A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
23.THE GREEKS
Now while after Solomon (whose reign was probably about 960 B.C.) the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah were suffering destruction and deportation, and while the Jewish people were developing their tradition in captivity in Babylon, another great power over the human mind, the Greek tradition, was also arising. While the Hebrew prophets were working out a new sense of direct moral responsibility between the people and an eternal and universal God of Right, the Greek philosophers were training the human mind in a new method and spirit of intellectual adventure.
The Greek tribes as we have told were a branch of the Aryan- speaking
stem. They had come down among the Ægean cities and islands some
centuries before 1000 B.C. They were probably already in southward
movement before the Pharaoh Thothmes hunted his first elephants beyond
the conquered Euphrates. For in those days there were elephants in
Mesopotamia and lions in Greece.
It is possible that it was a Greek raid that burnt Cnossos, but there
are no Greek legends of such a victory though there are stories of
Minos and his palace (the Labyrinth) and of the skill of the Cretan
artificers.
STATUE OF MELEAGER
STATUE OF MELEAGER
Note the progress in plastic power from the earlier wooden statue on
left
_Photo: Sebah & Foaillier_
Like most of the Aryans these Greeks had singers and reciters whose
performances were an important social link, and these handed down from
the barbaric beginnings of their people two great epics, the _Iliad_,
telling how a league of Greek tribes besieged and took and sacked the
town of Troy in Asia Minor, and the _Odyssey_, being a long adventure
story of the return of the sage captain, Odysseus, from Troy to his own
island. These epics were written down somewhen in the eighth or
seventh century B.C., when the Greeks had acquired the use of an
alphabet from their more civilized neighbours, but they are supposed to
have been in existence very much earlier. Formerly they were ascribed
to a particular blind bard, Homer, who was supposed to have sat down
and composed them as Milton composed Paradise Lost. Whether there
really was such a poet, whether he composed or only wrote down and
polished these epics and so forth, is a favourite quarrelling ground
for the erudite. We need not concern ourselves with such bickerings
here. The thing that matters from our point of view is that the Greeks
were in possession of their epics in the eighth century B.C., and that
they were a common possession and a link between their various tribes,
giving them a sense of fellowship as against the outer barbarians.
They were a group of kindred peoples linked by the spoken and
afterwards by the written word, and sharing common ideals of courage
and behaviour.
The epics showed the Greeks a barbaric people without iron, without
writing, and still not living in cities. They seem to have lived at
first in open villages of huts around the halls of their chiefs outside
the ruins of the Ægean cities they had destroyed. Then they began to
wall their cities and to adopt the idea of temples from the people they
had conquered. It has been said that the cities of the primitive
civilizations grew up about the altar of some tribal god, and that the
wall was added; in the cities of the Greeks the wall preceded the
temple. They began to trade and send out colonies. By the seventh
century B.C. a new series of cities had grown up in the valleys and
islands of Greece, forgetful of the Ægean cities and civilization that
had preceded them; Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Samos, Miletus
among the chief. There were already Greek settlements along the coast
of the Black Sea and in Italy and Sicily. The heel and toe of Italy
was called Magna Græcia. Marseilles was a Greek town established on
the site of an earlier Phœnician colony.
Now countries which are great plains or which have as a chief means of
transport some great river like the Euphrates or Nile tend to become
united under some common rule. The cities of Egypt and the cities of
Sumeria, for example, ran together under one system of government. But
the Greek peoples were cut up among islands and mountain valleys; both
Greece and Magna Græcia are very mountainous; and the tendency was all
the other way. When the Greeks come into history they are divided up
into a number of little states which showed no signs of coalescence.
They are different even in race. Some consist chiefly of citizens of
this or that Greek tribe, Ionic, Æolian or Doric; some have a mingled
population of Greeks and descendants of the pre-Greek “Mediterranean”
folk; some have an unmixed free citizenship of Greeks lording it over
an enslaved conquered population like the “Helots” in Sparta. In some
the old leaderly Aryan families have become a close aristocracy; in
some there is a democracy of all the Aryan citizens; in some there are
elected or even hereditary kings, in some usurpers or tyrants.
RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA
RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA
_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_
And the same geographical conditions that kept the Greek states divided
and various, kept them small. The largest states were smaller than
many English counties, and it is doubtful if the population of any of
their cities ever exceeded a third of a million. Few came up even to
50,000. There were unions of interest and sympathy but no coalescences.
Cities made leagues and alliances as trade increased, and small cities
put themselves under the protection of great ones. Yet all Greece was
held together in a certain community of feeling by two things, by the
epics and by the custom of taking part every fourth year in the
athletic contests at Olympia. This did not prevent wars and feuds, but
it mitigated something of the savagery of war between them, and a truce
protected all travellers to and from the games. As time went on the
sentiment of a common heritage grew and the number of states
participating in the Olympic games increased until at last not only
Greeks but competitors from the closely kindred countries of Epirus and
Macedonia to the north were admitted.
The Greek cities grew in trade and importance, and the quality of their
civilization rose steadily in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.
Their social life differed in many interesting points from the social
life of the Ægean and river valley civilizations. They had splendid
temples but the priesthood was not the great traditional body it was in
the cities of the older world, the-repository of all knowledge, the
storehouse of ideas. They had leaders and noble families, but no
quasi- divine monarch surrounded by an elaborately organized court.
Rather their organization was aristocratic, with leading families which
kept each other in order. Even their so- called “democracies” were
aristocratic; every citizen had a share in public affairs and came to
the assembly in a democracy, _but everybody was not a citizen_. The
Greek democracies were not like our modern “democracies” in which
everyone has a vote. Many of the Greek democracies had a few hundred
or a few thousand citizens and then many thousands of slaves, freedmen
and so forth, with no share in public affairs. Generally in Greece
affairs were in the hands of a community of substantial men. Their
kings and their tyrants alike were just men set in front of other men
or usurping a leadership; they were not quasi-divine overmen like
Pharaoh or Minos or the monarchs of Mesopotamia. Both thought and
government therefore had a freedom under Greek conditions such as they
had known in none of the older civilizations. The Greeks had brought
down into cities the individualism, the personal initiative of the
wandering life of the northern parklands. They were the first
republicans of importance in history.
THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON), PÆSTUM, SICILY
THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON), PÆSTUM, SICILY
_Photo: Alinari_
And we find that as they emerge from a condition of barbaric warfare a
new thing becomes apparent in their intellectual life. We find men who
are not priests seeking and recording knowledge and enquiring into the
mysteries of life and being, in a way that has hitherto been the
sublime privilege of priesthood or the presumptuous amusement of kings.
We find already in the sixth century B.C.—perhaps while Isaiah was
still prophesying in Babylon—such men as Thales and Anaximander of
Miletus and Heraclitus of Ephesus, who were what we should now call
independent gentlemen, giving their minds to shrewd questionings of the
world in which we live, asking what its real nature was, whence it came
and what its destiny might be, and refusing all ready-made or evasive
answers. Of these questionings of the universe by the Greek mind, we
shall have more to say a little later in this history. These Greek
enquirers who begin to be remarkable in the sixth century B.C. are the
first philosophers, the first “wisdom-lovers,” in the world.
And it may be noted here how important a century this sixth century
B.C. was in the history of humanity. For not only were these Greek
philosophers beginning the research for clear ideas about this universe
and man’s place in it and Isaiah carrying Jewish prophecy to its
sublimest levels, but as we shall tell later Gautama Buddha was then
teaching in India and Confucius and Lao Tse in China. From Athens to
the Pacific the human mind was astir.