Chapter IV: Part 4

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“The quantity of production,” says Mr. Bryce, “bears no relation
to the quality. Still less does the amount of good work produced
in any given area depend upon the number of persons living in
that area. Florence between A.D. 1250 and A.D. 1500 gave birth to
more men of first-rate poetical and artistic genius than London
has produced since 1250; yet Florence had in those two and a
half centuries a population of probably only from forty to sixty
thousand. And Florence herself has since A.D. 1500 given birth to
scarcely any distinguished poets or artists, though her population
has been larger than it was in the fifteenth century.”

THE GENIUS OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLORENCE, 1250 TO 1500, FAR EXCEEDED THAT OF LONDON FROM 1250 TO THE PRESENT DAY

Poets and Artists Born in Florence from 1250-1500

Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404-1472, architect, painter
Albertinelli, Mariotto, 1474-1515, painter
Andrea del Sarto, 1487-1531, painter
Angelico da Fiesole, Fra Giovanni, 1387-1455, painter
Botticelli, Alessandro, 1447-1510, painter
Cavalcanti, Guido, 1255-1300, poet, philosopher
Cimabue, Giovanni, 1240-1302, painter
Credi, Lorenzo di, 1459-1537, painter
Dante, Alighieri, 1265-1321, poet
Donatello, 1386-1466, sculptor and painter
Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 1378-1455, sculptor
Ghirlandajo, Domenico, 1449-1494, painter
Gozzoli, Benozzo, 1420-1498, painter
Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, painter, sculptor
Lippi, Fra Filippo, 1412-1469, painter
Lippi, Filippino, 1459-1504, painter
Lorenzo, Don, 1370-1425, painter
Medici, Lorenzo de, 1448-1492, poet
Orcagnia, Andrea di Cione, 1329-1368? sculptor, painter
Perugino, Vannucci Pietro, 1446-1524, painter
Pesellino, Francesco di, 1422-1457, painter
Pesello, Giuliano, 1367-1446, painter, sculptor
Pollajuolo, Antonio, 1429-1498, sculptor, painter
Pollajuolo, Piero, 1443-1496, sculptor, painter
Robbia, Andrea della, 1437-1528, sculptor
Robbia, Luca della, 1399-1482, sculptor
Rossi, Giovanni Battista de, 1494-1541, sculptor, painter
Ruccellai, Giovanni, 1475-1525, poet
Spinello, Aretino, 1334-1410, painter
Ucello, Paolo, 1397-1475, painter
Verocchio, Andrea, 1435-1488, sculptor, painter

THE LAST FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF FLORENTINE CULTURE HAVE BEEN LESS PRODUCTIVE THAN THE PRECEDING TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES

Poets and Artists Born in Florence since 1500

Allori, Christofano, 1577-1621, painter
Bronzino, Angelo, 1502-1572, painter
Cellini, Benvenuto, 1500-1571, sculptor
Cigoli, Luigi Cardi da, 1559-1613, painter
Cortona, Pietro da, 1596-1669, architect, painter
Dolci, Carlo, 1616-1686, painter
Doni, Antonio Francesco, 1513-1574, author
Furini, Francesco, 1604-1646, painter
Ligozzi, Jacobino, 1543-1627, painter
Poccetti, Bernardino, 1542-1612, painter
Salviati, Francesco, 1510-1563, painter
San Giovanni, Giovanni da, 1599-1636, painter
Santi di Tito, 1538-1603, painter
Tacco, Pietro, 1580-1640, sculptor
Venusti, Marcello, 1515-1579, painter

The Only Great Poet Born in London from 1250-1500

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1328-1400

Poets and Artists Born in London since 1500

Blake, William, 1757-1827, poet and painter
Browning, Robert, 1812-1889, poet
Byron, Geo. Gordon Noel, Lord, 1788-1824, poet
Defoe, Daniel, 1659-1731, author
Ford, Edward Onslow, 1852-1901, sculptor
Gilbert, Alfred, R.A., 1854- --, sculptor
Gray, Thomas, 1716-1771, poet
Hogarth, William, 1697-1764, painter
Hood, Thomas, 1799-1845, poet
Hunt, William Holman, 1827-1910, painter
Jonson, Ben, 1573-1637, poet and dramatist
Keats, John, 1795-1821, poet
Lamb, Charles, 1775-1834, essayist
Linnell, John, 1792-1882, painter
Lucas, John Seymour, 1849- --, painter
Milton, John, 1608-1674, poet
Morland, George, 1763-1804, painter
Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744, poet
Richmond, Sir William Blake, 1843- --, painter
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882, poet, painter
Ruskin, John, 1819-1900, author and art critic
Spenser, Edmund, 1552-1599, poet
Stothard, Thomas, 1755-1834, painter, illustrator
Swinburne, Algernon, 1837-1909, poet
Walker, Frederick, 1840-1875, painter
Watts, George F., 1817-1904, painter, sculptor

[Sidenote: The Small World of the Ancients]

The most ancient records we possess from Assyria, Egypt, Palestine, and from the Homeric poems, show how very limited was the range of geographical knowledge possessed by that small civilised world from which our own civilisation has descended. Speaking roughly, that knowledge seems in the tenth century B.C. to have extended about one thousand miles in each direction from the Isthmus of Suez. However, the best point of departure for the peoples of antiquity is the era of Herodotus, who travelled and wrote B.C. 460-440. The limits of the world as he knew it were Cadiz and the Straits of Gibraltar on the west, the Danube and the Caspian on the north, the deserts of Eastern Persia on the east, and the Sahara on the south, with vague tales regarding peoples who lived beyond, such as Indians far beyond Persia, and pygmies beyond the Sahara. He reports, however, not without hesitation, a circumnavigation of Africa by Phœnicians in the service of Pharaoh Necho.

This Babylonian map is probably of the eighth century B.C. The
two circles are supposed to represent the ocean, while the River
Euphrates and Babylon are shown inside them. The upper part of the
tablet is a cuneiform inscription.
]

Discovery advanced very slowly for many centuries, though the march of Alexander opened up part of the East, while the Roman conquests brought the Far North-West, including Britain, within the range of civilisation; and occasional voyages, such as that of Hanno along the coast of West Africa, that of Nearchus through the Arabian Sea, and that of Pythias to the Baltic, added something to knowledge. Procopius in A.D. 540 can tell us little more regarding the regions beyond Roman influence than Strabo does five and a half centuries earlier. The journeys of Marco Polo and Rubruquis throw only a passing light on the Far East. It is with the Spanish occupation of the Canary Isles, beginning in 1602, and with the Portuguese voyages of the fifteenth century, that the era of modern discovery opens. The re-discovery of America in 1492, for it had been already visited by the Northmen of Greenland and Iceland in the eleventh century, and the opening of the Cape route to India in 1497-1498, were hardly equal to the exploit of Magellan, whose circumnavigation of the globe in 1519-1520 marks the close of this striking period. Thereafter discovery proceeds more slowly. Some of the isles of the central and southern Pacific were not visited till the middle of the eighteenth century, and the north-west coast of America as well as the north-east Coast of Asia, remained little known till an even later date. Those explorations of the interior of North America, of the interior of Africa, of the interior of Australia, and of East Central Asia, which have completed our knowledge of the earth, belong to the nineteenth century. The first crossing of the North American Continent north of latitude 40° was not effected till A.D. 1806.

[Sidenote: The Thirst for New Territories]

The desire for new territory, for the propagation of religion, and, above all, for the precious metals, were the chief motives which prompted the voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These motives have remained operative; and to them has been added in more recent times the spirit of pure adventure and the interest in science, together with, increasing measure, the effort to secure trade. But the extension of trade followed slowly in the wake of discovery. China and Japan remained almost closed. The policy of Spain sought to restrict her American waters to her own ships, and the commerce they carried was scanty. Communication remained slow and dangerous across the oceans till the introduction of steam vessels (1825-1830).

Note Paradise at the top, and Jerusalem in the centre

The Fra Mauro Map: about 1457

Babylon is shown in the centre of the map

The World as Known on the Eve of Discovery of America (Drawn by Martin Behaim in 1492)

The World as known in 150 A.D. From a map by Ptolemy, who appears to have had knowledge of the sources of the Nile

THE FIRST MAPS: SOME EARLY GEOGRAPHERS’ IDEAS OF THE WORLD]

In each case the British Empire is shaded
]

[Sidenote: Round the World in 40 Days!]

Land transport, though it had steadily increased in Europe, remained costly as well as slow till the era of railway construction began in 1829. The application of steam as a motive power and of electricity as a means of communicating thought has been by far the greatest factor in this long process of reducing the dimensions of the world, which dates back as far as the domestication of beasts of burden, and the invention, first of paddles and oars, and then of sails. The North American Continent can now be crossed in five days, the South American (from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres) in under two, the Transandine tunnel having now been pierced. The Continent which stretches from the Baltic to the North Pacific can now be traversed in twelve days. By means of the Trans-Siberian line and its steamship connection with the ports of Japan, it is now possible to go round the globe in less than fifty days. Indeed, the journey has recently been done in forty days. Nor is this acceleration of transit more remarkable than its practical immunity, as compared with earlier times, not only from the dangers for which Nature is answerable, but from those also which man formerly interposed.

The increase of trade which has followed in the track first of discovery and latterly (with immensely larger volume) of the improvement of means of transport, has been accompanied not only by the seizure of transoceanic territories by the greater civilised States, but also by an outflow of population from those States into the more backward or more thinly-peopled parts of the earth. Sometimes, as in the case of North America, Siberia, and Australia, the emigrants extinguish or absorb the aboriginal population.

[Sidenote: Europeanisation of the World]

Sometimes, as in the case of India, Africa, and some parts of South America, they neither extinguish nor blend with the previous inhabitants, but rule them and spread what is called civilisation among them--this civilisation consisting chiefly in a knowledge of the mechanical arts and of deathful weapons accompanied by the destruction, more or less gradual, of their pre-existing beliefs and usages. Sometimes, again, as in the case of China, and to some extent also of the Mussulman East, though political dominion is not established, the process of substituting a new civilisation for the old one goes on despite the occasional efforts of the backward people to resist the process. The broad result is everywhere similar. The modern European type of civilisation is being diffused over the whole earth, superseding, or essentially modifying, the older local types. Thus, in a still more important sense than even that of communications, the world is contracted and becomes far more one than it has ever been before. The European who speaks three or four languages can travel over nearly all of it, and he can find on most of its habitable coasts, and in many parts of the lately-discovered interior, the appliances which are to him necessaries of life. The world is, in fact, becoming an enlarged Europe, so far as the externals of life and the material side of civilisation are concerned. The dissociative forces of Nature have been overcome.

[Sidenote: Triumph of Natural Science]

Putting together the two processes, the process in time and the process in space, which we have been reviewing, it will be seen that the main line of the development of mankind may be described as the transmission and the expansion of culture--that is to say, of knowledge and intellectual capacity. The stock of knowledge available for use and enjoyment has been steadily increased, and what each people accumulated has been made available for all. With this there has come assimilation, the destruction of weaker types of civilisation, the modification by constant interaction of the stronger types, the creation of a common type tending to absorb all the rest. Assimilation has been most complete in the sphere ruled by natural science--that is to say, in the material sphere, less complete in that ruled by the human sciences (including the sphere of political and social institutions), still less complete in the sphere of religious, moral, and social ideas, and as respects the products of literature and art. Or, in other words, where certainty of knowledge is attainable and utility in practice is incontestable, the process of assimilation has moved fastest and furthest.

[Sidenote: Nature & the Unity of Mankind]

The process has been a long one, for its beginnings reach back beyond our historical knowledge. So far as it lies within the range of history, it falls into two periods, the earlier of which supplies an instructive illustration of the later one which we know better. The effort which Nature--that is to say, the natural tendencies of man as a social being--has been making towards the unification of mankind during the last few centuries, is her second great effort. The first was in progress from the time when the most ancient records begin down to the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era.

The great exploit of Ferdinand Magellan, who circumnavigated the
globe in 1519-1520, ranks among the events of world importance, and
was the culminating achievement of the greatest period of discovery
in the world’s history.
]

Greek civilisation, which itself had drawn much from Egypt, as well as from Assyria, Phœnicia, and the peoples of Asia Minor, permeated the minds and institutions (except the legal institutions), of the Mediterranean and West European countries, and was propagated by the governing energy of the Romans. In its Romanised form it transformed or absorbed and superseded the less advanced civilisations of all those countries, creating one new type for the whole Roman world. With some local diversities, that type prevailed from the Northumbrian Wall of Hadrian to the Caucasus and the deserts of Arabia. The still independent races on the northern frontier of the Empire received a tincture of it, and would doubtless have been more deeply imbued had the Roman Empire stood longer.

Christianity, becoming dominant at a time when the Empire was already tottering, gave a new sense of unity to all whom the Greco-Roman type had formed, extended the influence of that type still further, and enabled much that belonged to it (especially its religious, its legal, and its literary elements) to survive the political dominion of the Emperors and to perpetuate itself among practically independent States which were springing up. The authority of Papal Rome helped to carry this sense of unity among civilised men through a period of ignorance, confusion, and semi-barbarism which might otherwise have extinguished it. Nevertheless, we may say, broadly speaking, that the first effort towards the establishment of a common type of civilisation was, if not closed, yet arrested by the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West. Close thereupon came the rise of Islam, tearing away the Eastern provinces, and creating a rival type of civilisation--though a type largely influenced by the Greco-Roman--which held its ground for some centuries, and has only recently shown that it is destined to vanish.

[Sidenote: Conquest and Civilisation]

The beginnings of the second effort toward the unification of civilised mankind may be observed as far back as the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its effective and decisive action may, however, be assigned to the fifteenth, when the spread of literary and philosophic culture, and the swift extension of maritime discovery, ushered in the modern phase wherein we have marked its irresistible advance. This phase differs from the earlier one both in its range--for it embraces the whole earth and not merely the Mediterranean lands--and in its basis, for it rests not so much upon conquest and religion as upon scientific knowledge, formative ideas, and commerce. Yet even here a parallelism may be noted between the ancient and the modern phase. Knowledge and ideas had brought about a marked assimilation of various parts of the ancient world to each other before Roman conquest completed the work, and what conquest did was done chiefly among the ruder races. So now, while it is knowledge and ideas that have worked for the creation of a common type among the peoples of European stock, conquest has been a potent means of spreading this type in the outlying countries and among the more backward races whose territories the European nations have seized.

European civilisation is being diffused all over the earth,
superseding or essentially modifying the older local types.
The solid black portions of this map represent territory under
Anglo-Saxon control; the shaded parts are under other European
control, and the dotted parts under Asiatic and African control.
]

[Sidenote: Language a Unifying Influence]

The diffusion of a few forms of speech has played a great part in both phases. Greek was spoken over the eastern half of the Roman world in the second century A.D., though not to the extinction of such tongues as Syriac and Egyptian. Latin was similarly spoken over the western half, though not to the extinction of the tongues we now call Basque and Breton and Welsh; and Latin continued to be the language of religion, of law, of philosophy, and of serious prose literature in general till the sixteenth century. So now, several of the leading European tongues are spoken far beyond the limits of their birthplace, and their wide range has become a powerful influence in diffusing European culture. German, English, Russian, Spanish, and French are available for the purposes of commerce, and for those who read books over nineteen-twentieths of the earth’s surface. The languages of the smaller non-European peoples are disappearing in those places where they have to compete with these greater European tongues, except in so far as they are a medium of domestic intercourse. Arabic, Chinese, and in less degree Persian are the only non-European languages which retain a world importance. English, German, and Spanish are pre-eminently the three leading commercial languages. They gain ground on the rest, and it is English that gains ground most swiftly. The German merchant is no doubt even more ubiquitous (if the expression be permitted) than is the English; but the German more frequently speaks English than the Englishman or American speaks German.

[Sidenote: Linking the Nations Together]

It has already been observed that assimilation has advanced least in the sphere of institutions, ideas, and literature. The question might, indeed, be raised whether the types of thought, of national character, and of literary activity represented by the five or six leading nations are not rather tending to become more accentuated. The self-consciousness of each nation, taking the form of pride or vanity, leads it to exalt its own type and to dwell with satisfaction on whatever differentiates it from other types. Nevertheless there are influences at work in the domain of practice as well as of thought, which, in creating a common body of opinion and a sense of common interest among large classes belonging to these leading nations, tend to link the nations themselves together. Religious sympathy, or a common attachment to certain doctrines, such as, for instance, those of Collectivism, works in this direction among the masses, as the love of science or of art does among sections of the more educated class. As regards the peoples not of European stock, who are, broadly speaking, the more backward, it is not yet possible to say what will be the influence of the European type of culture upon their intellectual development.

The material side of their civilisation will after a time conform to the European type, though, perhaps, to forms that are not the most progressive; and even such faiths as Buddhism and Islam may lose their hold on those who come most into contact with Europeans. But whether these peoples will produce any new types of thought or art under the stimulus of Europe, as the Teutons and Slavs did after they had been for centuries in contact with the relics of Greco-Roman culture, or whether they will be overborne by and merely imitate and reproduce what Europeans teach them--this is a question for conjecture only, since the data for predictions are wanting.

It is a question of special interest as regards the Japanese, the one non-European race which, having an old civilisation of its own, highly developed on the artistic side, has shown an amazing aptitude for appropriating European institutions and ideas. Already a Japanese physiologist has taken high rank among men of science by being one of the discoverers of the bacillus of the Oriental plague.

DOES HISTORY MAKE FOR PROGRESS?

One of the questions which both the writers and the readers of a History of the World must frequently ask themselves is whether the course of history establishes a general law of progress. Some thinkers have gone so far as to say that this must be the moral of history regarded as a whole, and a few have even suggested that without the recognition of such a principle and of a sort of general guidance of human affairs towards this goal, history would be unintelligible, and the doings of mankind would seem little better than the sport of chance.

[Sidenote: What is the Test of Progress?]

[Sidenote: What Mankind has Achieved]

Whatever may be thought of these propositions as matters of theory, the doctrine of a general and steady law of progress is one to which no historian ought to commit himself. His business is to set forth and explain the facts exactly as they are; and if he writes in the light of a theory he is pretty certain to be unconsciously seduced into giving undue prominence to those facts which make for it. Moreover, the question is in itself a far more complex one than the simple word “progress” at first sight conveys. What is the test of progress? In what form of human advance is it to be deemed to consist? Which of these forms is of the highest value? There can be no doubt of the advance made by man in certain directions. There may be great doubt as to his advance in other directions. There may possibly be no advance but even retrogression, or at least signs of an approaching retrogression, in some few directions. The view to be taken of the relative importance of these lines of movement is a matter not so much for the historian as for the philosopher, and its discussion would carry us away into fields of thought not fitted for a book like the present. Although, therefore, it is true that one chief interest of history resides in its capacity for throwing light on this question, all that need here be said may be expressed as follows:

There has been a marvellous advance in man’s knowledge of the laws
of Nature and of his consequent mastery over Nature.

There has been therewith a great increase in population, and, on
the whole, in the physical vigour of the average individual man.

There has been, as a further consequence, an immense increase in
the material comfort and well-being of the bulk of mankind, so that
to most men necessaries have become easier of attainment, and many
things which were once luxuries have become necessaries.

Against this is to be set the fact that some of the natural resources of the world are being rapidly exhausted. This would at one time have excited alarm; but scientific discoveries have so greatly extended man’s capacity to utilise other sources of natural energy, that people are disposed to assume that the loss of the resources aforesaid will be compensated by further discoveries.

[Sidenote: The Gain and the Loss]

As to progress other than material--that is to say, progress in intellectual capacity, in taste, in the power of enjoyment, in virtue, and generally in what is called happiness--every man’s view must depend on the ideal which he sets before himself of what constitutes happiness, and of the relative importance to happiness of the ethical and the non-ethical elements which enter into the conception. Until there is more agreement than now exists or has ever existed on these points, there is no use in trying to form conclusions regarding the progress man has made. Moreover, it is admitted that nearly every gain man makes is accompanied by some corresponding loss--perhaps a slight loss, yet a loss. When we attempt to estimate the comparative importance of these gains and losses, questions of great difficulty, both ethical and non-ethical, emerge; and in many cases our experience is not yet sufficient to determine the quantum of loss. There is room both for the optimist and for the pessimist, and in arguing such questions nearly everybody becomes an optimist or a pessimist. The historian has no business to be either.

There is another temptation besides that of delivering his opinion on these high matters, of which the historian does well to be aware--I mean the temptation to prophesy. The study of history as a whole, more inevitably than that of the history of any particular country or people, suggests forecasts of the future, because the broader the field which we survey the more do we learn to appreciate the great and wide-working forces that are guiding mankind, and the more therefore are we led to speculate on the results which these forces, some of them likely to be permanent, will tend to bring about.

[Sidenote: Modern Mastery of Nature]

This temptation can seldom have been stronger than it is now, when we see all mankind brought into closer relations than ever before, and more obviously dominated by forces which are essentially the same, though varying in their form. Yet it will appear, when the problem is closely examined, that the very novelty of the present situation of the world--the fact that our mastery of Nature has been so rapidly extended within the last century, and that the phenomena of the subjugation of the earth by Europeans and of the ubiquitous contact of the advanced and the backward races are so unexampled in respect of the area they cover--that all predictions must be uttered with the greatest caution, and due allowance made for elements which may disturb even the most careful calculations. It may, indeed, be doubted whether any predictions of a definitely positive kind--predictions that such and such things will happen--can be safely made, save the obvious ones which are based on the assumption that existing natural conditions remain for some time operative.

[Sidenote: A Glimpse into the Future]

Taking this assumption to be a legitimate one, it maybe predicted that population will continue to increase, at least till the now waste but habitable parts of the earth have been turned to account; that races, except where there is a marked colour line, will continue to become intermingled; that the small and weak races, and especially the lower set of savages, will be absorbed or die out; that fewer and fewer languages will be spoken; that communications will become even swifter, easier, and cheaper than they are at present; and that commerce and wealth will continue to grow, subject, perhaps, to occasional checks from political disturbance.

There are also some negative predictions on which one may venture, and with a little more confidence. No new race can appear, except possibly from a fusion of two or more existing races, or from the differentiation of a branch of an existing race under new conditions, as the Americans have been to some slight extent differentiated from the English, and the Brazilians from the Portuguese (there having been in the latter case a certain admixture of negro blood), and as the Siberians of the future may be a different sort of Russians. Neither is any new language likely to appear, except, mere trade jargons (like Chinook or pigeon English), because the existing languages of the great peoples are firmly established, and the process of change within each of these languages has, owing to the abundance of printed matter, become now extremely slow. Conditions can hardly be imagined under which such a phenomenon as the development of the Romance languages out of Latin, or of Danish and Swedish out of the common Northern tongue of the eleventh century, could recur.

From the statuary groups on the Albert Memorial.
]

It may seem natural to add the further prediction that the great States and the great religions will continue to grow and to absorb the small ones. But when we touch topics into which human opinion or emotion enters, we touch a new kind of matter, where the influences now at work may be too much affected by new influences to permit of any forecast. Conditions might conceivably come into action which would split up some or most of the present great States, and bring the world back to an age of small political communities.

So, too, though the lower forms of paganism are fast vanishing, and the four or five great religions are extending their sway, it is conceivable that new prophets may arise, founding new faiths, or that the existing religions may be split up into new sects widely diverse from one another. Even the supremacy of the European races, well assured as it now appears, may be reduced by a variety of causes, physiological or moral, when some centuries have passed.

From the statuary groups on the Albert Memorial.
]

Whoever examines the predictions made by the most observant and profound thinkers of the past will see reason to distrust almost all the predictions, especially those of a positive order, which shape themselves in our minds to-day.

JAMES BRYCE

WITH

A CHRONOLOGY OF TEN THOUSAND YEARS

By Arthur D. Innes, M.A.]

Within the memory of living men, the most advanced peoples of the world believed that the world itself had been created not 6,000 years ago. We have all learned now that the globe itself, that life--and long later mankind--came into being thousands, hundreds of thousands--it may be millions--of years ago.

How long precisely, none can tell. What we do know with certainty is that before the continents finally emerged in their present shape there was an Ice Age, immediately preceded by what is called the Drift Age, and that as early as the Drift Age man, the maker of implements, lived, and did battle with the cave bear and other monsters. Where man first came into being, how he spread over the globe, how the great races acquired their characteristics, we can only conjecture.

[Sidenote: The Birth of the Nations]

Wherever and whenever man appeared, the earliest traces show him to have been a sociable animal living in communities. The earliest unmistakable traces of civilisation, order, polity, are found in the basins of the Nile and the Euphrates, dating probably as far back as ten thousand years ago. The people who built the Pyramids had already advanced far in the knowledge which gives man the mastery over Nature; and the Pyramids were built certainly 3,000, and probably nearer 5,000, years before the Christian era. And while those pristine civilisations rose and fell in Egypt, civilisations were rising and passing away in Mesopotamia also.

In the fourth millennium there appears first a people with new characteristics--the Semitic race, gradually dominating the Mesopotamian civilisation, spreading westward in successive waves to the Mediterranean, surging into Egypt and out again; creating the Empires of Babylonia and of Assyria, and the Phœnician and Canaanite nations. And while the Semite Empires rose and fell, and Egypt held upon her ancient way, still mightier nations were coming to birth. The great Aryan or Indo-European migrations began, the Celt, the Latin, and the Hellene rolling westward by the Euxine and the Northern Mediterranean; while another group passed southward, to the East of the Semites, spreading the Aryan conquest over the greater part of the Indian peninsula.

[Sidenote: Conflicts of Ancient Peoples]

Of the doings of the great Semitic Powers in the second millennium B.C. we have some knowledge from the Hebrew records; and year by year fresh light is thrown on those records by inscriptions and tablets newly discovered or newly deciphered, Egyptian, Assyrian, or Hittite. Of the Hittite or early Syrian dominion we know little enough, except that it successfully defied the invading armies of Assyrian kings and Egyptian Pharaohs. Before 1500 the Semite conquerors of Egypt, the Hyksos, were driven out--an event associated by some authorities with the Hebrew Exodus. From this time the ebb and flow of Egyptian and Assyrian dynasties are more definitely recorded. In the closing centuries the prosperity of Tyre and Sidon reached its height, and the theocratic Hebrew nationality formed a kingdom. We become aware of Hellenic or kindred Powers in Asia Minor, at Troy, in Crete, at Mycenæ; of Achæans and Danaans in Egypt.

[Sidenote: The First Formation of States]

Before another five hundred years had passed, throughout the coasts and islands of the Ægean Sea, Æolians, Ionians, Dorians established themselves in cities, and every city rapidly grew into a highly-organised State. Over the Mediterranean, to Southern Italy, to Sicily, to Marseilles, the new Greek civilisation carried its commerce and its culture. In Italy the Latin races were in like manner forming themselves into city-states, developing conceptions of Government undreamed of by Oriental minds. Rome was founded, and acquired a leadership. Throughout the Hellenic and the Latin world the idea of civic freedom took root; the primitive monarchical systems disappeared, and, through revolutions and temporary despotisms, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, the States took on for the most part a Republican form.

In the East an Aryan Power overthrew the last of the Assyrian-Babylonian dynasties; but these Persian conquerors became assimilated to the conquered nations. Fundamentally their empire was of the same type as its predecessors. The Persian sway, however, extended not only into Egypt but over the partly Hellenised Asia Minor; and the Ionic revolt, in the first year of the fifth century B.C. brought the spirit of the East and the spirit of the West into fierce collision. The great king hurled his hosts against defiant Hellas; at Marathon and at Salamis, Athens shattered his army and his fleets. Thenceforth, for a thousand years, the West was the aggressor.

[Sidenote: Athens and the Greek Immortals]

But the rolling back of the “barbarian” tide was not the only glory that fell to Athens; in that same century the little state bore sons whose names stand in the front rank of the immortals for all time: Æschylus and Sophocles, Phidias, Pericles, Socrates, and Plato; in the next half century, Demosthenes; with others almost if not quite, on the same plane. The character of Athens, idealised, no doubt, is epitomised by Thucydides in the speech of Pericles. She was the sum of all that was best and noblest in Hellenism--its love of freedom, of beauty, of energy, of harmony, and its public spirit. Politically, the story of the period which followed Salamis is mainly one of the rivalry between Athens and Sparta; until the rise of Macedon, when King Philip made himself master of all Hellas.

[Sidenote: The Coming-up of Alexander]

Then, with the beginning of the last quarter of the fourth century, Alexander the Great blazed upon the world, toppled the empires of Western Asia before him, conquered Egypt, and swept over the great mountain-barriers into India, where Buddhism had already begun to displace the ancient Brahmanism of the first Aryans. The Greek influences did not long linger in the far East after the great conqueror’s death. His empire broke up. Asia west of the Euphrates remained, indeed, under the dominion mainly of one Grecian dynasty, the Seleucidæ; Egypt under that of another, the Ptolemies. Yet Alexander’s attempts to blend East and West failed. Orientalism abode, unconquered, ineradicable; Hellenism prevailed almost after the fashion of British domination in India to-day, in the land, but not of it.

Meanwhile, the struggle between Aryans and non-Aryans had been running a partly separate course in the West. The Phœnicians of Carthage and the pre-Aryan Etruscans, the dominant power in Italy, made a joint assault on the Greeks of Sicily and the Latins of the mainland at the beginning of the fifth century. They were beaten back, but for a century the struggle continued between Rome and Veii. The great Celtic incursion of the Gauls threatened destruction to Rome, but completed the destruction of Etruria. In the fourth century and the first half of the third century B.C. Rome was chiefly engaged in the double task of achieving supremacy, passing into actual dominion among the Latin states, and of establishing the great Senatorial oligarchy, against whose stubborn resolution the Epirote Pyrrhus hurled himself in vain.

Just sixty years after Alexander’s death began the sixty years’ struggle between Rome and Carthage, in the latter years of which the genius of Hannibal was pitted against the grim persistence of the Roman oligarchy. Carthage fell; Rome triumphed, and with her triumph entered on her career of extended conquest.

[Sidenote: The Triumph of Rome]

The organisation which had ruled the city-state itself not ill, and raised it to an immense pre-eminence, sufficed also to maintain its powers of conquest, but not its political virtue. Rome’s armies subdued the divided and disorganised realms which more or less recognised the over-lordship of Macedon; they made the Ptolemies and the Seleucidæ acknowledge their supremacy; they shattered the new barbarian hordes, which began to pour across the Alpine passes, and the African tribes of Numidia. But the lofty public spirit was gone which had made Rome so great when she was battling for life. Reformers arose, only to prove that there was no power in the constitution strong enough to enforce reform. Victorious generals with their legions behind them began to dictate legislation; Marius and Sulla, democrats or reactionaries, signalised their political successes by slaughtering hecatombs of their opponents.

At last, statesmanship and generalship found their supreme incarnation in one person, Julius Cæsar. For many years one of the two foremost men in the Republic, he finally crushed his rival Pompeius and became acknowledged head of the state. Before he could complete the work of reconstruction, Cæsar fell beneath the daggers of Republican enthusiasts; but ere many years had passed his adopted son Octavian triumphed over all rivals, and established the Principate or Empire, the absolute dominion of one ruler over the whole Roman world--although that dominion was still maintained under the Republican forms.

[Sidenote: The Birth of Christ]

A tremendous event in itself, the reign of Augustus also witnessed one which has had a great influence on the history of the world--the birth of Christ. His ministry, to which perhaps the term event should be applied, was during the reign of the second Emperor, Tiberius. The new faith born on the soil of Judæa was to modify profoundly all the ideals, social and political as well as theological and personal, of the entire Western world; but for many years its adherents remained nothing more than a persecuted yet steadily growing sect; suspected and hated as anarchists rather than as misbelievers, in a world where the rankest and wildest superstitions lived side by side with a general intellectual scepticism.

For four centuries the Imperial city ruled over nearly the whole known world. Beyond the Euphrates on the east, beyond the Rhine and the Danube, she could maintain no permanent footing; within her own borders it seemed as though her sway became a part of the natural order--so much so that when her power had passed away her very conquerors did her homage and took upon themselves titles as her officers.

[Sidenote: Rome in her Decline]

But the overthrow was yet a long way off. The reconstruction organised by Augustus and his Ministers was developed by able rulers--Tiberius, Trajan, Hadrian, the Antonines--during some two hundred years, in spite of intervals when a murderous tyranny or a feeble incompetence occupied the throne of the Cæsars. From the Pillars of Hercules to the river of Mesopotamia, northward as far as Britain, southward to the deserts of Africa, Roman civilisation, Roman law and justice, Roman military discipline, and Roman roads maintained the Roman peace.

[Sidenote: Fall of Rome and Rise of Goths]

Then came an era when the Imperial purple became the prize of successful generals acclaimed by their legions; and the frontier armies, themselves largely formed out of Teutonic or other semi-“barbarian” tribes, found themselves face to face with new barbarian hordes which for another century and a half they held in check. But the tremendous external pressure on frontiers so vast made it imperative that the Government should be somewhat decentralised. At the end of the third century Diocletian parted the empire into four great divisions. The new system could not endure; Constantine the Great again became sole emperor. Under him Christianity was at length adopted as the state religion; the Church herself became a fundamental factor in the political system; and the political centre of gravity was transferred from Rome to Byzantium.

[Sidenote: Beginning of Byzantium]

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The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18)Chapter IV: Part 4

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