For some generations after the death of Gautama, these high and noble Buddhist teachings, this first plain teaching that the highest good for man is the subjugation of self, made comparatively little headway in the world. Then they conquered the imagination of one of the greatest monarchs the world has ever seen.
We have already mentioned how Alexander the Great came down into India and fought with Porus upon the Indus. It is related by the Greek historians that a certain Chandragupta Maurya came into Alexander’s camp and tried to persuade him to go on to the Ganges and conquer all India. Alexander could not do this because of the refusal of his Macedonians to go further into what was for them an unknown world, and later on (303 B.C.) Chandragupta was able to secure the help or various hill tribes and realize his dream without Greek help. He built up an empire in North India and was presently (303 B.C.) able to attack Seleucus I in the Punjab and drive the last vestige of Greek power out of India. His son extended this new empire. His grandson, Asoka, the monarch of whom we now have to tell, found himself in 264 B.C. ruling from Afghanistan to Madras.
Asoka was at first disposed to follow the example of his father and
grandfather and complete the conquest of the Indian peninsula. He
invaded Kalinga (255 B.C.), a country on the east coast of Madras, he
was successful in his military operations and—alone among conquerors—he
was so disgusted by the cruelty and horror of war that he renounced it.
He would have no more of it. He adopted the peaceful doctrines of
Buddhism and declared that henceforth his conquests should be the
conquests of religion.
A LOHAN OR BUDDHIST APOSTLE (Tang Dynasty)
A LOHAN OR BUDDHIST APOSTLE (Tang Dynasty)
_(From the statue in the British Museum)_
His reign for eight-and-twenty years was one of the brightest
interludes in the troubled history of mankind. He organized a great
digging of wells in India and the planting of trees for shade. He
founded hospitals and public gardens and gardens for the growing of
medicinal herbs. He created a ministry for the care of the aborigines
and subject races of India. He made provision for the education of
women. He made vast benefactions to the Buddhist teaching orders, and
tried to stimulate them to a better and more energetic criticism of
their own accumulated literature. For corruptions and superstitious
accretions had accumulated very speedily upon the pure and simple
teaching of the great Indian master. Missionaries went from Asoka to
Kashmir, to Persia, to Ceylon and Alexandria.
TRANSOME SHOWING THE COURT OF ASOKA
TRANSOME SHOWING THE COURT OF ASOKA
_India Mus._
ASOKA PANEL FROM BHARHUT
ASOKA PANEL FROM BHARHUT
_India Mus._
Such was Asoka, greatest of kings. He was far in advance of his age.
He left no prince and no organization of men to carry on his work, and
within a century of his death the great days of his reign had become a
glorious memory in a shattered and decaying India. The priestly caste
of the Brahmins, the highest and most privileged caste in the Indian
social body, has always been opposed to the frank and open teaching of
Buddha. Gradually they undermined the Buddhist influence in the land.
The old monstrous gods, the innumerable cults of Hinduism, resumed
their sway. Caste became more rigorous and complicated. For long
centuries Buddhism and Brahminism flourished side by side, and then
slowly Buddhism decayed and Brahminism in a multitude of forms replaced
it. But beyond the confines of India and the realms of caste Buddhism
spread—until it had won China and Siam and Burma and Japan, countries
in which it is predominant to this day.
THE PILLAR OF LIONS
THE PILLAR OF LIONS
Capital of the Pillar (column lying on side) erected in Deer Park in
the time of Asoka, where Buddha preached his first sermon
But now we must go back three centuries in our story to tell of a great teacher who came near to revolutionizing the religious thought and feeling of all Asia. This was Gautama Buddha, who taught his disciples at Benares in India about the same time that Isaiah was prophesying among the Jews in Babylon and Heraclitus was carrying on his speculative enquiries into the nature of things at Ephesus. All these men were in the world at the same time, in the sixth century B.C. - unaware of one another. This sixth century B.C. was indeed one of the most remarkable in all history. Everywhere—for as we shall tell it was also the case in China—men’s minds were displaying a new boldness. Everywhere they were waking up out of the traditions of kingships and priests and blood sacrifices and asking the most penetrating questions. It is as if the race had reached a stage of adolescence—after a childhood of twenty thousand years.
The early history of India is still very obscure. Somewhen perhaps
about 2000 B.C., an Aryan- speaking people came down from the
north-west into India either in one invasion or in a series of
invasions; and was able to spread its language and traditions over most
of north India. Its peculiar variety of Aryan speech was the Sanskrit.
They found a brunette people with a more elaborate civilization and
less vigour of will, in possession of the country of the Indus and
Ganges. But they do not seem to have mingled with their predecessors
as freely as did the Greeks and Persians. They remained aloof. When
the past of India becomes dimly visible to the historian, Indian
society is already stratified into several layers, with a variable
number of sub-divisions, which do not eat together nor intermarry nor
associate freely. And throughout history this stratification into
castes continues. This makes the Indian population something different
from the simple, freely inter-breeding European or Mongolian
communities. It is really a community of communities.
Siddhattha Gautama was the son of an aristocratic family which ruled a
small district on the Himalayan slopes. He was married at nineteen to
a beautiful cousin. 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 felt that the
existence he was leading was not the reality of life, but a holiday—a
holiday that had gone on too long.
The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the
un-satisfactoriness of all happiness, descended upon the mind of
Gautama. While he was in this mood he met one of those wandering
ascetics who already existed in great numbers in India. These men
lived under severe rules, spending much time in meditation and in
religious discussion. They were 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 fellow
clansmen. There was a great feast and a Nautch 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.” He
resolved to leave his happy aimless life forthwith. 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 arms. 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 and mounted his horse and rode off
into the world.
TIBETAN BUDDHA
TIBETAN BUDDHA
Gilt Brass Casting in India Museum, showing Gautama Buddha in the
“earth witness” attitude
_India Mus._
Very far he 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, removed all his ornaments and
sent them and his horse and sword back to his house. 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 of the Vindhya Mountains.
There lived a number of wise men in a warren 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. Gautama became versed in all
the metaphysics of his age. But his acute intelligence was
dissatisfied with the solutions offered him.
A BURMESE BUDDHA
A BURMESE BUDDHA
Marble Figure from Mandalay, eighteenth century work, now in the India
Museum
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 Gautama now put to the
test. He betook himself with five disciple companions to the jungle
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.” 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 fell unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness
of these semi-magical ways to wisdom was plain to him.
THE DHAMÊKH TOWER
THE DHAMÊKH TOWER
In the Deer Park at Sarnath. Sixth Century A.D.
_(From a Painting in the India Museum)_
He horrified his companions by demanding ordinary food and refusing to
continue his 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. Gautama wandered alone.
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its
advances 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 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.
He went on to Benares and there he sought out and won back his lost
disciples to his new teaching. In the King’s Deer Park at Benares they
built themselves huts and set up a sort of school to which came many
who were seeking after wisdom.
The starting point of his teaching was his own question as a fortunate
young man, “Why am I not completely happy?” It was an introspective
question. It was a question very different in quality from the frank
and self-forgetful _externalized_ curiosity with which Thales and
Heraclitus were attacking the problems of the universe, or the equally
self-forgetful burthen of moral obligation that the culminating
prophets were imposing upon the Hebrew mind. The Indian teacher did
not forget self, he concentrated upon self and sought to destroy it.
All suffering, he taught, was due to the greedy desires of the
individual. Until man has conquered his personal cravings his life is
trouble and his end sorrow. There were three principal forms that the
craving for life took and they were all evil. The first was the desire
of the appetites, greed and all forms of sensuousness, the second was
the desire for a personal and egotistic immortality, the third was the
craving for personal success, worldliness, avarice and the like. All
these forms of desire had to be overcome to escape from the distresses
and chagrins of life. When they were overcome, when self had vanished
altogether, then serenity of soul, Nirvana, the highest good was
attained.
This was the gist of his teaching, a very subtle and metaphysical
teaching indeed, not nearly so easy to understand as the Greek
injunction to see and know fearlessly and rightly and the Hebrew
command to fear God and accomplish righteousness. It was a teaching
much beyond the understanding of even Gautama’s immediate disciples,
and it is no wonder that so soon as his personal influence was
withdrawn it became corrupted and coarsened. There was a widespread
belief in India at that time that at long intervals Wisdom came to
earth and was incarnate in some chosen person who was known as the
Buddha. Gautama’s disciples declared that he was a Buddha, the latest
of the Buddhas, though there is no evidence that he himself ever
accepted the title. Before he was well dead, a cycle of fantastic
legends began to be woven about him. The human heart has always
preferred a wonder story to a moral effort, and Gautama Buddha became
very wonderful.
Yet there remained a substantial gain in the world. If Nirvana was too
high and subtle for most men’s imaginations, if the myth-making impulse
in the race was too strong for the simple facts of Gautama’s life, they
could at least grasp something of the intention of what Gautama called
the Eight-fold way, the Aryan or Noble Path in life. In this there was
an insistence upon mental uprightness, upon right aims and speech,
right conduct and honest livelihood. There was a quickening of the
conscience and an appeal to generous and self-forgetful ends.
Before the time of Alexander Greeks had already been spreading as merchants, artists, officials, mercenary soldiers, over most of the Persian dominions. In the dynastic disputes that followed the death of Xerxes, a band of ten thousand Greek mercenaries played a part under the leadership of Xenophon. Their return to Asiatic Greece from Babylon is described in his _Retreat of the Ten Thousand_, one of the first war stories that was ever written by a general in command. But the conquests of Alexander and the division of his brief empire among his subordinate generals, greatly stimulated this permeation of the ancient world by the Greeks and their language and fashions and culture. Traces of this Greek dissemination are to be found far away in central Asia and in north-west India. Their influence upon the development of Indian art was profound.
For many centuries Athens retained her prestige as a centre of art and
culture; her schools went on indeed to 529 A.D., that is to say for
nearly a thousand years; but the leadership in the intellectual
activity of the world passed presently across the Mediterranean to
Alexandria, the new trading city that Alexander had founded. Here the
Macedonian general Ptolemy had become Pharaoh, with a court that spoke
Greek. He had become an intimate of Alexander before he became king,
and he was deeply saturated with the ideas of Aristotle. He set
himself, with great energy and capacity, to organize knowledge and
investigation. He also wrote a history of Alexander’s campaigns which,
unhappily, is lost to the world.
Alexander had already devoted considerable sums to finance the
enquiries of Aristotle, but Ptolemy I was the first person to make a
permanent endowment of science. He set up a foundation in Alexandria
which was formerly dedicated to the Muses, the Museum of Alexandria.
For two or three generations the scientific work done at Alexandria was
extraordinarily good. Euclid, Eratosthenes who measured the size of
the earth and came within fifty miles of its true diameter, Apollonius
who wrote on conic sections, Hipparchus who made the first star map and
catalogue, and Hero who devised the first steam engine are among the
greater stars of an extraordinary constellation of scientific pioneers.
Archimedes came from Syracuse to Alexandria to study, and was a
frequent correspondent of the Museum. Herophilus was one of the
greatest of Greek anatomists, and is said to have practised
vivisection.
For a generation or so during the reigns of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II
there was such a blaze of knowledge and discovery at Alexandria as the
world was not to see again until the sixteenth century A.D. But it did
not continue. There may have been several causes of this decline.
Chief among them, the late Professor Mahaffy suggested, was the fact
that the Museum was a “royal” college and all its professors and
fellows were appointed and paid by Pharaoh. This was all very well
when Pharaoh was Ptolemy I, the pupil and friend of Aristotle. But as
the dynasty of the Ptolemies went on they became Egyptianized, they
fell under the sway of Egyptian priests and Egyptian religious
developments, they ceased to follow the work that was done, and their
control stifled the spirit of enquiry altogether. The Museum produced
little good work after its first century of activity.
Ptolemy I not only sought in the most modern spirit to organize the
finding of fresh knowledge. He tried also to set up an encyclopædic
storehouse of wisdom in the Library of Alexandria. It was not simply a
storehouse, it was also a book-copying and book-selling organization.
A great army of copyists was set to work perpetually multiplying copies
of books.
Here then we have the definite first opening up of the intellectual
process in which we live to-day; here we have the systematic gathering
and distribution of knowledge. The foundation of this Museum and
Library marks one of the great epochs in the history of mankind. It is
the true beginning of Modern History.
ARISTOTLE
ARISTOTLE
From Herculaneum, probably Fourth Century B.C.
_Photo: Dr. Singer_
Both the work of research and the work of dissemination went on under
serious handicaps. One of these was the great social gap that
separated the philosopher, who was a gentleman, from the trader and the
artisan. There were glass workers and metal workers in abundance in
those days, but they were not in mental contact with the thinkers. The
glass worker was making the most beautifully coloured beads and phials
and so forth, but he never made a Florentine flask or a lens. Clear
glass does not seem to have interested him. The metal worker made
weapons and jewellery but he never made a chemical balance. The
philosopher speculated loftily about atoms and the nature of things,
but he had no practical experience of enamels and pigments and philters
and so forth. He was not interested in substances. So Alexandria in
its brief day of opportunity produced no microscopes and no chemistry.
And though Hero invented a steam engine it was never set either to pump
or drive a boat or do any useful thing. There were few practical
applications of science except in the realm of medicine, and the
progress of science was not stimulated and sustained by the interest
and excitement of practical applications. There was nothing to keep
the work going therefore when the intellectual curiosity of Ptolemy I
and Ptolemy II was withdrawn. The discoveries of the Museum went on
record in obscure manuscripts and never, until the revival of
scientific curiosity at the Renascence, reached out to the mass of
mankind.
Nor did the Library produce any improvements in book making. That
ancient world had no paper made in definite sizes from rag pulp. Paper
was a Chinese invention and it did not reach the western world until
the ninth century A.D. The only book materials were parchment and
strips of the papyrus reed joined edge to edge. These strips were kept
on rolls which were very unwieldy to wind to and fro and read, and very
inconvenient for reference. It was these things that prevented the
development of paged and printed books. Printing itself was known in
the world it would seem as early as the Old Stone Age; there were seals
in ancient Sumeria; but without abundant paper there was little
advantage in printing books, an improvement that may further have been
resisted by trades unionism on the part of the copyists employed.
Alexandria produced abundant books but not cheap books, and it never
spread knowledge into the population of the ancient world below the
level of a wealthy and influential class.
STATUETTE OF MAITREYA: THE BUDDHA TO COME
STATUETTE OF MAITREYA: THE BUDDHA TO COME
A Græco-Buddhist sculpture of the Third Century A.D.
_(From Malakand, N. W. Province, now in the India Museum)_
So it was that this blaze of intellectual enterprise never reached
beyond a small circle of people in touch with the group of philosophers
collected by the first two Ptolemies. It was like the light in a dark
lantern which is shut off from the world at large. Within the blaze
may be blindingly bright, but nevertheless it is unseen. The rest of
the world went on its old ways unaware that the seed of scientific
knowledge that was one day to revolutionize it altogether had been
sown. Presently a darkness of bigotry fell even upon Alexandria.
Thereafter for a thousand years of darkness the seed that Aristotle had
sown lay hidden. Then it stirred and began to germinate. In a few
centuries it had become that widespread growth of knowledge and clear
ideas that is now changing the whole of human life.
THE DEATH OF BUDDHA
THE DEATH OF BUDDHA
Græco-Buddhist carving from Sivat Valley, N. W. Province, probably A.D.
350
_India Mus._
Alexandria was not the only centre of Greek intellectual activity in
the third century B.C. There were many other cities that displayed a
brilliant intellectual life amidst the disintegrating fragments of the
brief empire of Alexander. There was, for example, the Greek city of
Syracuse in Sicily, where thought and science flourished for two
centuries; there was Pergamum in Asia Minor, which also had a great
library. But this brilliant Hellenic world was now stricken by
invasion from the north. New Nordic barbarians, the Gauls, were
striking down along the tracks that had once been followed by the
ancestors of the Greeks and Phrygians and Macedonians. They raided,
shattered and destroyed. And in the wake of the Gauls came a new
conquering people out of Italy, the Romans, who gradually subjugated
all the western half of the vast realm of Darius and Alexander. They
were an able but unimaginative people, preferring law and profit to
either science or art. New invaders were also coming down out of
central Asia to shatter and subdue the Seleucid empire and to cut off
the western world again from India. These were the Parthians, hosts of
mounted bowmen, who treated the Græco-Persian empire of Persepolis and
Susa in the third century B.C. in much the same fashion that the Medes
and Persians had treated it in the seventh and sixth. And there were
now other nomadic peoples also coming out of the northeast, peoples who
were not fair and Nordic and Aryan- speaking but yellow-skinned and
black-haired and with a Mongolian speech. But of these latter people
From 431 to 404 B.C. the Peloponnesian War wasted Greece. Meanwhile to the north of Greece, the kindred country of Macedonia was rising slowly to power and civilization. The Macedonians spoke a language closely akin to Greek, and on several occasions Macedonian competitors had taken part in the Olympic games. In 359 B.C. a man of very great abilities and ambition became king of this little country - Philip. Philip had previously been a hostage in Greece; he had had a thoroughly Greek education and he was probably aware of the ideas of Herodotus - which had also been developed by the philosopher Isocrates of a possible conquest of Asia by a consolidated Greece.
He set himself first to extend and organize his own realm and to
remodel his army. For a thousand years now the charging horse-chariot
had been the decisive factor in battles, that and the close-fighting
infantry. Mounted horsemen had also fought, but as a cloud of
skirmishers, individually and without discipline. Philip made his
infantry fight in a closely packed mass, the Macedonian phalanx, and he
trained his mounted gentlemen, the knights or companions, to fight in
formation and so invented cavalry. The master move in most of his
battles and in the battles of his son Alexander was a cavalry charge.
The phalanx _held_ the enemy infantry in front while the cavalry swept
away the enemy horse on his wings and poured in on the flank and rear
of his infantry. Chariots were disabled by bowmen, who shot the horses.
With this new army Philip extended his frontiers through Thessaly to
Greece; and the battle of Chæronia (338 B.C.), fought against Athens
and her allies, put all Greece at his feet. At last the dream of
Herodotus was bearing fruit. A congress of all the Greek states
appointed Philip captain-general of the Græco- Macedonian confederacy
against Persia, and in 336 B.C. his advanced guard crossed into Asia
upon this long premeditated adventure. But he never followed it. He
was assassinated; it is believed at the instigation of his queen
Olympias, Alexander’s mother. She was jealous because Philip had
married a second wife.
BUST OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
BUST OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
_(As in the British Museum)_
But Philip had taken unusual pains with his son’s education. He had
not only secured Aristotle, the greatest philosopher in the world, as
this boy’s tutor, but he had shared his ideas with him and thrust
military experience upon him. At Chæronia Alexander, who was then only
eighteen years old, had been in command of the cavalry. And so it was
possible for this young man, who was still only twenty years old at the
time of his accession, to take up his father’s task at once and to
proceed successfully with the Persian adventure.
In 334 B.C.—for two years were needed to establish and confirm his
position in Macedonia and Greece—he crossed into Asia, defeated a not
very much bigger Persian army at the battle of the Granicus and
captured a number of cities in Asia Minor. He kept along the
sea-coast. It was necessary for him to reduce and garrison all the
coast towns as he advanced because the Persians had control of the
fleets of Tyre and Sidon and so had command of the sea. Had he left a
hostile port in his rear the Persians might have landed forces to raid
his communications and cut him off. At Issus (333 B.C.) he met and
smashed a vast conglomerate host under Darius III. Like the host of
Xerxes that had crossed the Dardanelles a century and a half before, it
was an incoherent accumulation of contingents and it was encumbered
with a multitude of court officials, the harem of Darius and many camp
followers. Sidon surrendered to Alexander but Tyre resisted
obstinately. Finally that great city was stormed and plundered and
destroyed. Gaza also was stormed, and towards the end of 332 B.C. the
conqueror entered Egypt and took over its rule from the Persians.
ALEXANDER’S VICTORY OVER THE PERSIANS AT ISSUS
ALEXANDER’S VICTORY OVER THE PERSIANS AT ISSUS
_(From the Pompeian Mosaic)_
Alexander charges in on the left, Darius is in the chariot to the right
At Alexandretta and at Alexandria in Egypt he built great cities,
accessible from the land and so incapable of revolt. To these the trade
of the Phœnician cities was diverted. The Phœnicians of the western
Mediterranean suddenly disappear from history—and as immediately the
Jews of Alexandria and the other new trading cities created by
Alexander appear.
In 331 B.C. Alexander marched out of Egypt upon Babylon as Thothmes and
Rameses and Necho had done before him. But he marched by way of Tyre.
At Arbela near the ruins of Nineveh, which was already a forgotten
city, he met Darius and fought the decisive battle of the war. The
Persian chariot charge failed, a Macedonian cavalry charge broke up the
great composite host and the phalanx completed the victory. Darius led
the retreat. He made no further attempt to resist the invader but fled
northward into the country of the Medes. Alexander marched on to
Babylon, still prosperous and important, and then to Susa and
Persepolis. There after a drunken festival he burnt down the palace of
Darius, the king of kings.
THE APOLLO BELVEDERE
Thence Alexander presently made a military parade of central Asia,
going to the utmost bounds of the Persian empire. At first he turned
northward. Darius was pursued; and he was overtaken at dawn dying in
his chariot, having been murdered by his own people. He was still
living when the foremost Greeks reached him. Alexander came up to find
him dead. Alexander skirted the Caspian Sea, he went up into the
mountains of western Turkestan, he came down by Herat (which he
founded) and Cabul and the Khyber Pass into India. He fought a great
battle on the Indus with an Indian king, Porus, and here the Macedonian
troops met elephants for the first time and defeated them. Finally he
built himself ships, sailed down to the mouth of the Indus, and marched
back by the coast of Beluchistan, reaching Susa again in 324 B.C. after
an absence of six years. He then prepared to consolidate and organize
this vast empire he had won. He sought to win over his new subjects.
He assumed the robes and tiara of a Persian monarch, and this roused
the jealousy of his Macedonian commanders. He had much trouble with
them. He arranged a number of marriages between these Macedonian
officers and Persian and Babylonian women: the “Marriage of the East
and West.” He never lived to effect the consolidation he had planned.
A fever seized him after a drinking bout in Babylon and he died in 323
B.C.
Immediately this vast dominion fell to pieces. One of his generals,
Seleucus, retained most of the old Persian empire from the Indus to
Ephesus; another, Ptolemy, seized Egypt, and Antigonus secured
Macedonia. The rest of the empire remained unstable, passing under the
control of a succession of local adventurers. Barbarian raids began
from the north and grew in scope and intensity. Until at last, as we
shall tell, a new power, the power of the Roman republic, came out of
the west to subjugate one fragment after another and weld them together
The century and a half that followed the defeat of Persia was one of very great splendour for the Greek civilization. True that Greece was torn by a desperate struggle for ascendancy between Athens, Sparta and other states (the Peloponnesian War 431 to 404 B.C.) and that in 338 B.C. the Macedonians became virtually masters of Greece; nevertheless during this period the thought and the creative and artistic impulse of the Greeks rose to levels that made their achievement a lamp to mankind for all the rest of history.
The head and centre of this mental activity was Athens. For over
thirty years (466 to 428 B.C.) Athens was dominated by a man of great
vigour and liberality of mind, Pericles, who set himself to rebuild the
city from the ashes to which the Persians had reduced it. The beautiful
ruins that still glorify Athens to-day are chiefly the remains of this
great effort. And he did not simply rebuild a material Athens. He
rebuilt Athens intellectually. He gathered about him not only
architects and sculptors but poets, dramatists, philosophers and
teachers. Herodotus came to Athens to recite his history (438 B.C.).
Anaxagoras came with the beginnings of a scientific description of the
sun and stars. Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides one after the other
carried the Greek drama to its highest levels or beauty and nobility.
The impetus Pericles gave to the intellectual life of Athens lived on
after his death, and in spite of the fact that the peace of Greece was
now broken by the Peloponnesian War and a long and wasteful struggle
for “ascendancy” was beginning. Indeed the darkling of the political
horizon seems for a time to have quickened rather than discouraged
men’s minds.
Already long before the time of Pericles the peculiar freedom of Greek
institutions had given great importance to skill in discussion.
Decision rested neither with king nor with priest but in the assemblies
of the people or of leading men. Eloquence and able argument became
very desirable accomplishments therefore, and a class of teachers
arose, the Sophists, who undertook to strengthen young men in these
arts. But one cannot reason without matter, and knowledge followed in
the wake of speech. The activities and rivalries of these Sophists led
very naturally to an acute examination of style, of methods of thought
and of the validity of arguments. When Pericles died a certain
Socrates was becoming prominent as an able and destructive critic of
bad argument—and much of the teaching of the Sophists was bad argument.
A group of brilliant young men gathered about Socrates. In the end
Socrates was executed for disturbing people’s minds (399 B.C.), he was
condemned after the dignified fashion of the Athens of those days to
drink in his own house and among his own friends a poisonous draught
made from hemlock, but the disturbance of people’s minds went on in
spite of his condemnation. His young men carried on his teaching.
PART OF THE FAMOUS FRIEZE OF THE PARTHENON, ATHENS
PART OF THE FAMOUS FRIEZE OF THE PARTHENON, ATHENS
A specimen of Grecian sculpture in its finest expression. Compare the
advance of art with that seen in the animals shown on p. 105
_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_
THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS
THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS
The marvellous group of Temples and monuments built under the
inspriration of Pericles
_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_
THE THEATRE AT EPIDAUROS, GREECE
THE THEATRE AT EPIDAUROS, GREECE
A wonderfully preserved specimen showing the vast auditorium
_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_
Chief among these young men was Plato (427 to 347 B.C.) who presently
began to teach philosophy in the grove of the Academy. His teaching
fell into two main divisions, an examination of the foundations and
methods of human thinking and an examination of political institutions.
He was the first man to write a Utopia, that is to say the plan of a
community different from and better than any existing community. This
shows an altogether unprecedented boldness in the human mind which had
hitherto accepted social traditions and usages with scarcely a
question. Plato said plainly to mankind: “Most of the social and
political ills from which you suffer are under your control, given only
the will and courage to change them. You can live in another and a
wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and work it out. You are
not awake to your own power.” That is a high adventurous teaching that
has still to soak in to the common intelligence of our race. One of
his earliest works was the Republic, a dream of a communist
aristocracy; his last unfinished work was the Laws, a scheme of
regulation for another such Utopian state.
THE CARYATIDES OF THE ERECHTHEUM
THE CARYATIDES OF THE ERECHTHEUM
The ancient sanctuary on the Acropolis at Athens
_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_
ATHENE OF THE PARTHENON
ATHENE OF THE PARTHENON
_Photo: Alinart_
The criticism of methods of thinking and methods of government was
carried on after Plato’s death by Aristotle, who had been his pupil and
who taught in the Lyceum. Aristotle came from the city of Stagira in
Macedonia, and his father was court physician to the Macedonian king.
For a time Aristotle was tutor to Alexander, the king’s son, who was
destined to achieve very great things of which we shall soon be
telling. Aristotle’s work upon methods of thinking carried the science
of Logic to a level at which it remained for fifteen hundred years or
more, until the mediæval schoolmen took up the ancient questions again.
He made no Utopias. Before man could really control his destiny as
Plato taught, Aristotle perceived that he needed far more knowledge and
far more accurate knowledge than he possessed. And so Aristotle began
that systematic collection of knowledge which nowadays we call Science.
He sent out explorers to collect _facts_. He was the father of
natural history. He was the founder of political science. His students
at the Lyceum examined and compared the constitutions of 158 different
states...
Here in the fourth century B.C. we find men who are practically “modern
thinkers.” The child-like, dream-like methods of primitive thought had
given way to a disciplined and critical attack upon the problems of
life. The weird and monstrous symbolism and imagery of the gods and
god monsters, and all the taboos and awes and restraints that have
hitherto encumbered thinking are here completely set aside. Free,
exact and systematic thinking has begun. The fresh and unencumbered
mind of these newcomers out of the northern forests has thrust itself
into the mysteries of the temple and let the daylight in.