward in exchange. There had been very considerable
advances in gastronomy and the arts of entertainment. Petro-
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 459
nius describes a feast given by a wealthy man under the early
Caesars, a remarkable succession of courses, some delicious, some
amazing, exceeding anything that even the splendours and
imagination of modern New York could produce; and the
festival was varied by music and by displays of tight-rope
dancing, juggling, Homeric recitations, and the like. There
was a considerable amount of what we may describe as "rich
men's culture" throughout the empire. Books were far more
plentiful than they had been before the time of the Caesars.
Men prided themselves upon their libraries, even when the cares
and responsibilities of property made them too busy to give
their literary treasures much more than a passing examination.
The knowledge of Greek spread eastward and of Latin west-
ward, and if the prominent men of this or that British or
Gallic city lacked any profound Greek culture themselves, they
could always turn to some slave or other, whose learning had
been guaranteed of the highest quality by the slave-dealer, to
supply the deficiency.
The generation of Cato had despised Greeks and the Greek-
language, but now all that was changed. The prestige of Greek
learning of an approved and settled type was as high in the
Rome of Antoninus Pius as it, was in the Oxford and Cam-
bridge of Victorian England. The Greek scholar received the
same mixture of unintelligent deference and practical contempt.
There was a very considerable amount of Greek scholarship,
and of written criticism and commentary. Indeed there was so
great an admiration for Greek letters as almost completely
to destroy the Greek spirit; and the recorded observations of
Aristotle were valued so highly as to preclude any attempt to
imitate his organization of further inquiry. It is noteworthy
that while Aristotle in the original Greek fell like seed upon
stony soil in the Roman world, he was, in Syrian and Arabic
translations, immensely stimulating to the Arabic civilization
of a thousand years later. N"or were the aesthetic claims of
Latin neglected in this heyday of Greek erudition. As Greece
had her epics and so forth, the Romans felt that they, too, must
have their epics. The age of Augustus was an age of imitative
literature. Virgil in the ^Eneid set himself modestly but reso-
lutely, and with an elegant sort of successfulness, to parallel
the Odyssey and Iliad.
All this wide-spread culture of the wealthy householder is to
460 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
the credit of the early Eoman Empire, and Gihbon makes the
most of it in the sunny review of the age of the Antonines with
which he opens his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His
design for that great work demanded a prelude of splendour anA
tranquillity. But he was far too shrewd and subtle not to
qualify his apparent approval of the conditions he describes.
"Under the Roman Empire/ 7 he writes, "the labour of an in-
dustrious and ingenious people was variously but incessantly
employed in the service of the rich. In their dress, their table,
their houses, and their furniture, the favourites of fortune united
every refinement of convenience, of elegance, and of splendour,
whatever could soothe their pride, or gratify their sensuality.
Such refinements, under the odious name of luxury, have been
severely arraigned by the moralists of every age ; and it might
perhaps be more conducive to the virtue, as well as happiness,
of mankind, if all possessed the necessaries, and none the super-
fluities of life. But in the present imperfect condition of
society, luxury, though it may proceed from vice or folly, seems
to be the only means that can correct the unequal distribution
of property. The diligent mechanic and the skilful artist,
who have obtained no share in the division of the earth, receive
a voluntary tax from the possessors of land; and the latter are
prompted, by a sense of interest, to improve those estates, with
whose produce they may purchase additional pleasure. This
operation, the particular effects of which are felt in every soci-
ety, acted with much more diffuse energy in the Roman world.
The provinces would soon have been exhausted of their wealth,
if the manufactures and commerce of luxury had not insen-
sibly restored to the industrious subjects the sums which were
exacted from them by the arms and authority of Rome."
And so on, with a sting of satire in every fold of the florid
description.
If we look a little more widely than a hovering aeroplane can
do at the movement of races upon the earth, or a little more
closely than an inspection of streets, amphitheatres, and ban-
quets goes, into the souls and thoughts of men, we shall find
that this impressive display of material prosperity is merely
the shining garment of a polity blind to things without and
things within, and blind to the future. If, for instance, we
compare the two centuries of Roman ascendancy and opportu-
nity, the first and second centuries A.D., with the two centuries
THE CJESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 461
of Greek and Hellenic life beginning about 466 B.C. with the
supremacy of Pericles in Athens, we are amazed by we can-
not call it an inferiority, it is a complete absence of science. The
incuriousness of the Roman rich and the Roman rulers was more
massive and monumental even than their architecture.
In one field of knowledge particularly we might have ex-
pected the Romans to have been alert and enterprising, and
that was geography. Their political interests demanded a
steadfast inquiry into the state of affairs beyond their fron-
tiers, and yet that inquiry was never made. There is prac-
tically no literature of Roman travel beyond the imperial limits,
no such keen and curious accounts as Herodotus gives of the
Scythians, the Africans, and the like. There is nothing in
Latin to compare with the early descriptions of India and
Siberia that are to be found in Chinese. The Roman legions
went at one time into Scotland, yet there remains no really
intelligent account of Picts or Scots, much less any glance
at the seas beyond. Such explorations as those of Hanno or
Pharaoh Necho seem to have been altogether beyond the scope
of the Roman imagination. It is probable that after the de-
struction of Carthage the amount of shipping that went out
into the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar fell to incon-
siderable proportions. Still more impossible in this world of
vulgar wealth, enslaved intelligence, and bureaucratic rule was
any further development of the astronomy and physiography of
Alexandria. The Romans do not seem even to have inquired
what manner of men wove the silk and prepared the spices or
collected the amber and the pearls that came into their mar-
kets. Yet the channels of inquiry were open and easy; path-
ways led in every direction to the most convenient "jumping-off
places'' for explorers it is possible to imagine.
"The most remote countries of the ancient world were ran-
sacked to supply the pomp and delicacy of Rome. The forests
of Scythia afforded some valuable furs. Amber was brought
overland from the shores of the Baltic to the Danube, and the
barbarians were astonished at the price which they received in
exchange for so useless a commodity. There was a considerable
demand for Babylonian carpets and other manufactures of the
East ; but the most important branch of foreign trade was car-
ried on with Arabia and India. Every year, about the time of
the summer solstice, a fleet of a hundred and twenty vessels
462 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
sailed from Myos-hormos, a port of Egypt on the Red Sea. By
the periodical assistance of the monsoons, they traversed the
ocean in about forty days. The coast of Malabar, or the island
of Ceylon, was the usual term of their navigation, and it was
in those markets that the merchants from the more remote
countries of Asia expected their arrival. The return of the
fleet to Egypt was fixed to the months of December or January,
and as soon as their rich cargo had been transported, on the
backs of camels, from the Red Sea to the Nile, and had de-
scended that river as far as Alexandria, it was poured, without
delay, into the capital of the empire." x
Yet Rome was content to feast, exact, grow rich, and watch
its gladiatorial shows without the slightest attempt to learn
anything of India, China, Persia or Scythia, Buddha or Zoro-
aster, or about the Huns, the Negroes, the people of Scandi-
navia, or the secrets of the western sea.
When we realize the uninspiring quality of the social atmos^
phere which made this indifference possible, we are able to
account for the failure of Rome during its age of opportunity
to develop any physical or chemical science, and as a conse-
quence to gain any increased control over matter. Most of the
physicians in Rome were Greeks and many of them slaves for
the Roman wealthy did not even understand that a bought mind
is a spoilt mind. Yet this was not due to any want of natural
genius among the Roman people; it was due entirely to their
social and economic conditions. From the Middle Ages to the
present day Italy has produced a great number of brilliant
scientific men. And one of the most shrewd and inspired of
scientific writers was an Italian, Lucretius, who lived between
the time of Marius and Julius Caesar (about 100 B.C. to about
55 B.C.). This amazing man was of the quality of Leonardo da
Vinci (also an Italian) or Newton. He wrote a long Latin poem
about the processes of Nature, De Rerum Naturia, in which he
guessed with astonishing insight about the constitution of mat-
ter and about the early history of mankind. Osborn in his Old
Stone Age quotes with admiration long passages from Lucretius
about primitive man, so good and true are they to-day. But this
was an individual display, a seed that bore no fruit. Roman
science was still-born into a suffocating atmosphere of vile
wealth and military oppression. The true figure to represent
'Gibbon.
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 463
the classical Roman attitude to science is not Lucretius, but
that Roman soldier who hacked Archimedes to death at the
storming of Syracuse.
And if physical and biological science wilted and died on
the stony soil of Roman prosperity, political and social science
never had a chance to germinate. Political discussion would
have been treason to the emperor, social or economic inquiry
would have threatened the rich. So Rome, until disaster fell
upon her, never examined into her own social health, never
questioned the ultimate value of her hard officialism. Conse-
quently, there was no one who realized the gravity of her failure
to develop any intellectual imagination to hold her empire
together, any general education in common ideas that would
make men fight and work for the empire as men will fight and
work for a dear possession. But the rulers of the Roman
Empire did not want their citizens to fight for anything in. any
spirit at all. The rich had eaten the heart out of their general
population, and they were content with the meal they had
made. The legions were filled with Germans, Britons, JsTumid-
ians, and the like; and until the very end the wealthy Romans
thought they could go on buying barbarians to defend them
against the enemy without and the rebel poor within. How
little was done in education by the Romans is shown by an
account of what was done. Says Mr. H. Stuart Jones, "Julius
Caesar bestowed Roman citizenship on 'teachers of the liberal
arts'; Vespasian endowed professorships of Greek and Latin
oratory at Rome; and later emperors, especially Antoninus
Pius, extended the same benefits to the provinces. Local enter-
prise and munificence were also devoted to the cause of educa-
tion; we learn from the correspondence of the younger Pliny
that public schools were founded in the towns of Northern Italy.
But though there was a wide diffusion of knowledge under the
empire, there was no true intellectual progress. Augustus, it is
true, gathered about him the most brilliant writers of his
time, and the debut of the new monarchy coincided with the
Golden Age of Roman literature ; but this was of brief duration,
and the beginnings of the Christian era saw the triumph of
classicism and the first steps in the decline which awaits all
literary movements which look to the past rather than the
future."
There is a diagnosis of the intellectual decadence of the age
464 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
in a treatise upon the sublime by a Greek writer who wrote
somewhen in the second, third, or fourth century A.D., and
who may possibly have been Longinus Philologus, which states
very distinctly one manifest factor in the mental sickness of the
Roman world. He is cited by Gibbon : "The sublime Longinus,
who, in somewhat a later period and in the court of a Syrian
queen, Zenobia, preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, ob-
serves and laments the degeneracy of his contemporaries, which
debased their sentiments, enervated their courage, and depressed
their talents. 'In the same manner,' says he, 'as some children
always remain pigmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely
confined, thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and
habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves or
to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in
the ancients, who, living under a popular government, wrote
with? all the same freedom as they acted. 7 ?
But this critic grasped only one aspect of the restraints
upon mental activity. The leading-strings that kept the Roman
mind in a permanent state of infantilism constituted a double
servitude ; they were economic as well as political. The account
Gibbon gives of the life and activities of a certain Herodes
Atticus, who lived in the time of Hadrian, shows just how
little was the share of the ordinary citizen in the outward mag-
nificence of the time. This Atticus had an immense fortune,
and he amused himself by huge architectural benefactions to
various cities. Athens was given a racecourse, and a theatre of
cedar, curiously carved, was set up there to the memory of his
wife ; a theatre was built at Corinth, a racecourse was given to
Delphi, baths to Thermopylae, an aqueduct to Canusium, and so
on and so on. One is struck by the spectacle of a world of
slaves and common people who were not consulted and over
whose heads, without any participation on their part, this rich
man indulged in his displays of "taste." Numerous inscrip-
tions in Greece and Asia still preserve the name of Herodes
Atticus, "patron and benefactor/ 7 who ranged about the empire
as though it was his private garden, commemorating himself
by these embellishments. He did not confine himself to splendid
buildings. He was also a philosopher, though none of his wis-
dom has survived. He had a large villa near Athens, and there
philosophers were welcome guests so long as they convinced their
patron of the soundness of their pretensions, received his ciis-
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 465
courses with respect, and did not offend him by insolent
controversy.
The world, it is evident, was not progressing during these two
centuries of Roman prosperity. But was it happy in its stagna-
tion? There are signs of a very unmistakable sort that -the
great mass of human beings in the empire, a mass numbering
something between a hundred and a hundred and fifty millions,
was not happy, was probably very acutely miserable, beneath
its outward magnificence. True there were no great wars and
conquests within the empire, little of famine or fire or sword
to afflict mankind ; but, on the other hand, there was a terrible
restraint by government, and still more by the property of
the rich, upon the free activities of nearly everyone. Life for
the great majority who were neither rich nor official, nor the
womankind and the parasites of the rich and official, must have
been laborious, tedious, and lacking in interest and freedom
to a degree that a modern mind can scarcely imagine.
Three things in particular may be cited to sustain the opinion
that this period was a period of widespread unhappiness. The
first of these is the extraordinary apathy of the population to
political events. They saw one upstart pretender to empire
succeed another with complete indifference. Such things did
not seem to matter to them ; hope had gone. When presently
the barbarians poured into the empire, there was nothing but the
legions to face them. There was no popular uprising against
them at all. Everywhere the barbarians must have been out-
numbered if only the people had resisted. But the people did
not resist. It is manifest that to the bulk of its inhabitants the
Roman Empire did not seem to be a thing worth fighting for.
To the slaves and common people the barbarian probably seemed
to promise more freedom and less indignity than the pompous
rule of the imperial official and grinding employment by the
rich. The looting and burning of palaces and an occasional
massacre did not shock the folk of the Roman underworld as it
shocked the wealthy and cultured people to whom we owe such
accounts as we have of the breaking down of the imperial sys-
tem. Great numbers of slaves and common people probably
joined the barbarians, who knew little of racial or patriotic
prejudices, and were openhanded to any promising recruit. No
doubt in many cases the population found that the barbarian
was a worse infliction even than the tax-gatherer and the slave-
406 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
driver. But that discovery came too late for resistance or the
restoration of the old order.
And as a second symptom that points to the same conclusion
that life was hardly worth living for the poor and the slaves and
the majority of people during the age of the Antonines, we
must reckon the steady depopulation of the empire. People
refused to have children. They did so, we suggest, because
their homes were not safe from oppression, "because in the case
of slaves there was no security that the husband and wife would
not be separated, because there was no pride nor reasonable
hope in children any more. In modern states the great breed-
ing-ground has always been the agricultural countryside where
there is a more or less secure peasantry ; but under the Koman
Empire the peasant and the small cultivator was either a wor-
ried debtor, or he was held in a network of restraints that made
him a spiritless serf, or he had been ousted altogether by the
gang production of slaves.
A third indication that this outwardly flourishing period was
one of deep unhappiness and mental distress for vast multitudes,
is to be found in the spread of new religious movements through-
out the population. We have seen how in the case of the little
country of Judea a whole nation may be infected by the persua-
sion that life is unsatisfactory and wrong, and that something
is needed to set it right. The mind of the Jews, as we know,
had crystallized about the idea of the Promise of the One True
God and the coming of a Saviour or Messiah. Rather different
ideas from these were spreading through the Roman Empire.
They were but varying answers to one universal question:
"What must we do for salvation?" A frequent and natural
consequence of disgust with life as it is, is to throw the imagina-
tion forward to an after-life, which is to redeem all the miseries
and injustices of this one. The belief in such compensation is
a great opiate for present miseries. Egyptian religion had long
been saturated with anticipations of immortality, and we have
seen how central was that idea to the cult of Serapis and Isis
at Alexandria. The ancient mysteries of Demeter and Orpheus,
the mysteries of the Mediterranean race, revived and made a
sort of iJieocrasia with these new cults.
A second great religious movement was Mithraism, a de-
velopment of Zoroastrianism, a religion of very ancient Aryan
origin, traceable back to the Indo-Iranian people before they
THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 467
split into Persians and Hindus. We cannot here examine its
mysteries in any detail. 1 Mithras was a god of light, a Sun
of Righteousness, and in the shrines of the cult he was always
represented as slaying a sacred bull whose blood was the seed of
life. Suffice it that, complicated with many added ingredients,
this worship of Mithras came into the Roman Empire about
the time of Pompey the Great, and began to spread very widely
under the Caesars and Antonines. Like the Isis religion, it
promised immortality. Its followers were mainly slaves, sol-
diers, and distressed people. In its methods of worship, in the
burning of candles before the altar and so forth, it had a certain
superficial resemblance to the later developments of the ritual
of the third great religious movement in the Roman world,
Christianity.
Christianity also was a doctrine of immortality and salvation,
and it, too, spread at first chiefly among the lowly and unhappy.
Christianity has been denounced by modern writers as a "slave
religion." It was. It took the slaves and the downtrodden, and
it gave them hope and restored their self-respect, so that they
stood up for righteousness like men and faced persecution and
torment. But of the origins and quality of Christianity we will
tell more fully in a later chapter.
3
We have already shown reason for our statement that the
Roman imperial system was a very unsound political growth
indeed. It is absurd to write of its statecraft ; it had none. At
its best it had a bureaucratic administration which kept the
peace of the world for a time and failed altogether to secure it.
Let us note here the main factors in its failure.
The clue to all its failure lies in the absence of any free
mental activity and any organization for the increase, develop-
ment, and application of knowledge. It respected wealth and
it despised science. It gave government to the rich, and im-
agined that wise men could be bought and bargained for in the
slave markets when they were needed. It was, therefore, a
colossally ignorant and unimaginative empire. It foresaw
nothing.
It had no strategic foresight, because it was blankly ignorant
1 See Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity.
468 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
of geography and ethnology. It knew nothing of the conditions
of Russia, Central Asia, and the East. It was content to keep
the Khine and Danube as its boundaries, and to make no effort
to Romanize Germany. But we need only look at the map of
Europe and Asia showing the Roman Empire to see that a will-
ing and incorporated Germany was absolutely essential to the
life and security of Western Europe. Excluded, Germany be-
came a wedge that needed only the impact of the Hunnish ham-
mer to split up the whole system.
Moreover, this neglect to push the boundaries northward to
the Baltic left that sea and the North Sea as a region of ex-
periment and training and instruction in seamanship for the
Northmen of Scandinavia, Denmark, and the Frisian coast.
But Rome went on its way quite stupidly, oblivious to the growth
of a newer and more powerful piracy in the north.
The same unimaginative quality made the Romans leave the
seaways of the Mediterranean- undeveloped. When presently
the barbarians pressed down to the warm water, we read of no
swift transport of armies from Spain or Africa or Asia to the
rescue of Italy and the Adriatic coasts. Instead, we see the
Vandals becoming masters of the western Mediterranean with-
out so much as a naval battle.
The Romans had been held at the Euphrates by an array of
mounted archers. It was clear that as the legion was organized
it was useless in wide open country, and it should have been
equally clear that sooner or later the mounted nomads of east
Germany, south Russia or Parthia were bound to try conclu-
sions with the empire. But the Romans, two hundred years
after Caesar's time, were still marching about, the same drilled
and clanking cohorts they had always been, easily ridden round
and shot to pieces. The empire had learnt nothing even from
Carrhse.
The incapacity of the Roman imperialism for novelty in
methods of transport again is amazing. It was patent that their
power and unity depended upon the swift movement of troops
and supplies from one part of the empire to another. The re-
public made magnificent roads; the empire never improved
upon them. Four hundred years before the Antonines, Hero
of Alexandria had made the first steam-engine. Beautiful
records of such beginnings of science were among the neglected
treasures of the rich men's libraries throughout the imperial
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 469
domains. They were seed lying on stony ground. The armies
and couriers of Marcus Aurelius drudged along the roads ex-
actly as the armies of Scipio Africanus had done three centuries
before them.
The Roman writers were always lamenting the effeminacy
of the age. It was their favourite cant. They recognized that
the free men of the forest and steppes and desert were harder
and more desperate fighters than their citizens, but the natural
corollary of developing the industrial power of their accumula-
tions of population to make a countervailing equipment never
entered their heads. Instead they took the barbarians into
their legions, taught them the arts of war, marched them about
the empire, and returned them, with their lesson well learnt,
to their own people.
In view of these obvious negligences, it is no wonder that
the Romans disregarded that more subtle thing, the soul of the
empire, altogether, and made no effort to teach or train or win
its common people into any conscious participation with its
life. Such teaching or training would indeed have run counter
to all the ideas of the rich men and the imperial officials. They
had made a tool of religion; science, literature, and education
they had entrusted to the care of slaves, who were bred and
trained and sold like dogs or horses; ignorant, pompous, and
base, the Roman adventurers of finance and property who cre-
ated the empire, lorded it with a sense of the utmost security
while their destruction gathered without the empire and within.
By the second and third centuries A.D. the overtaxed and
overstrained imperial machine was already staggering towards
its downfall.
4
And now it is necessary, if we are to understand clearly the
true situation of the Roman Empire, to turn our eyes to the
world beyond its northern and eastern borders, the world of
the plains, that stretches, with scarcely a break, from Holland
across Germany and Russia to the mountains of Central Asia
and Mongolia, and to give a little attention to the parallel em-
pire in China that was now consolidating and developing a
far tougher and more enduring moral and intellectual unity
than the Romans ever achieved.
470 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
"It is the practice," says Mr. E. H. Parker, "even amongst
our most highly educated men in Europe, to deliver sonorous
sentences about being 'masters of the world/ 'bringing all na-
tions of the earth under her sway/ and so on, when in reality
only some corner of the Mediterranean is involved, or some
ephemeral sally into Persia and Gaul. Cyrus and Alexander,
Darius and Xerxes, Caesar and Pompey, all made very interest-
ing excursions, but they were certainly not on a larger scale
or charged with greater human interest than the campaigns
which were going on at the other end of Asia. Western civiliza-
tion possessed much in art and science for which China never
cared, but, on the other hand, the Chinese developed a historical
and critical literature, a courtesy of demeanour, a luxury of
clothing, and an administrative system of which Europe might
have been proud. In one word, the history of the Ear East is
quite as interesting as that of the Far West. It only requires
to be able to read it. When we brush away contemptuously
from our notice the tremendous events which took place on the
plains of Tartary, we must not blame the Chinese too much for
declining to interest themselves in the doings of what to them
appear insignificant states dotted round the Mediterranean and
Caspian, which, at this time, was practically all the world of
which we knew in Europe." *
We have already mentioned (in Chap. XIV and elsewhere)
the name of Shi Hwang-ti, who consolidated an empire much
smaller, indeed, than the present limits of China, but still
very great and populous, spreading from the valleys of the
Hwang-ho and the Yang-tse. He became king of Ch'in in 246
B.C. and emperor in 220 B.C., and he reigned until 210 B.C.,
and during this third of a century he effected much the same
work of consolidation that Augustus CaBsar carried out in Rome
two centuries later. At his death there was dynastic trouble
for four years, and then (206 B.C.) a fresh dynasty, the Han,
established itself and ruled for two hundred and twenty-nine
years. The opening quarter century of the Christian era was
troubled by a usurper; then what is called the Later Han
Dynasty recovered power and ruled for another century and a
half until China, in the time of the Antonines, was so dev-
astated by an eleven-year pestilence as to fall into disorder.
This same pestilence, we may note, also helped to produce a
J E. H. Parker, A Thousand Yews of the Tartars.
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 471
472 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
century of confusion in the Western world (see 1). But
altogether until this happened, for more than four hundred
years Central China was generally. at peace, and on the whole
well governed, a cycle of strength and prosperity unparalleled
by anything in the experience of the Western world.
Only the first of the Han monarchs continued the policy of
Shi Hwang-ti against the literati. His successor restored the
classics, for the old separatist tradition was broken, and in the
uniformity of learning throughout the empire lay, he saw, the
cement of Chinese unity. While the Roman world was still
blind to the need of any universal mental organization, the Han
emperors were setting up a uniform system of education and
of literary degrees throughout China that has maintained the
intellectual solidarity of that great and always expanding coun-
try into modern times. The bureaucrats of Rome were of the
most miscellaneous origins and traditions; the bureaucrats of
China were, and are still, made in the same mould, all mem-
bers of one tradition. Since the Han days China has experi-
enced great vicissitudes of political fortune, but they have never
changed her fundamental character; she has been divided, but
she has always recovered her unity; she has been conquered,
and she has always absorbed and assimilated her conquerors.
But from our present point of view, the most important conse-
quences of this consolidation of China under Shi Hwang-ti and
the Hans was in its reaction upon the unsettled tribes of the
northern and western border of China. Throughout the disor-
dered centuries before the time of Shi Hwang-ti, the Hiung-
nu or Huns had occupied Mongolia and large portions of North-
ern China, and had raided freely into China and interfered
freely in Chinese politics. The new power and organization of
the Chinese civilization began to change this state of affairs
for good and all.
We have already, in our first account of Chinese beginnings,
noted the existence of these Huns. It is necessary now to ex-
plain briefly who and what they were. Even in using this word
Hun as a general equivalent for the Hiung-nu, we step on to
controversial ground. In our accounts of the development of
the Western world we have had occasion to name the Scythians,
and to explain the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between
Cimmerians, Sarmatians, Medes, Persians, Parthians, Goths,
and other more or less nomadic, more or less Aryan peoples
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 473
who drifted to and fro in a great arc between the Danube and
Central Asia. While sections of the Aryans were moving south
and acquiring and developing civilization, these other Aryan
peoples were developing mobility and nomadism ; they were
learning the life of the tent, the wagon, and the herd. They
were learning also to use milk as a food basis, and were prob-
ably becoming less agricultural, less disposed to take even
snatch crops, than they had been. Their development was
being aided by a slow change in climate that was replacing the
swamps and forests and parklands of South Russia and Central
Asia by steppes, by wide grazing lands that is, which
favoured a healthy, unsettled life, and necessitated an an-
nual movement between summer and winter pasture. These
peoples had only the lowest political forms; they split up,
they mingled together; the various races had identical social
habits ; and so it is that the difficulty, the impossibility of sharp
distinctions between them arises. Now the case of the Mon-
golian races to the north and north-west of the Chinese civiliza-
tion is very parallel. There can be little doubt that the Hiung-
nu, the Huns, and the later people called the Mongols, were
all very much the same people, and that the Turks and Tartars
presently branched off from this same drifting Mongolian popu-
lation. Kalmucks and Buriats are later developments of the
same strain. Here we shall favour the use of the word "Hun"
as a sort of general term for these tribes, just as we have been
free and wide in our use of "Scythian" in the West.
The consolidation of China was a very serious matter for
these Hunnish peoples. Hitherto their overflow of population
had gone adventuring southward into the disorders of divided
China as water goes into a sponge. Now they found a wall
built against them, a firm government, and disciplined armies
cutting them off from the grass plains. And though the wall
held them back, it did not hold back the Chinese. They were
increasing and multiplying through these centuries of peace,
and as they increased and multiplied, they spread steadily with
house and plough wherever the soil permitted. They spread
westward into Tibet and northward and north-westwardly, per-
haps to the edge of the Gobi desert. They spread into the homes
and pasturing and hunting-grounds of the Hunnish nomads,
exactly as the white people of the United States spread west-
ward into the hunting-grounds of the Red Indians. And in
474 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
spite of raid and massacre, they were just as invincible because
they had the pressure of numbers and a strong avenging gov-
ernment behind them. Even without the latter support the
cultivating civilization of China has enormous powers of
permeation and extension. It has spread slowly and continu-
ously for three thousand years. It is spreading in Manchuria
and Siberia to-day. It roots deeply where it spreads.
Partly the Huns were civilized and assimilated by the Chi-
nese. The more northerly Huns were checked and their super-
abundant energies were turned westward. The southern Huns
were merged into the imperial population.
If the reader will examine the map of Central Asia, he will
see that very great mountain barriers separate the Southern,
Western, and Eastern peoples of Asia. (But he should be
wary of forming his ideas from a map upon Mercator's projec-
tion, which enormously exaggerates the areas and distances of
Northern Asia and Siberia.) He will find that from the cen-
tral mountain masses three great mountain systems radiate east-
ward ; the Himalayas going south-eastward, south of Tibet, the
Kuen Lun eastward, north of Tibet, and the Thien Shan north-
eastward to join the Altai mountains. Further to the north is
the great plain, still steadily thawing and drying. Between
the Thien Shan and the Kuen Lun is an area, the Tarim Basin
(= roughly Eastern Turkestan), of rivers that never reach
the sea, but end in swamps and intermittent lakes. This basin
was much more fertile in the past than it is now. The moun-
tain barrier to the west of this Tarim Basin is high, but not
forbidding; there are many practicable routes downward into
Western Turkestan, and it is possible to travel either along the
northern foothills of the Kuen Lun or by the Tarim valley
westward from China to Kashgar (where the roads converge),
and so over the mountains to Kokand, Samarkand, and Bok-
hara. Here then is the natural meeting-place in history of
Aryan and Mongolian. Here or round by the sea.
We have already noted how Alexander the Great came to
one side of the barrier in 329 B.C. High among the mountains
of Turkestan a lake preserves his name. Indeed, so living is
the tradition of his great raid, that almost any stone ruin in
Central Asia is still ascribed to "Iskander." After this brief
glimpse, the light of history upon this region fades again, and
when it becomes bright once more it is on the eastern and not
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS
upon the western side. Far away to the east Shi Hwang-ti had
routed the Huns and walled them out of China proper. A por-
tion of these people remained in the north of China, a remnant
which was destined to amalgamate with Chinese life under the
Hans, but a considerable section had turned westward and
(second and first centuries B.C.) driven before them a kindred
people called the Yueh-Chi, driving them from the eastern to
the western extremity of the Kuen Lun, and at last right over
the barrier into the once Aryan region of Western Turkestan. 1
These Yueh-Chi conquered the slightly Hellenized kingdom of
Bactria, and mixed with Aryan people there. Later on these
Yueh-Chi became, or were merged with Aryan elements into, a
people called the Indo-Scythians, who went on down the Khyber
Pass and conquered northern portions of India as far as Benares
(100-150 A.D.), wiping out the last vestiges of Hellenic rule
in India. This big splash over of the Mongolian races west-
ward was probably not the first of such splashes, but it is the
first recorded splash. In the rear of the Yueh-Chi were the
Huns, and in the rear of the Huns and turning them now north-
ward was the vigorous Han Dynasty of China. In the reign
of the greatest of the Han monarchs, Wu-Ti (140-86 B.C.), the
Huns had been driven northward out of the whole of Eastern
Turkestan or subjugated, the Tarim Basin swarmed with Chi-
nese settlers, and caravans were going over westward with
silk and lacquer and jade to trade for the gold and silver of
Armenia and Rome.
The splash over of the Yueh-Chi is recorded, but it is fairly
evident that much westward movement of sections of the Hun-
nish peoples is not recorded. From 200 B.C. to 200 A.D. the
Cninese Empire maintained a hard, resolute, advancing front
towards nomadism, and the surplus of the nomads drifted
steadily west. There was no such settling down behind a final
frontier on the part of the Chinese as we see in the case of the
Romans at the Rhine and Danube. The drift of the nomads
before this Chinese thrust, century by century, turned south-
ward at first towards Bactria. The Parthians of the first cen-
tury B.C. probably mingled Scythian and MongoliaH elements.
The "singing arrows" that destroyed the army of Crassus came,
'Even in Eastern Turkestan there are still strong evidences of Nordic
blood in the physiognomy of the people. EIJa and Percy Sykes, Through
Deserts and Oases of Central Asia.
476 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
it would seem, originally from the Altai and the Thien Shan.
After the first century B.C. the line of greater attraction and
least resistance lay for a time towards the north of the Caspian.
In a century or so all the country known as Western Turkestan
was "Mongolized," and so it remains to this day. A second
great thrust by China began about 75 A.D., and accelerated the
westward drift of the nomads. In 102, Pan Chau, a Chinese
general, was sending explorers from his advanced camp upon
the Caspian (or, as some authorities say, the Persian Gulf)
to learn particulars of the Roman power. But their reports
decided him not to proceed.
By the first century A.D. nomadic Mongolian peoples were
in evidence upon the eastern boundaries of Europe, already
greatly mixed with Nordic nomads and with uprooted Nordic
elements from the Caspian-Pamir region. There were Hunnish
peoples established between the Caspian Sea and the Urals.
West of them were the Alans, probably also a Mongolian peo-
ple with Nordic elements; they had fought against Pompey
the Great when he was in Armenia in 65 B.C. These were as
yet the furthest westward peoples of the new Mongolian ad-
vance, and they made no further westward push until the fourth
century A.D. To the north-west the Finns, a Mongolian people,
had long been established as far west as the Baltic.
West of the Huns, beyond the Don, there were purely Nordic
tribes, the Goths. These Goths had spread south-eastward
from their region of origin in Scandinavia. They were a Teu-
tonic people, and we have already marked them crossing the
Baltic in the map we have given of the earlier distribution of
the Aryan-speaking people. These Goths continued to move
south-eastward across Russia, using the rivers and never for-
getting their Baltic watercraft. No doubt they assimilated
much Scythian population as they spread down to the Black
Sea. In the first century A.D. they were in two main divisions,
the Ostrogoths, the east Goths, who were between the Don and
the Dnieper, and the Visigoths, or west Goths, west of the
Dnieper. During the first century there was quiescence over
the great plains, but population was accumulating and the tribes
were fermenting. The second and third centuries seem to have
been a phase of comparatively moist seasons and abundant
grass. Presently in the fourth and fifth centuries the weather
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 477
478 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
grew drier and the grass became scanty and the nomads stirred
afresh.
But it is interesting to note that in the opening century of
the Christian era, the Chinese Empire was strong enough to
expel and push off from itself the surplus of this Mongolian
nomadism to the north of it which presently conquered North
India and gathered force and mingled with Aryan nomadism,
and fell at last like an avalanche upon the weak-backed Roman
Empire.
Before we go on to tell of the blows that now began to fall
upon the Roman Empire and of the efforts of one or two great
men to arrest the collapse, we may say a few words about the
habits and quality of these westward-drifting barbaric Mon-
golian peoples who were now spreading from the limits of
China towards the Black and Baltic Seas. It is still the Euro-
pean custom to follow the lead of the Roman writers and write
of these Huns and their associates as of something incredibly
destructive and cruel. But such accounts as we have from the
Romans were written in periods of panic, and the Roman could
lie about his enemies with a freedom and vigour that must
arouse the envy even of the modern propagandist. He could
talk of "Punic faith" as a byword for perfidy while committing
the most abominable treacheries against Carthage, and his rail-
ing accusations of systematic cruelty against this people or
that were usually the prelude and excuse for some frightful
massacre or enslavement or robbery on his own part. He had
quite a modern passion for self-justification. We must remem-
ber that these accounts of the savagery and frightfulness of
the Huns came from a people whose chief amusement was
gladiatorial shows, and whose chief method of dealing with in-
surrection and sedition was nailing the offender to a cross to
die. From first to last the Roman Empire must have killed
hundreds of thousands of men in that way. A large portion
of the population of this empire that could complain of the
barbarism of its assailants consisted of slaves subject prac-
tically to almost any lust or caprice at the hands of their owners.
It is well to bear these facts in mind before we mourn the
swamping of the Roman Empire by the barbarians as though
it was an extinction of all that is fine in life by all that is black
and ugly.
The facts seem to be that the Hunnish peoples were the east-
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 479
ern equivalent of the primitive Aryans, and that, in spite of
their profound racial and linguistic differences, they mixed
with the nomadic and semi-nomadic residuum of the Aryan-
speaking races north of the Danube and Persia very easily and
successfully. Instead of killing, they enlisted and intermarried
with the peoples they invaded. They had that necessary gift
for all peoples destined to political predominance, tolerant
assimilation. They carne rather later in time, and their
nomadic life was more highly developed than that of the primi-
tive Aryans. The primitive Aryans were a forest and ox-wagon
people who took to the horse later. The Hunnish peoples had
grown up with the horse. Somewhen about 1200 or 1000
years B.C. they began to ride the horse. The bit, the saddle,
the stirrup, these are not primitive things, but they are neces-
sary if man and horse are to keep going for long stretches. It
is well to bear in mind how modern a thing is riding. Alto-
gether man has not been in the saddle for much more than three
thousand years. 1 We have already noted the gradual appear-
ance of the war-chariot, the mounted man, and finally of dis-
ciplined cavalry in this history. It was from the Mongolian
regions of Asia that these things came. To this day men in
Central Asia go rather in the saddle than on their proper feet.
Says Ratzel, 2 "Strong, long-necked horses are found in enor-
mous numbers on the steppes. For Mongols and Turcomans
riding is not a luxury; even the Mongol shepherds tend their
flocks on horseback. Children are taught to ride in early youth ;
and the boy of three years old often takes his first riding-lesson
on a safe child's saddle and makes quick progress."
It is impossible to suppose that the Huns and the Alans could
have differed very widely in character from the present nomads
of the steppe regions, and nearly all observers are agreed in
describing these latter as open and pleasant people. They
are thoroughly honest and free-spirited. "The character of
the herdsmen of Central Asia," says Eatzel, 3 "when unadul-
terated, is ponderous eloquence, frankness, rough good-nature,
pride, but also indolence, irritability, and a tendency to vin-
dictiveness. Their faces show a considerable share of frankness
'See Roger Pocock, Horses, a very interesting and picturesque little
book.
3 The History of Mankind, book v., C.
*Ibid.
480 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
combined with amusing naivete. . . . Their courage is rather
a sudden blaze of pugnacity than cold boldness. Religious
fanaticism they have none. Hospitality is universal." This is
not an entirely disagreeable picture. Their personal bearing,
he says further, is quieter and more dignified than that of the
townsmen of Turkestan and Persia. Add to this that the
nomadic life prevents any great class inequalities or any ex-
tensive development of slavery.
Of course these peoples out of Asia were totally illiterate and
artistically undeveloped. But we must not suppose, on that
account, that they were primitive barbarians, and that their
state of life was at the level from which the agricultural civili-
zation had long ago arisen. It was not. They, too, had de-
veloped, but they had developed along a different line, a line
with less intellectual complication, more personal dignity per-
haps, and certainly with a more intimate contact with wind
and sky.
5
The first serious irruptions of the German tribes into the
Roman Empire began in the third century with the decay of
the central power. We will not entangle the reader here with
the vexed and intricate question of the names, identity, and
inter-relationships of the various Germanic tribes. Historians
find great difficulties in keeping them distinct, and these
difficulties are enhanced by the fact that they them-
selves took little care to keep themselves distinct. We find in
236 A.D. a people called the Franks breaking bounds upon the
Lower Rhine, and another, the Alamanni, pouring into Alsace.
A much more serious push southward was that of the Goths.
We have already noted the presence of these people in South
Russia, and their division by the Dnieper into Western and
Eastern Goths. They had become a maritime people again
upon the Black Sea probably their traditional migration from
Sweden was along the waterways, for it is still possible to row
a boat, with only a few quite practicable portages, from the
Baltic right across Russia to either the Black or Caspian Sea
and they had wrested the command of the eastern seas from
the control of Rome. They were presently raiding the shores
of Greece. They also crossed the Danube in a great land raid
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 481
in 247, and defeated and killed the Emperor Decius in what is
now Serbia. The province of Dacia vanished from Roman
history. In 270 they were defeated at Nish in Serbia by
Claudius, and in 276 they were raiding Pontus. It is char-
acteristic of the invertebrate nature of the empire that the
legions of Gaul found that the most effective method of deal-
ing with the Franks and the Alamanni at this time was by
setting up a separate emperor in Gaul and doing the job by
themselves.
Then for a while the barbarians were held, and the Emperor
Probus in 276 forced the Franks and the Alamanni back over
the Rhine. But it is significant of the general atmosphere
of insecurrfy created by these raids that Aurelian (270-275)
fortified Rome, which had been an open and secure city for all
the earlier years of the empire.
In 321 A.D. the Goths were again over the Danube, plunder-
ing what is now Serbia and Bulgaria. They were driven back
by Constantine the Great, of whom we shall have more to tell
in the next chapter. About the end of his reign (337 A.D.)
the Vandals, a people closely kindred to the Goths, being pressed
by them, obtained permission to cross the Danube into Pan-
nonia, which is now that part of Hungary west of the river.
But by the middle of the fourth century the Hunnish people
to the east were becoming aggressive again. They had long
subjugated the Alani, and now they made the Ostrogoths, the
east Goths, tributary. The Visigoths (or west Goths) followed
the example of the Vandals, and made arrangements to cross
the Danube into Roman territory. There was some dispute
upon the terms of this settlement, and the Visigoths, growing
fierce, assumed the offensive, and at Adrianople defeated the
Emperor Valens, who was killed in this battle. They were
then allowed to settle in what fs now Bulgaria, and their army
became nominally a Roman army, though they retained their
own chiefs, the foremost of whom was Alaric. It exhibits
the complete "barbarization" of the Roman empire that had
already occurred, that the chief opponent of Alaric the Goth,
Stilicho, was a Pannonian Vandal. The legions in Gaul were
under the command of a Frank, and the Emperor Theodosius I
(emp. 379-395) was a Spaniard chiefly supported by Gothic
auxiliaries.
The empire was now splitting finally into an eastern (Greek-
482 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
speaking) and a western (Latin-speaking) half. Theodosius
the Great was succeeded by his sons Arcadius at Constanti-
nople and Honorius at Kavenna. Alaric made a puppet of the
eastern monarch and Stilicho of the western. Huns now first
appear within the empire as auxiliary troops enlisted under
Stilicho. In this struggle of East and West, the frontier if
we can still speak of a frontier between the unauthorized bar-
barian without and the barbarian in employment within gave
way. Fresh Vandals, more Goths, Alans, Suevi, marched freely
westward, living upon the country. Amidst this confusion
occurred a crowning event. Alaric the Goth marched down
Italy, and after a short siege captured Rome (410).
By 425 or so, the Vandals (whom originally we noted in
East Germany) and a portion of the Alani (whom we first
mentioned in South-east Russia) had traversed Gaul and the
Pyrenees, and had amalgamated and settled in the south of
Spain. There were Huns in possession of Pannonia and Goths
in Dalmatia. Into Bohemia and Moravia came and settled a
Slavic people, the Czechs (451). In Portugal and north of
the Vandals in Spain were Visigoths and Suevi. Gaul was
divided among Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians. Britain
was being invaded by Low German tribes, the Jutes, Angles
and Saxons, before whom the Keltic British of the south-west
were flying across the sea to what is now Brittany in France.
The usual date given for this invasion is 449, but it was prob-
ably earlier. 1 And as the result of intrigues between two im-
perial politicians, the Vandals of the south of Spain, under
their king Genseric, embarked en masse for North Africa (429),
became masters of Carthage (439), secured the mastery of the
sea, raided, captured, and pillaged Rome (455), crossed into
Sicily, and set up a kingdom in West Sicily, which endured
there for a hundred years (up to 534). At the time of its
greatest extent (477) this Vandal kingdom included also
Corsica, Sardinia, and the Balearic Isles, as well as much of
North Africa.
About this Vandal kingdom facts and figures are given that
show very clearly the true nature of these barbarian irruptions.
They were not really the conquest and replacement of one peo-
ple or race by another; what happened was something very
different it was a social revolution started and masked by a
>E. B.
THE CJESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 48*
484 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
superficial foreign conquest. The whole Vandal nation, men,
women, and children, that came from Spain to Africa, for
example, did not number more than eighty thousand souls.
We know this because we have particulars of the transport
problem. In their struggle for North Africa, Dr. Schurtz tells
us, 1 "there is no trace of any serious resistance offered by the
inhabitants; Boniface (the Roman governor of North Africa)
had defended Hippo with Gothic mercenaries, while the native
population lent no appreciable assistance, and the nomad tribes
of the country either adopted a dubious attitude or availed them-
selves of the difficulties of the Roman governor to make attacks
and engage in predatory expeditions. This demoralization re-
sulted from social conditions, which had perhaps developed more
unfavourably in Africa than in other parts of the Roman Em-
pire. The free peasants had long ago become the serfs of the
great landed proprietors, and were little superior in position to
the masses of slaves who were everywhere to be found. And
the great landowners had become in their turn easy victims
of the policy of extortion followed by unscrupulous governors
to an increasingly unprecedented extent in proportion as the
dignity of the imperial power sank lower. No man who had
anything to lose would now take a place in the senate of the
large towns, which had once been the goal of the ambitious,
for the senators were required to make up all deficiencies in the
revenue, and such deficiencies were now frequent and consider-
able. ... Bloody insurrections repeatedly broke out, always
traceable ultimately to the pressure of taxation. . . ."
Manifestly the Vandals came in as a positive relief to such
a system. They exterminated the great landowners, wiped out
all debts to Roman money-lenders, and abolished the last ves-
tiges of military service. The cultivators found themselves
better off; the minor officials kept their places; it was not so
much a conquest as a liberation from an intolerable deadlock.
It was while the Vandals were still in Africa that a great
leader, Attila, arose among the Huns. The seat of his govern-
ment was in the plains east of the Danube. For a time he
swayed a considerable empire of Hunnish and Germanic tribes,
and his rule stretched from the Rhine into Central Asia. He
negotiated on equal terms with the Chinese emperor. He
bullied Ravenna and Constantinople for ten years. Honoria.
In Helmolt'8 History of the World.
THE CLESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 485
the grand-daughter of Theodosius II, Emperor of the Eastern
empire, one of those passionate young ladies who cause so much
trouble in the world, having been put under restraint because
of a love affair with a court chamberlain, sent her ring to
Attila and called upon him to be her husband and deliverer.
He was also urged to attack the Eastern empire by Genseric
the Vandal, who was faced by an alliance of the Western and
Eastern emperors. He raided southward to the very walls of
Constantinople, completely destroying, says Gibbon, seventy
cities in his progress, and forcing upon the emperor an onerous
peace, which apparently did not involve the liberation of
Honoria to her hero.
At this distance of time we are unable to guess at the motives
for this omission. Attila continued to speak of her as his
affianced bride, and to use the relationship as a pretext for
aggressions. In the subsequent negotiations a certain Priscus
accompanied an embassy to the camp of the Hunnish monarch,
and the fragments that still survive of the narrative he wrote
give us a glimpse of the camp and way of living of the great
conqueror.
The embassy was itself a curiously constituted body. Its
head was Maximin, an honest diplomatist who went in good
faith. Quite unknown to him and, at the time, to Priscus,
Vigilius, the interpreter of the expedition, had also a secret
mission from the court of Theodosius which was to secure by
bribery the assassination of Attila. The little expedition went
by way of Nish ; it crossed the Danube in canoes, dug out of a
single tree, and it was fed by contributions from the villages
on the route. Differences in dietary soon attracted the atten-
tion of the envoys. Priscus mentions mead in the place of wine,
millet for corn, and a drink either distilled 1 or brewed from
barley. The journey through Hungary will remind the reader
in many of its incidents of the journeys of travellers in Central
Africa during the Victorian period. The travellers were
politely offered temporary wives.
Attila 7 s capital was rather a vast camp and village than a
town. There was only one building of stone, a bath constructed
on the Roman model. The mass of the people were in huts and
tents; Attila and his leading men lived in timber palaces in
great stockaded enclosures with their numerous wives and min-
1 Gibbon.
486 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
isters about them. There was a vast display of loot, but Attila
himself affected a nomadic simplicity ; he was served in wooden
cups and platters, and never touched bread. He worked hard,
kept open court before the gate of his palace, and was commonly
in the saddle. The primitive custom of both Aryans and Mon-
gols of holding great feasts in hall still held good, and there
was much hard drinking. Priscus describes how bards chanted
before Attila. They "recited the verses which they had com-
posed, to celebrate his valour and his victories. A profound
silence prevailed in the hall, and the attention of the guests
was captivated by the vocal harmony, which revived and per-
petuated the memory of their own exploits; a martial ardour
flashed from the eyes of the warriors, who were impatient for
battle; and the tears of the old men expressed their generous
despair, that they could no longer partake the danger and glory
of the field. This entertainment, which might be considered
as a school of military virtue, was succeeded by a farce that
debased the dignity of human nature. A Moorish and Scythian
buffoon successively excited the mirth of the rude spectators by
their deformed figures, ridiculous dress, antic gestures, absurd
speeches, and the strange, unintelligible confusion of the Latin,
the Gothic, and the Hunnish languages, and the hall resounded
with loud and licentious peals of laughter. In the midst of
this intemperate riot, Attila alone, without change of counte-
nance, maintained his steadfast and inflexible gravity." 1
Although Attila was aware, through the confession of the
proposed assassin, of the secret work of Vigilius, he allowed
this embassy to return in safety, with presents of numerous
horses and the like, to Constantinople. Then he despatched an
ambassador to Theodosius II to give that monarch, as people
say, a piece of his mind. "Theodosius," said the envoy, "is
the son of an illustrious and respectable parent; Attila, like-
wise, is descended from a noble race; and he has supported, by
his actions the dignity which he inherited from his father
Munzuk. But Theodosius has forfeited his parental honours,
and, by consenting to pay tribute, has degraded himself to the
condition of a slave. It is therefore just that he should rever-
ence the man whom fortune and merit have placed above him ;
instead of attempting, like a wicked slave, clandestinely to
conspire against his master."
1 Gibbons.
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 487
This straightforward bullying was met by abject submission.
The emperor sued for pardon, and paid a great ransom.
In 451 Attila declared war on the western empire. He
invaded Gaul. So far as the imperial forces were concerned,
he had things all his own way, and he sacked most of the towns
of France as far south as Orleans. Then the Franks and
Visigoths and the imperial forces united against him, and a
great and obstinate battle at Troyes (451), in which over
150,000 men were killed on both sides, ended in his repulse
and saved Europe from a Mongolian overlord. This disaster
by no means exhausted Attila's resources. He turned his at-
tention southward, and overran North Italy. He burnt Aquileia
and Padua, and looted Milan, but he made peace at the entreaty
of Pope Leo I. He died in 453. . . .
Hereafter the Huns, so far as that name goes in Europe, the
Huns of Attila, disappeared out of history. They dissolve into
the surrounding populations. They were probably already much
mixed, and rather Aryan than Mongolian. They did not be-
come, as one might suppose, the inhabitants of Hungary, though
they have probably left many descendants there. About a hun-
dred years after came another Hunnish or mixed people, the
Avars, out of the east into Hungary, but these were driven out
eastward again by Charlemagne in 791-5. The Magyars, the
modern Hungarians, came westward later. They were a
Turko-Finnish people. The Magyar is a language belonging to
the Finno-Ugrian division of the Ural-Altaic tongues. The
Magyars were on the Volga about 550. They settled in Hun-
gary about 900. . . . But we are getting too far on in our
story, and we must return to Rome.
In 493 Theodoric, a Goth, became King of Rome, but already
for seventeen years there had been no Roman emperor. So
it was in utter social decay and collapse that the great slave-
holding "world-ascendancy" of the God-Csesars and the rich
men of Rome came to an end.
n
6
But though throughout the whole of Western Europe and
North Africa the Roman imperial system had collapsed, though
credit had vanished, luxury production had ceased and money
was hidden, though creditors were going unpaid and slaves
488
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
masterless, the tradition of the Caesars was still being carried
on in Constantinople. We have already had occasion to men-
tion as two outstanding figures among the late Casars, Diocle-
tian (284) and Constantine the Great (312), and it was to
the latter of t'hese that the world owes the setting up of a fresh
imperial centre at Constantinople. Very early during the im-
perial period the unsuitahility of the position of Rome as a
world capital, due to the Roman failure to use the sea, was felt.
HOMA1M EMPIRE ei
uAten-TlxeocUnac walLna
vruvLlir .snlyiccb *tb "tiuz
Etnpcror at Coastaniinople
The destruction of Carthage and Corinth had killed the ship-
ping of the main Mediterranean sea-routes. For a people who
did not use the sea properly, having the administrative centre
at Rome meant that every legion, every draft of officials, every
order, had to travel northward for half the length of_ Italy
before it could turn east or west. Consequently nearly all the
more capable emperors set up their headquarters at some sub-
ordinate centre in a more convenient position. Sirmium (on
the River Save), Milan, Lyons, and Nicomedia (in Bithynia)
were among such supplementary capitals. For a time under
Diocletian, Durazzo was the imperial capital. Ravenna, near
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 480
the head of the Adriatic, was the capital of the last Koman
emperors in the time of Alaric and Stilicho.
It was Constantiiie the Great who determined upon the
permanent transfer of the centre of imperial power to the
Bosphorus. We have already noted the existence of the city
of Byzantium, which Constantine chose to develop into his new
capital. It played a part in the story of the intricate Itistiseus
(Chap, xxi, 4) ; it repulsed Philip of Macedon (Chap, xxiii,
3). If the reader will examine its position, he will see that
in the hands of a line of capable emperors, and as the centre
of a people with some solidarity and spirit and seacraft (neither
of which things were vouchsafed to it), it was extraordinarily
well placed. Its galleys could have penetrated up the rivers
to the heart of Russia and outflanked every barbarian advance.
It commanded practicable trade routes to the east, and it was
within a reasonable striking distance of Mesopotamia, Egypt,
Greece, and all the more prosperous and civilized regions of
the world at that period. And even under the rule of a series
of inept monarchs and under demoralized social conditions, the
remains of the Roman Empire centring at Constantinople held
out for nearly a thousand years.
It was the manifest intention of Constantine the Great that
Constantinople should be the centre of an undivided empire.
But having regard to the methods of travel and transport avail-
able at the time, the geographical conditions of Europe and
Western Asia do not point to any one necessary centre of govern-
ment. If Rome faced westward instead of eastward, and so
failed to reach out beyond the Euphrates, Constantinople on
the other hand was hopelessly remote from Gaul. The enfeebled
Mediterranean civilization, after a certain struggle for Italy,
did in fact let go of the west altogether and concentrated upon
what were practically the central vestiges, the stump, of the
empire of Alexander. The Greek language resumed its sway,
which had never been very seriously undermined by the official
use of Latin. This "Eastern" or Byzantine empire is generally
spoken of as if it were a continuation of the Roman tradition.
It is really far more like a resumption of Alexander's.
The Latin language had not the intellectual vigour behind it
it had not the literature and the science, to make it a neces-
sity to intelligent men and so to maintain an ascendancy over
the Greek. For no language, whatever officialdom may do,
490
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
THE CAESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 491
can impose itself in competition with another that can offer
the advantages of a great literature or encyclopaedic informa-
tion. Aggressive languages must bring gifts, and the gifts of
Greek were incomparably greater than the gifts of Latin. The
Eastern empire was from the beginnings of its separation Greek-
speaking, and a continuation, though a degenerate continua-
tion, of the Hellenic tradition. Its intellectual centre was no
longer in Greece, but Alexandria. Its mentality was no longer
the mentality of free-minded plain-speaking citizens, of the
Stagirite Aristotle and the Greek Plato ; its mentality was the
mentality of the pedants and of men politically impotent; its
philosophy was a pompous evasion of real things, and its scien-
tific impulse was dead. Nevertheless, it was Hellenic and not
Latin. The Roman had come, and he had gone again. Indeed
he had gone very extensively from the west also. By the sixth
century A.D. the populations of Europe and North Africa had
been stirred up like sediment. When presently in the seventh
and eighth centuries the sediment begins to settle down again
and populations begin to take on a definite localized character,
the Roman is only to be found by name in the region about
Rome. Over large parts of his Western empire we find changed
and changing modifications of his Latin speech ; in Gaul, where
the Frank is learning a Gallic form of Latin and evolving
French in the process; in Italy, where, under the influence of
Teutonic invaders, the Lombards and Goths, Latin is being
modified into various Italian dialects; in Spain and Portugal,
where it is becoming Spanish and Portuguese. The funda-
mental Latinity of the languages in these regions serves to re-
mind us of the numerical unimportance of the various Frankish,
Vandal, Avar, Gothic, and the like German-speaking invaders,
and serves to justify our statement that what happened to the
Western empire was not so much conquest and the replacement
of one population by another as a political and social revolu-
tion. The district of Yalais in South Switzerland also retained
a fundamentally Latin speech and so did the Canton Grisons;
and, what is more curious and interesting, is that in Dacia and
Mossia Inferior, large parts of which to the north of the Danube
became the modern Roumania (= Romania), although these
regions were added late to the empire and lost soon, the Latin
speech also remained.
In Britain Latin was practically wiped out by the conquering
492 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Anglo-Saxons, from among whose various dialects the root stock
of English presently grew.
But while the smashing of the Roman social and political
structure was thus complete, while in the east it was thrown
off by the older and stronger Hellenic tradition, and while
in the west it was broken up into fragments that began to take
on a new and separate 
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