Horace G. Hutchinson

“ We know that he is allowed much freedom. We are sure, too, that the freedom is not unlimited. Therefore it is impossible for us to tell, of any particular action or series of actions, whether they are all man's own or whether they have been arranged for him. I will only say this, that it looks to me very much as if it had been arranged that the Roman power, the Greek thought, and the Christian religion should come together just at this moment in our story and complete each other for the service of man. ”

“ The Phœnicians, as we have seen, had planted colonies of their own at all convenient places along the Mediterranean shore, and of all these Carthage had grown to be by far the strongest in its numbers. It was regarded as the capital city, the headquarters, of all that half-merchant and half-pirate host which we have seen always going to and fro on the waters of the great inland sea. For fifty years and more before the battle of Marathon was fought it had become a great power, the chief naval power of the world, and it had already come into collision with the Greeks. ”

“ I do not know whether you will agree, but it seems to me that the story of mankind is much more amusing, and will do us much more good, if we try to see how the peoples of the world lived from time to time, what kind of people they were, and how they worked and played and fought, rather than if we just study a list of the names of their kings and of their towns. ”

“ In the great story we find this often repeated—that a people living in a mountainous country, in a severe climate, and in surroundings which make their lives difficult and their food hard to get, come down on the inhabitants of a country where the soil is more fertile, the climate milder, and life altogether easier, and drive these easy-going people out before them as if they were sheep running away before wolves. ”

“ At the beginning of our knowledge of this region Assyria was only a province, a northern province, of Babylonia, and was ruled from Babylon. But the Assyrians became very strong and revolted, and conquered those who had been their masters, and it was during this victorious period that they made those incursions into Palestine of which the Bible tells us. But at length the Babylonians, their old masters, rose up against them and got the mastery over them again, and after this blaze of glory Assyria sinks back into its old place as a province of Babylon, in the northern part of the empire. ”

“ As we have seen, there was a moment in the Second Punic War, just after the Battle of Cannæ, when it seems marvellous that Rome escaped destruction. What is almost more marvellous still is that it was just during the same time that she was fighting so hard, and in the end so victoriously, against the Carthaginians that she was able to fight and to extend her power towards the East, over Macedon, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. It is an extent of conquest which must seem most marvellous of all when we consider how quickly it was all done. ”

“ They saw the moon, and to some of them it seemed that the moon was a power not unlike the sun, but less strong, and so it occurred to them that perhaps the moon was a goddess and the wife of the great god the sun. But the Egyptians, unlike others, looked on the moon as a male deity. When they had gone thus far in guesses about the heavenly bodies, they did not have to go any great way farther in order to ascribe all sorts of power—less than the power of the sun or of the moon—to the other planets and stars. ”

“ Nothing in the whole story is much more wonderful than the way in which the Syrians, for instance, revolted again, very soon after being conquered and subjugated by the first Thothmes; and the endurance of the Jews under the repeated conquest of their country is one of the marvels of history. It is difficult to understand how it was that they were not entirely destroyed as a nation, and that they are among us, and in every country of the world, as people of a very distinct character and nationality to-day. ”

“ If you look at the map of Greece, you will see that not only has the country the sea on three sides of it, but that it is cut up, and cut into, by a wonderful number of bays and gulfs of the sea, so that it would have a very great length of seashore if all were added together. Naturally that meant that the Greeks were great sea-goers. They were a great "maritime" people, as we should say—from mare, which is Latin for sea. A good deal of their excellence in art we may suspect that they derived from those ancient Minoans whom we saw masters of Crete very long ago. ”

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

“ There was Egypt along the Nile, and Babylonia—for a thousand and more years, rather to be called Assyria—along the Euphrates and Tigris.
But there was also yet a third power, very great, very ancient, and highly civilised, a sea-power, with its capital in the big island, which you will sec on the map, lying to the south of Greece, Crete.
You will observe, perhaps, that it quite agrees with all that we find in the later story of mankind, that a nation living on an island should be powerful at sea. To-day you see the great sea-powers, ourselves and Japan. ”

“ It is a point at which most of the threads of the story come together. It might almost seem to us, looking back over it, as if it were the point to which it had been designed, by some great designer, that the story of man should work itself out. ”

“ He had conquered Greeks before—those Spartans whom he had met fighting in the alliance under King Crœsus. He would conquer them again. He would crush them and take possession of their country.
After all that they had accomplished, the conquest of Greece cannot have seemed to the Persians as if it would be a hard matter. Greece, as a single nation, did not exist. There were many Grecian states, but they were always fighting among themselves, each striving for the supremacy. The chief of the fighting states were Sparta and Athens. ”

“ These splendid buildings of the Minoans, as they {79} have been discovered for us by the digger, have a much more modern, a much less strange, appearance than those either of Babylonia or of Egypt. The Babylonian buildings especially look to us, as we make pictures of them in our minds, like palaces of some great ogre. The supports at each side of the doors and gates are very often in the form of huge winged bulls. Human heads and figures of colossal size are to be seen everywhere. ”

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

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

“ We may be quite sure of one thing, that the Grecian states never could have stopped the advance of Persia if it had not been for the marvellous courage and discipline of the Spartans, and that the Spartans never could have had this marvellous courage and discipline if it had not been for the remarkable character of their institutions and their government. Their great idea {138} was that the individual man or woman did not matter at all. What mattered was the state—that the state should be powerful, should have good soldiers to defend it and to attack its enemies. ”

“ It must be very interesting to be an antiquary and to dig—or to order a gang of diggers to {77} dig under your directions—and not to know what you may be going to turn up next: now a gold ear-ring, now a bronze sword, now the edge of a worked stone that may be the corner-stone of a building which more digging may prove to be one of the greatest and most marvellous buildings in the world! ”

“ Now, you saw how the Jews from time to time were dispersed—to Egypt, to Babylonia, to various parts of Asia Minor, to the islands and to the Greek cities. The Greeks, not caring deeply for religious things, although greatly interested in philosophy and speculations about the mysteries of life, allowed the Jews to follow their own religion and customs wherever they settled. And the Jews adhered to their own religion and customs very strictly and tenaciously. ”

“ The years will then no longer grow fewer and fewer as they come to the year of the birth of Christ; but more and more as they mount up away from that date.
In the early days of the rule of Herod in Judæa, that is, about the year 40 B.C., there came a new danger on the land. Those Parthians, whom Julius Cæsar had defeated, swarmed back again, on their horses, across the Euphrates, and swept over a great part of the country. Herod implored the help of Rome, and not in vain; but Julius Cæsar was no longer the world's master then. ”

“ It is not only the vastness of the size that amazes us. That is the chief wonder of the Egyptian pyramids. But the buildings and other remains in Crete are more wonderful still.
This Cretan civilisation at so very early a date makes an extraordinary chapter in the world's story. It would still have been a story very extraordinary if it had been only just the story of what happened in the island of Crete, and did not spread beyond it. ”

“ And that feeling of strength always makes a people that can feel it actually stronger. It helped to make their greatness. The result of the battle at Platæa had been very doubtful in the midst of the fight. The Greeks had been saved only by the steadfast courage of the Spartans. But its conclusion was decisive. Persia was a real danger to Greece no more. On the contrary, it is Greece that we now find carrying the war into Asia Minor and freeing those Ionian coast cities from the yoke of Persia. Perpetual jealousies between the states still prevented Greece from extending her power far. ”

“ In fact, in cleverness and in all the arts and sciences the Greeks were not only superior to all those about them, but they were superior to all that have been since—even to ourselves, though we have had all these years in which to learn. We have learnt to make trains go, and the telephone and poison gases, and guns that will shoot twenty-five miles, and other things of that kind. But we are not the equals of the Greeks of 500 B.C. in art, oratory, poetry or philosophy. ”

“ I told you that Xerxes for the safety of his fleet had made an alliance with Carthage before making his great attack on Greece. It was something more than a mere arrangement that his ships should not be meddled with as they went to and fro. It was an agreement for some more active help than this. Carthage was to attack the Greek colonial power in Sicily at the same time as Xerxes fell upon the mainland of Greece from the east. ”

“ But the reason why I have told you all this about man's tools, before telling you what he did with them, is that I want you to get clearly into your heads this truth—that even the best and most learned of the men who have searched back into history are able to tell us only a very small part of the whole story of man's doings on the earth. ”

“ You have seen this—if you will remember—that in the course of our story we found that the Greeks, the Greeks at the time when the Persian conquerors from the east came up against them and could make their way no farther west, were the first people whom we met in the whole course of the story to whom religion did not mean a great deal in their lives. ”

“ And then, when a friend had died, had gone through that great change which we call death, they would often, still in dreams, see him again, as he had been in life, though they knew that his body had not moved from the place where it had been buried. ”

“ And finally we have the Jews, that people of such extraordinary toughness, so marvellously determined to hold on to their own ways of life and of serving God, thoroughly dispersed all the world over, and so carrying their religion and their religious books, which are the base of the Christian religion, with them everywhere. ”

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

“ Rome had conquered the world. Masses of wealth from the conquered provinces had been brought to her and were constantly coming in. The rich men had their splendid houses and villas. They vied with each other in giving feasts and entertainments to the populace, in order to gain the votes of the people and to be elected to high positions, at home or abroad, in which they could make large fortunes by receiving bribes or by taxing the provinces. ”

“ There grew up in Greece a class of what we may call professional soldiers, ready to hire themselves out for pay, to fight on any side that would make it worth their while to do so. We find them thus, as what we call "mercenaries," fighting sometimes for the Egyptians, sometimes against them. Some of them we even find fighting for the Persians. And they scarcely ceased fighting among themselves. The Persian empire extended to Egypt, and to all the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, but it was not powerful enough to prevent much fighting between the peoples subject to it. ”

“ There were mummies long before Menes, whose date, you may remember, has been guessed so early as 5500 years B.C. and so late as 3300 B.C. At first it seems as if only kings were mummied. The kings were always looked on as semi-divine, and later the people began to regard the king as being almost identical with—almost the same as—Osiris. It is as if they thought that the god came down in spirit to live in the body of the reigning king. ”

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