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The Progress of Hellenism, in Alexander's Empire
by John Pentland Mahaffy,
Professor of Ancient History in Trinity College Dublin
LONDON, UNWIN, I9O5
Still a valuable overview of the Hellenistic Age.
CONTENTS
Lecture I. Xenophon the Precursor of Hellenism (page 1.)
Lecture II. Macedonia and Greece (page 29.)
Lecture III. Egypt (page 63.)
Lecture IV. Syria (page 91.)
Lecture V. General Reflections on Hellenism (page 107.)
From the PREFACE
The following Lectures, delivered in the University of Chicago, represent the compendium of a long and brilliant development of human culture. To obtain a brief and yet accurate survey of it is certainly a desideratum to various classes of readers, and will, I trust, satisfy a real want.... The appearance of Xenophon in this company will seem novel to many; and it is so in truth. But this new view of a familiar figure is amply justified by the works which any sceptic may consult for himself. This first lecture is, therefore, that which will chiefly attract classical scholars, to whom Xeno- phon is a household word in the class-room. If it encourages them to read him through, instead of confining themselves to his popular works, I shall have attained what I most desire...J. P. M. Dublin, January, 1905.
Lecture I.
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR OF HELLENISM
The first thing essential is that you and I should understand one another, especially regarding the topic of my discourse. I am not sure that all of you agree with me in the meaning you attach to the word "Hellenism." And no wonder; for if you read the immortal Grote, you will find it used by him for the high culture of Athens, and as the substantive corresponding to the adjective "Hellenic." If, on the other hand, you open the great work of Droysen, the History of Hellenism, you will find that it excludes the purest Greek culture, and corresponds to the adjective "Hellenistic." As you may see from the program of my lectures, I intend to use the word in the latter sense, and to speak of that diffusion of Greek speech and culture through Macedonia and the nearer East which, while it extended the influence, could not but dilute the purity, of Hellenic civilisation. I wish Grote had adopted from the Germans the word "Hellenedom," to correspond with "Hellenic." Then all would have been clear. Or perhaps I should have coined "Hellenicism," to correspond to "Hellenistic." But what chance had I of accomplishing what the Roman emperor despaired of adding a new word to one's mother- tongue ? I must therefore be content with repeating that by "Hellenism" I mean that so-called "silver age" of Greek art and literature, when they became cosmopolitan, and not parochial; and by "Hellenistic," not only what was Greek, but what desired and assumed to be Greek, from the highest and noblest imitation down to the poorest travesty.
The pidgin English of the Solomon islander is as far removed from the prose of Ruskin or of Froude as is the rudest Hellenistic epitaph or letter from the music of Plato's diction, but both are clear evidence of the imperial quality in that language which sways the life of millions of men far beyond the limits of its original domain. Yet it must needs be that as the matchless idiom of Aristophanes passed out to Macedonian noble, to Persian grandee, to Syrian trader, to Egyptian priest, each and all of these added somewhat of their national flavour, and so produced an idiom and a culture uniform indeed in application, though by no means uniform in construction.
It is customary to date the origin of this Hellenism from the reign of Alexander, whose house had adopted Greek culture, and whose arms carried it into the far East ; but this is to my mind a superficial view, and it is the object of my first lecture to show you that Hellenism was a thing of older growth, and that it began from the moment that Athens ceased to be the dominant centre of Greece in politics as well as in letters.
The end of the long Peloponnesian war threw out of Greece a crowd of active and ambitious men some exiled from their homes, some voluntary absentees in search of employment. Neighbouring nationalities Macedonians, Persians, Egyptians were coming into nearer view, and becoming the possible homes of expatriated Greeks. All these countries had long since sought and found merce- naries, not only among the poor mountaineers of Achaea and Arcadia, but among the aristocrats of Lesbos and Rhodes, nay even of Athens and Sparta. And now mercenary service rot only became more frequent and more respectable, but the relations between the employers and the employed began to change. Earlier Persian kings and satraps had regarded their Greek mercenaries as they regarded their Indian elephants mere tools to win victories. The relations of the younger Cyrus with the Greeks were of a wholly different kind. He endeavoured to make them friends, and to reconcile them to Persian ideas of state and of sovereignty. How well he succeeded I will proceed to show in the case of Xenophon.
But not only in the case of active men and travellers but among the stay-at-home and purely literary, there grew up in this generation a feeling that culture was more than race, and wealth better than nobility. We have Isocrates, the rhetorician and schoolmaster, saying in a passage of which he probably did not himself apprehend the deep meaning, that to be an Athenian meant, not to be born in Attica, but to have attained to Attic culture. Socrates, the most undeniable of Athenians, had already by his teaching loosened the bonds of city patriotism. He had taught wider views, and laid larger issues before men; and so we have a typical pupil, Xenophon, using the Delphic oracle, not for Hellenic, but Hellenistic purposes, compelling its assent to his schemes of ambition, and looking forward to eastern war and travel as the obvious resource for a man without a fixed position at home.
It is an exceptional good fortune for the modern historian that this figure of Xenophon, furnished with all the books he ever wrote (and some which he never wrote), stands out so clearly at this momentous epoch, when constant petty wars and rumours of wars at home were preparing Greece for the coming change. He begins his life a pure Athenian, and to the end remained entitled by his style to the name of the Attic bee. But where did that bee not gather honey ? Not merely from the thyme of Attica and the cistus of the Peloponnese, but from the rose gardens of Persia and the sunflowers of Babylonia. And so in every successive work there is some new flavour in the diction and the tone of thought, till we come in the Cyropcedia to that extraordinary panegyric on the methods of the Persian monarchy, even including the employment of eunuchs to take charge of the king's household.
But generalities or metaphors are not sufficient to prove my case. Let us descend into details. I say that in the main features of his life and teaching Xenophon represents the first step in the transition from Hellenedom to Hellenism. It is apparent, first, in his language; for though he writes excellent Attic Greek, he discards the niceties of style which were then invading Attic prose, 1 and which made the essays of his contemporary Isocrates, and the orations of Demosthenes, the most artificial of all the great prose writing the world has seen. Still more he allows himself the use of stray and strange words provincial in the sense of not being Attic, picked up in his travels at Sinope or Samos or Byzantium, and often appearing but once in his works. Thus his language distinctly approximates to that common dialect which was the lingua franca of all the Hellenistic world. Hence he remained always popular, while the writers in dialect Sappho, Theocritus, nay even Herodotus were well-nigh unintelligible to the Hellenistic child. There is, moreover, a great diminution in his use of particles, as compared, e. g., with the prose of Plato. These delicate spices, which gave flavour to every page of Plato, very soon lost their perfume; they became as unintelligible to the later Greeks as they are to our scholars; that is to say, grammarians could still talk about them, but no man knew how to use them. And so the simpler prose of Xenophon became the highest ideal of their aspirations.
But if in this respect his life became simpler and plainer, in others it followed a contrary course. In his Socratic dialogues he had given a very complete analysis of all that could be attained in Attic life. His Socrates is not only a perfect man of high intel- lectual endowments, who discusses all the problems of life, but the pupils he has trained, men of high birth and independent fortune, are represented as putting his theory into practice. Ischomachus, in the dialogue or tract On Household Economy, not only gives us a famous picture of the educating of his own wife, after her marriage, but tells of the whole course of the work and the amusements of an Attic country gentleman. None of us questions that it was in this Socratic education that Xenophon laid the foundation of his all-around capacities both for intellectual and for practical life. He was not a deep philosopher, and he cared not to be; but, as Tacitus says of Agricola, another practical man, retinuit, quod est difficillimum, in philosophia modum. He had not the tastes or the ambitions of a college Don. When he had graduated, so to speak, under Socrates, he went out into the world. And there he found other nations which could do some things better than the Greeks, and could attain great happiness denied to them.
There are several blind spots in the ideal prospects of Ischomachus the Attic gentleman. In the first place, field sports were impossible in Attica. In a land so thickly populated, and so carefully cultivated, large properties were scarce, and preservation impossible. So game was long since extirpated from Attica. But no sooner did Xenophon go to visit the younger Cyrus in Asia Minor than he woke up to the dignities and delights of hunting. This taste he kept up all his life. After his return with the Ten Thousand, he was attached to the Spartans in their campaigns against the Persian satraps, and so he had frequently the chance of poaching their splendid preserves. In later life, when Sparta desired to reward him, he obtained a sporting estate on the Arcadian side of Olympia, which he turns aside to describe (in his Anabasis V, 3) with evident delight. He writes tracts on hunting, and says that the pursuit of the hare is so fascinating as to make a man forget that he ever was in love with anything else. Now, all this side of his life he learned not from Socrates or at Athens, but from his intercourse with Persian grandees.
In another place, when speaking of order in the keeping of a household, he quotes no Greek example, but rather the great Phoenician merchantman he had seen at Corinth, where all the tackle and the freight were packed away with such neatness and economy as to make it a sight for the Greeks to visit. And so he adds that the planting of a paradise belonging to his patron Cyrus was not only far superior to any- thing in Greece, but, what was more astonishing, that great prince had deigned to occupy his own hands with this planting. In the laying out, there- fore, of orchards and parks he found that the Greeks had everything to learn from a race of men whom they had been brought up to hate and despise. I notice, by the way, that in one point both the Attic and the Persian gardens were still undeveloped. In all his descriptions of them Xenophon is silent on the culture of flowers. Nor does he ever speak of the beauty of his fruit trees in flower. When we hear of Alexandria, in the next century, that it pro- duced beautiful flowers at every season in its green- houses, we see that the Hellenism of Xenophon was only incipient. Queen Cleopatra had been taught many luxuries unknown even to the younger Cyrus. n
Still the very changes of residence in Xenophon's life could not but broaden his views and enlarge his tastes beyond those of the cultivated Athenian. Consider for a moment how much of the world he had seen. Starting from Sardis with the army of Cyrus, and being free from discipline as a volunteer, he travelled all through southern Asia Minor into Babylonia, where he tells us of the strange and new aspect of the country, with its, wide rivers, its great deserts, its dense cultivation, and its fauna and flora so much more tropical than anything known in Greece. Then comes the battle of Kunaxa and the disastrous death of his great patron, Cyrus. The famous retreat of the Ten Thousand is what has made Xenophon's name immortal, and though, as I gravely suspect, he has much exaggerated his own importance in that arduous affair, he must certainly have had the experience of a journey over the high passes of Armenia in deep snow and arctic temperature, to contrast with the burning plains of Babylonia. He returns along the north coast of Asia Minor, encountering many strange savage tribes, whose man- ners and customs he notes with curious interest. Then from Byzantium he makes a tour among the bar- barians of European Thrace, and thence returns to Greece, only to revert again to Asia Minor, and this time to campaign in its central provinces. He next comes home with his second patron, King Agesilaus of Sparta, through Bceotia, where the famous battle of Koronea gives him a foretaste of Boeotian supremacy. Yet of all the Greeks none were so distasteful to him as these hardy vulgarians. Not even the great and refined Epaminondas earns from him more than rare and unwilling praise, and presently our travelled Athenian departs in exile to the Peloponnese, where he seems to have spent the rest of his long life.
Thus Xenophon had studied not only all Greece, but all the borders of the Greek world in Asia Minor and Thrace; he had penetrated the great Persian empire and learned its splendour and its weakness. In fact, the whole sphere of early Hel- lenism was under his ken. The West only Sicily and southern Italy he neglects, and this is quite characteristic of the rise of Hellenism in the next generation. All the desires, the ambitions, the prospects of the Greeks of the fourth and third centuries before Christ lay eastward, not westward. To them the Romans were yet unknown and unnoticed barbarians, and the Greek West no land of large promise like the East; for apart from the tough mountaineers of Calabria and Sicily, dangerous neighbours on land, there was the Carthaginian sea-power which took care to close the avenues of trade to the fabulous isles and coasts, that loomed against the setting sun. But in the armies he com- manded there were not wanting many mercenaries hailing from the far West ; there must also have been 13
many who had served in Egypt; and it was from these that he derived his great respect and admira- tion for that ancient civilisation. The Egyptians who fight against the great Cyrus in Xenophon's romance, who are ultimately settled by him as a colony in Asia Minor, are the bravest and best of oriental nations. Such, then, being this man's wide experience, it is well worth seeking from his writings his general views regarding the Greek world, his estimate of its strength and of its weakness, and above all, what he has said or would have said, had we asked him of the future prospects of the complex of states around him.
The first and most important point I notice is his firm belief in the expansion of the Hellenic race. He has before him constantly the feasibility of set- tling colonies of Greeks anywhere through Asia. When the Ten Thousand reach the Black Sea, and the next problem is how to occupy or provide for them, one of the ideas always recurring, and one which makes Xenophon suspected by all those who are longing for their homes in Greece, is his supposed ambition to be the founder of a new Greek city on the Euxine, where by trade, and by intermarriage with the natives, his companions might acquire a new and a wealthy home. Had not Olbia and Apollonia and Trapezus and many other Greek colonies of earlier days fared splendidly in these remote but most profitable regions, where sea and land, river and plain, combined to produce their natural wealth for the enterprising stranger ? The Thracian king, who calls in his services, quite naturally makes similar offers. Xenophon is to possess a castle, marry a Thracian princess, and settle down as a magnate who brings about him Greeks for the purposes of trade and of mercenary service. Every ambitious Greek had therefore this prospect dang- ling before his eyes. And this gave him a new, a practical, interest in learning to appreciate the qualities of the neighbour races, hitherto set down in the lump as barbarians. The Persian grandees on their side must have found both pleasure and profit in bringing Greeks about their courts. If so far back as the days of Sappho we hear that one of the girls she had educated in charms went to exercise them in Lydian Sardis, 1 is it not to be assumed that also this Greek influence upon the East was still waxing ? The profession of Greek mercenary was not confined to men-at-arms, and among the booty brought home by the Ten Thousand there were so many women that their outcry was quite a feature in the camp in moments of excitement. It is highly improbable that many of these had followed the army from Hellenic lands in their upward march, and if not, here was an eastern element affecting the next generation of the profession of arms. The fusion of races, therefore, though slow and sporadic, was distinctly on its increase. The campaigns of the Spartan king Agesilaus in Asia Minor, where he was attended, and no doubt advised, by Xcnophon, pointed to a large invasion of the East; and had he not been recalled by the miserable dissensions and quarrels of Greece, the conquest, partial if not total, of the Persian empire was in near prospect. Isocrates in more than one public letter implores the leaders of his nationality to compose their parochial disputes, and unite for the great object of becoming lords of the East.
The result he regarded as certain ; but who was to accomplish this great Hellenic league for the sub- jugation of the East ? On this question Xenophon's opinions and his forecast are not the less clear because we have to gather them indirectly from many stray indications in his works. He had had large practical experiences, besides the theoretical opinions of his master Socrates, to afford him materials for a sound judgment. In the first place, he had made essay of democracy, both the best and the worst that Greece could afford. He had lived an Athenian during the latter half of the great war which deprived his city of her supremacy, and he had seen his great mas- ter gradually alienating the majority by his trench- ant criticism, till that master's life was sacrificed to the vulgar prejudices of a democratic jury. Yet Athens was the most refined and cultivated democracy that ever existed. The bitter and satirical tract On the Polity of the Athenians, still printed among the works of Xenophon, is now generally recognised as the work of an older writer, living at Athens when Xenophon was a child. But it would not have attained its place, or kept it so long, had not the readers of Xenophon felt that it expressed the opin- ions he was likely to hold. It is certain that the school of Socrates, even before his shameful prosecu- tion and condemnation, were no friends of democracy. They all regarded the opinion of the majority, as such, worth nothing, and thought that the masses should be guided by the enlightened judgment of the select one or the select few. What they would have said or thought, had they made experience of the democracies of our day, is another question. They had before them a sovereign assembly which by a bare majority at a single meeting might abrogate a law or take away a human life without further penalty than the contrition and the shame which some- times followed upon calmer reflection. There were no higher courts of appeal from the sovereign assem- bly, no rehearing by a second and smaller House; the Athenian demos was recognised as a tyrant, above the laws which itself had sanctioned. That such a state should carry out a large policy of conquest, based upon a confederation of friendly states, was clearly impossible. Apart from other difficulties, the con- duct of military affairs by a political assembly was absurd. When a general could be appointed or dis- missed by a mere civilian vote of ordinary citizens, was any prompt or elaborate campaign possible ? The generals were all playing a political as well as a strategic game, and looking to their supporters at home more than to their troops abroad for support. There are not wanting parallels for all this in modern times. Great foreign conquests both then and now require something very different from the leading of a democratic assembly.
But Xenophon had other and far worse experiences of Greek democracy. As a leader of importance, selected by the majority to command an army of Greek mercenaries, he found himself in an impromptu military republic, . whose city was its camp, and whose laws the resolutions of armed men swayed by the momentary gusts of passion, of panic, or of pride. At the same time, they were no mere random adventurers, who regarded the camp as their only home, but men of whom the majority had not gone out from poverty, but because they had heard so high a character of Cyrus. Some brought men, some money, with them; some had run away from home, or left wife and children behind them, with the hope and intention of coming back rich men. 1 Yet such men, though obedient enough to discipline on the march or in action, were constantly breaking out into riots in camp; officers were deposed, inno- cent men hunted to death in the fury of the moment. 2 To live among such people, still more to be respon- sible for the leading of them, was a life of imminent daily risk. Such was the wilder democracy which Xenophon experienced, and here he had not the resource, which he strongly recommends to the cav- alry general in his tract, that above all things he must "square" the governing council of his city, and have on his side a leading politician to defend him. Xenophon therefore saw very plainly what hampered and weakened the Athens of Demosthenes in the next generation, and handed over Greece to Philip of Macedon that a democracy which exposes its executive government to constant criticism, and which constantly discusses and changes its military plans, is wholly unfit to make foreign conquests and to rule an extended empire.
There was evidently far more hope from the side of Sparta, which at this very moment I mean dur- ing Xenophon's youth and his campaigning days held supremacy in Greece, commanded considerable armies, and was under monarchical government. More especially under an able king like Agesilaus, Xenophon must have felt his hopes of invading the East within reach of their fulfilment. But a closer survey of the far-famed Spartan constitution showed him that here, too, there were flaws and faults which made Sparta unfit to hold empire. He has left us a tract On the Lacedtzmonian Polity, in which he details to us with admiration the strict discipline of that state and especially the thorough organisation of its education of boys and men for war. The order, the respect for authority, the simplicity of life, the subordination of even the most sacred family rights to the service of the state all these aristocratic features fascinated every cultivated Greek who lived under the sway of that most capricious tyrant, a popular assembly. But they did not appreciate the compensating advantages which democracy, however dangerous and turbulent, afforded them.
As Grote has expounded to us with complacent insistence, no Spartan would have been so fitted to take a lead suddenly in public affairs, civil or mili- tary, as the cultivated pupil of Socrates from Athens, who jumps in a moment from an amateur into a general. When Sparta obtained her empire, she had no competent civil service to manage her dependencies. Her harmosts, as they were called, were but rude and overbearing soldiers, not above venality and other corruption, but wholly unable to maintain the imperial dignity which is the only justification of a ruler from without, the only counterpoising boon for those who find their liberties impaired. And even if there had been competent rulers among the Spartan aristocracy, the method of appointment was radically vicious. For though Sparta was in name a dual monarchy, the real power lay with the five ephors so far as we know them, narrow and bigoted men who were more anxious to keep the kings in subjection than to appoint fit men as governors in the subject cities. Xenophon's experiences when the Ten Thousand returned to Byzantium show us how arbitrary and cruel was the rule of these governors, how absurd their mutual jealousies, how incompetent their handling of great public interests. Yet there was no remedy while the ephors appointed their personal friends, against whose crimes it was well nigh im- possible to obtain redress.
With all these various experiences before him, Xenophon wrote his largest and most elaborate treatise, doubtless that on which he staked his reputation the book On the Education of Cyrus. The fate that mocks so many human efforts has not spared the Attic bee. This voluminous book, in which the many speeches and curious digressions seem to suggest the garrulity of advancing age, has been neglected from the author's own day till now, while the Anabasis has been inflicted on every school- boy for two millenniums. The wonder is that so little-heeded a treatise ever survived the neglect of ages. Yet no Greek book should have excited greater likes and dislikes than this. Its theme is the vindication, both theoretically and practically, of absolute monarchy, as shown in the organisation of the Persian empire. In many other of his writ- ings as, for example, in the (Economicus, he sets forth the Socratic idea that if you can find the man with a ruling soul, the archie man, you had better put him in control, and trust to his wisdom rather than to the counsels of many. But now he takes as his ideal the far-off figure of the first Cyrus, whose gigantic deeds impress alike the Hebrew prophet and the Greek philosopher, and, amplifying his picture with many romantic details, gives us in the form of a historical novel a monarch's handbook for the gaining and the administration of a great empire. We never hear that Alexander the Great read this treatise. Most probably his tutor Aristotle hid it from him with jealous care. For what teaching could be more odious to the Hellenic mind ? Never- theless, in all Greek literature there was hardly a book which would prove more interesting to Alex- ander, or more useful to him in justifying his adop- tion of oriental ideas.
What is even more striking is this, that after Alexander's magnificent display of what the "archie man" could do if he possessed an acknowledged monarchy, the whole Hellenistic world acquiesced in monarchy as the best and most practical form of government. The seventh and eighth books of the CyrofcBdia were in spirit but the earliest of the many tracts composed by Stoic and Peripatetic philoso- phers about monarchy (jrepi fiaaCketas), and it was marvellous how even the democrats of Athens outbid their neighbours in their servile adulation of such a king as Demetrius, whose father had founded a new dynasty. Before a century had elapsed since Xenophon's treatise appeared, hardly a Greek city existed which was not directly or indirectly under the control of a king. Even the Rhodian confederacy lasted only because the surrounding kings found their finances more manageable in a neutral banking cen- tre with vast credit, and therefore with vast capital secured in a place of safety. And so when a great earthquake ruined the city, it was all the kings of the Hellenistic world who sent contributions to re- store it kings at war or at variance one with the other, but all bound to support the financial credit of Rhodes and avert a commercial crash.
I will but notice one more feature in this monarchy which overspread the Hellenistic world, which Xenophon saw in his day and admired, though he did not fully comprehend its strange nature. It is this, that hereditary monarchy develops in its sub- jects a loyalty to the sovereign almost unintelligible to the modern republican. The notion that it was the highest honour not only to die for the king, but to live in his personal service, was as foreign to the old Hellenic societies as it is to the modern American. And yet among the great and proud nobility of Persia, as among that of the French monarchy, and even now in England, men and women of the greatest pride and the largest wealth are "lords-in- waiting," "women of the bed chamber," " mistresses of the robes," "chamberlains," and "maids of honour." Xenophon saw this kind of devotion at the very outset of the Anabasis (I, 5). If Clearchus, the Lacedaemonian general, saw anyone slothful or lagging behind, he struck him with his stick, but set to the work himself, in order that he might turn public opinion to his side. How different the posi- tion of Cyrus ! He sees a lot of carts stuck in the deep mud of a pass, and the men set to extricate them shirking the work. Whereupon he calls upon his retinue of lords to show them an example. These, without a word, throwing off their purple headdress, dash into the mud with their costly tunics, their coloured trousers, with tores of gold around their necks, and bracelets on their wrists, and, setting to work with a will drag out the carts forthwith. Xeno- phon wonders at this instance of discipline (evraljia) in these young nobles. It was nothing of the kind. It was that loyalty that holds the personal service of the prince by divine right to be the noblest self-sac- rifice. These Persians were proud to do the work of asses and of mules when called upon by their prince, and yet they were far greater gentlemen than the Greeks who would have been highly offended at such an order.
Starting, then, with Macedon and Persia, whose kings, like the Spartan kings, professed a descent from the gods, the whole Hellenistic world learned to regard a Ptolemy, a Seleucus, even an Attalus, as something superhuman in authority. This was the change which Xenophon foresaw as highly expedient, if not necessary to the management of a great empire.
It is, I think, well worth observing that this prob- lem of monarchy did not occupy Xenophon merely in his old age. If the Cyropcedia shows in its style, as I am convinced, something of the prolixity of age, the Hiero, or dialogue between that tyrant and Simonides, shows much of the exuberance of youth, and accordingly it has by general consent been classed among Xenophon's earliest works. In the former part of this most interesting tract Hiero sets forth the dangers and miseries of the Greek tyrant's life, surrounded as he was by flattery concealing hatred and mistrust, regarded as he was by all a public enemy, whose murder would be regarded an act of patriotism. Hiero details the circumstances which he regards essential to a tyrant's safety, and therefore certain to entail his unpopularity and its consequent miseries. A tyrant must keep up a mercenary force; he must therefore levy taxes for its support; he cannot possibly travel or see the world, for fear of a revolution in his absence, and so on, through the catalogue of difficulties, which were a commonplace of Greek literature. But when all is said on that side, Simonides reposts that it is not by reason of their external circumstances, but of their own characters, that Greek tyrants have earned the mistrust and hatred of men. He goes on to show how even a monarch not hereditary, who has risen from a private station, could earn the esteem and gratitude of his subjects, and, by identifying his own interests with those of his city, make himself the acknowledged benefactor of all around him. Even the keeping of a mercenary force is justified by good practical reasons, as the protection of frontiers was always a great burden to a citizen population, and as the readiness and discipline of professional soldiers must be superior to a sudden levy of amateurs in war, if such unwilling recruits can indeed be called amateurs. With such arguments Xenophon justifies the fact that most ambitious Greeks regarded the attaining to a tyranny as the very acme of their desires. However, if this fact was known to the Ten Thous- and, it justifies not a little of their suspicions that Xenophon dreamt of being not only the founder but the autocrat of a new city on the Euxine. The picture of the benevolent tyrant, shown in the Hiero, would hardly be a sufficient guarantee to them that Xenophon, as a monarch, would indeed depart so widely from the ordinary and hateful traditions of a Greek tyranny. We need only here insist that the idea of monarchy had already occupied the early attention of the author of the Cyropadia, and that he had probably found the arguments in its favour an ordinary topic among the young aristocrats in the school of Socrates.
I confess that the extremes to which he carries his defence of the imperii instrumenta employed by the kings of Persia must be distasteful to any rea- sonable critic, most of all to any democrat, ancient or modern. The way in which he describes the great king absorbing all the interests and ambitions of his subjects, and making every man in the state look to the sovran as the fountain of honour and of promotion all this savours of a Napoleonic cen- tralisation and a Napoleonic tyranny, which, as it saps all individual independence, so it kills the growth and nurture of the highest qualities in human nature. This unpleasant side of the book may afford one reason for its systematic neglect. It is so far like one of those artificial school-exercises, so com- mon in the next generation, where the speaker made it his glory to vindicate some villain or justify some crime. And perhaps Xenophon was infected with this "sophistic" more than his readers imagine. Nevertheless, I for one have no doubt that real con- victions in favour of monarchy underlie all his semi- sophistical arguments.
Grote, the great historian of Greece, who was the first to inspire me, and perhaps many of you, with the love of Greek history and Greek literature, looks upon this momentous change as the death-knell of his favourite country. " 'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more." And yet at no time did the Greeks do more for the letters, the commerce, the civility of all the ancient world. And hence it is that I have chosen this somewhat neglected period as the topic of my discourses.
Lecture II.
MACEDONIA AND GREECE
In my last address I showed you how Xenophon a thorough and cultivated Hellene, and yet a travelled man, and acquainted with the East fore- shadowed the spread of Hellenic influence and cul- ture beyond its early and restricted home. He is not, like Isocrates, a political theorist, nor does he formally, in any of his works, hold out the conquest of the East by the Greeks as the great national object of the future. He probably thought the practical difficulties to be insurmountable, for till an absolute ruler should arise able to coerce Greece into unity, at least for military purposes, all theories and exhortations were useless. But Isocrates, living a few years longer, saw clearly enough that such a solution was within sight, and in his open letter to Philip of Macedon exhorts him to lead the Greeks away from internal disputes and wars into the new role of a conquering race. But no Philip, nay even no Alexander, could have done this work with Greek armies, either citizen or mercenary. He must have the backbone of quite another force bound to him not only by discipline, but by loyalty, and ready to protect him against Greek intrigue and Greek insurrection. All these conditions were satisfied by Macedonia, with Philip as its monarch. But it required nearly twenty years of organisation, of civilisation, and of subjugation to prepare the com- bined forces of Greece, Macedon, Illyria, and Thrace for its great work; and when all was ready Philip was struck down by the hand of an assassin. Providentially, a great successor was ready to carry out the matured plan. But had Alexander been killed in his first melee at the Granikos, when the Persian nobles fought so gallantly with him hand to hand, the whole history of Hellenism would have been changed, and its progress delayed till some other organising and conquering genius had arisen. It was therefore to the king of Macedon, leading his own people, that the first great spread of Hellenism is directly due. 1
Macedonia had long been known to the Greeks, especially through the cities they had founded on the coast, which carried on some trade with the semi- civilised interior; but, except for the court, neither Greek language nor Greek culture had penetrated into the wild country. The kings had, indeed, long since made out for themselves a Greek pedigree, and had courted Greek literary men. If Simonides had basked in the courts of Thessaly, Euripides had produced plays for the Macedonian, though it is very likely that the Macedonian nobles who came to hear the Bacchcs at court understood it no better than did the Parthian lords who saw the head of Crassus brought in to play its ghastly part in the same immortal drama. But how little hold Greek ever took upon the people is manifest from the fact that we know not of a single Macedonian author, unless we count the royal Ptolemies, some of whom dabbled in literature.
The materials which the genius of Alexander found to his hand were quite distinct the military qualities of the Macedonians and the culture of the Greeks; and both were absolutely necessary for his purpose. Moreover, both remained clear and dis- tinct elements in every kingdom which was formed out of his vast empire. If it were only for this reason, it is desirable to lay firm hold of the general features of both these nations before we consider the Egypt and the Syria which they transformed, or failed to transform, from oriental into Hellenistic states. Remember I must take broad views in this sketch, and must speak of Greece as one conglomerate, though as you all know, it was made up of little separate cities, each with its own small territory and its independence, like the little states which crowded the map of Germany when we were young, and still more like the little city- republics which crowded the map of Italy in mediaeval times. And so I must talk of Macedonia as one thing, though it never was a stricter unity in its older history than the unity of Germany now is, and though it doubtless con- tained with its Agrianes, Paeonians, Epirots, etc., a greater variance than there is between Bavarians and Saxons in the German empire. But, as I may presume that you know all this about Greece, I will confine myself chiefly to Macedonia.
When Macedonia emerged from its obscurity owing to the genius of the famous Philip, it had long been known and despised by the Greeks, as the home of people who did not inhabit cities. If you go now and visit Macedonia, you will see at once the force of this contrast. The Greek loved the sea-side, the neighbourhood of many men, the lounge and the talk in the market-place. His amusements were processions, feasts, ceremonies, athletics, plays. He was essentially no sportsman, and he was only a soldier from the compulsion of defending his home, or of making money abroad. There is little of what we call chivalry among the Greeks, if we except the earlier, or rather the ideal, Spartans. A Demosthenes says with very ill-advised contempt that no decent slave could be procured from that country. He thought this a scathing remark ; we might interpret it as a compliment. The retort is obvious that very fine masters came from it, as the Greeks learned to their cost.
Now, in contrast, the Macedonians were rude and hardy, mountaineers in the strict sense of the word, living among forests and glens, loving to pursue the bear and the wolf through pathless wilds, or to spear the boar in hand-to-hand conflict. And, as you might expect in such a country, there were feudal lords, who held a sort of hereditary sovereignty over certain districts, and who had the traditions and the dignity of royal pretensions, though these were all swallowed up in the splendour of their suzerain, the king of Macedonia.
Yet the fact is not without its importance. These nobles Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Craterus took service under Alexander just as the German hereditary princes now serve under the Prussian headship. In both cases we find that this kind of officer gives a peculiar character to the army, and that such leaders are obeyed far better, and are more efficient, than men promoted from the ranks. Sec- ondly, when Alexander died, and these men set up as independent sovereigns, they did so with the habits of ruling, and with the dignity only attained by generations of nobility.
Thus there is a marked contrast between Alex- ander and his generals with what appears at first sight a close parallel. Napoleon was an upstart, and his generals were upstarts who failed as kings. Alexander was a hereditary king, and his generals hereditary princes and nobles, who consequently succeeded in founding new royal houses. The ablest of the staff, Eumenes, of Kardia, who was Alexander's intimate secretary, failed in establish- ing a kingdom for himself, not for want of bravery, not for want of ability as a general, but because the Macedonians would not be led by an upstart Greek so completely had the tables turned upon the intellec- tual leaders of the world. This peculiar character of the Macedonian aristocracy is, I think, of the last importance in understanding the career of the Macedonians as a conquering race.
I shall not go into the politics of Philip, which you can all study in any ordinary Greek history, but will say a word about his military idea, the famous phalanx. The intention of it is evident. He wished to make an inferior infantry that is, one of less training and of inferior arms equal to the full-armed Greeks by massing it into a column, a moving square, in which five rows of lance-points formed an impenetrable barrier to assailants, and which, if it advanced, must walk through any oppo- sition made in loose order. This object was really effected, and so thoroughly that even the Roman infantry could not resist its advance, and Paullus iEmilius, the conqueror of Macedonia at the battle of Pydna, told his friend Polybius he had never seen anything so terrible. But, of course, the advancing of the vast and solid column was attended with great difficulties. Any interruption in the ground made an obstacle not to be overcome without break- ing the formation, and so an advance on broken ground was fatal to the phalanx. It seems also to have been so constructed that facing about to meet an attack from the flank or rear was never practically possible. Let me also remind you that the modern square with which we fight large bodies of savages has that terrible offensive weapon, the rifle, while the Macedonian phalanx could not use even the slings and darts of ancient warfare.
The fact therefore remains that in its early days the phalanx was not of much real importance. Philip may have won one great battle with it; Alex- ander never did; it was only in the great wars of his successors, when both sides used the phalanx, that the direct shock of the opposing infantry was decided by the steadier troops holding together, while the weaker melted away before the actual conflict, as is now usually the case if two hostile lines charge with the bayonet.
I revert now to the statement, which may have surprised some of you, that Alexander never won a battle with the Macedonian phalanx. This is quite certain. While a mere boy, he had decided his father's great battle of Chaeronea against the Thebans and Athenians by a charge of cavalry ; and all through his life he pursued the same tactics. He (like Crom- well) won his battles by charges of cavalry, using the phalanx merely as his defensive arm, which occupied and threatened the enemy while the decisive work was done on his right wing. It appears to me that he even regarded the phalanx as a clumsy and unman- ageable arm, for at the moment of his death he was breaking it up into smaller and lighter formations. That wonderful general, whose great secret lay in the promptness and decision of his operations, naturally chose the handiest order for rapid advance, and the most intelligent co-operation, and as he found the phalanx unsuitable, so he despised the use of both elephants and scythed chariots, which his oriental enemies employed, as weapons not trustworthy and likely to confuse a sound and rational plan of battle. On the other hand, he perfected his heavy cavalry and his footguards in every practical way. The footguards were very lightly armed, and intended to support the cavalry as promptly as possible. The cavalry was made the special service for his friends and his nobles, essen- tially the household cavalry, and specially trained to riding and to the use of the spear. For as the use of stirrups was still unknown, fighting on horse- back was a very different thing from what it is nowa- days, and the use of the sword must have been comparatively small, when rising in the saddle, nay the saddle itself, was unknown.
The other point in which Alexander made im- provements in the art of war, which have not been appreciated, was that of artillery. Philip had already used all the newer mechanical discoveries for siege trains and battering purposes, but Alexan- der applied them to field artillery, which he brought to such perfection that his army could carry with it engines which threw stones and darts three hundred yards. Imagine what an advantage this gave him. He frequently cleared a narrow pass or the opposite side of a river of the enemy by the mere fire of his catapults, and then crossed at leisure.
I think it worth giving you these details, because it is a vague thing, though a perfectly true thing, to say that it was by his genius that Alexander con- quered the eastern world. Genius always works with the means at its disposal, or rather disposes of the ordinary means in such a way as to produce exceptional results. Thus Alexander found ready the phalanx, the siege trains, and the military aris- tocracy which his father had employed in an active and successful reign. He enlarged their use, or modified them to suit greater and nobler plans.
His army, as you know, was a small one. To carry a vast number of men into Asia in a rapid campaign, through hostile country, would be im- possible; so that he probably never had an effective force of more than thirty thousand under his com- mand. I except of course sieges, like that of Tyre, when he formed a settled camp and delayed for months, and his progress in ships down the Indus. But even with thirty thousand men you will wonder how he could undertake to attack a new and strange country, and penetrate far beyond the knowledge of any Macedonians and Greeks, among nations of strange languages and customs, unless he were a wandering knight-errant in search of romantic ad- ventures. This, indeed, is the very view of him taken by the romances on his life composed at Alexandria, which are not unlike the Arabian Nights composed at Cairo, the mediaeval successor to Alex- andria, in their imagination. But the real Alexander was no such person, and the key to his action is given in a curious passage of Josephus. 1 I need hardly tell you that when his great expedition was successful, he rapidly established Greek as the lingua franca of the whole empire, and this it was which gave the chief bond of union to the many countries of old civilisation, which had hitherto been isolated.
This unity of culture is the remarkable thing in the history of the world. Before Alexander, Persia, India, Egypt, and Italy were all separately following out their own ideas. After Alexander, all conform to a common standard, and desire to be regarded as members of a common civilisation. St. Paul required no gift of tongues to preach to the civilised world. He wrote in Greek to Jews, Galatians, Mace- donians, and Romans; and far beyond their limits Greek would carry the traveller from Gades to Ceylon. This was the direct result of Alexander's conquests. It will be our duty in the next two lectures to follow out the effects of this Hellenizing of the world in its two most striking examples the kingdoms of Alex- andria and of Antioch, which better describe them than Egypt and Syria.
But what was the result upon Macedonia and Greece, the original nucleus of all this vast domin- ion ? It is remarkable that neither ever lost its importance in the great new complex of nations. However splendid and important Babylon or Alex- andria might be, Macedonia was the true home of the kings, it gave its title to the military nobility of Syria and Egypt, and none of the early Successors thought he had succeeded to the empire, if he had not recovered the ancient seat of the monarchy and laid his bones in the royal sepulchre at y£gae. The Regent for the heirs of Alexander was naturally sup- posed to live there; the great majority of Alexan- der's house, his mother, his wife and child, resided there. There, too, they were all successively mur- dered, to make way for the house of Antipater, whom the great king himself had intrusted with Macedonia, and whose son Casander established himself over the murdered remains of all his master's house. After Casander's death his contemptible sons either died or were murdered to make way for Demetrius the Besieger, of whom Plutarch has left so interesting a life, the son of Antigonus, who was the fellow- commander and rival of Antipater. This Demetrius was married to Casander's sister, so that their son Antigonus Gonatas, who may be regarded as the real founder of the new and famous line of Macedonian kings which ended with the Roman conquest, was the offspring of two of Alexander's most eminent generals both of them great Macedonian nobles, with hereditary rights, and thus commanding the respect of the warlike mountaineers not only by their prowess, but by their social position. This is the real secret of the attachment and devotion of the Macedonians to their kings. I will consider as briefly as possible the general characteristics of this famous line, and point out to you their real importance in modifying the world's history.
The first king, Antigonus of Macedon, grandson of Alexander's general of the same name, had a long and checkered struggle for his kingdom. He was at first foiled by the famous Pyrrhus, his superior in arms; by old Lysimachus, another companion of Alexander; lastly by the terrible fury of the Celts or Galatians, whose invasion swept all Macedonia, got rid of his rivals for him, and allowed him to begin again the task of making for himself a kingdom.
This invasion of the Celts is one of the turning-points in Greek history. It took place in 278 B. C, when the original companions of Alexander were all gone from the scene through age if not through vio- lence, and when the world was longing for rest after forty years of confusion. All the knight-errants of the world were now passing away, and six years more saw the end of Pyrrhus, who was in Italy when this great barbarian invasion took place. Macedonia and Greece were weary of wars and rumours of wars, and were glad to acquiesce in the claims of the prudent, philosophical, high-principled Antigonus. From this time to the year 168 B. C., when the battle of Pydna and the capture of King Perseus made an end of the kingdom of Macedonia, the Antigonids, as they were called, were the ruling house, and suc- ceeded one another on strictly hereditary principles. In round numbers, the first king reigned forty years; his son, ten; his cousin, Antigonus Doson, nearly ten as guardian to the infant heir; then this new Philip, the opponent of the Romans, for over forty years; and his son Perseus, for about ten; that is to say, two long reigns of about forty years, and three short ones of about ten, made up the whole period of the Antigonids during which they remained great figures in the Hellenistic world. Of course, I cannot go into the details of these reigns, but there are certain general features which you can easily carry away, and which will give you an interest in learning more about them.
In the first place, it was not only the first An- tigonus (Gonatas) who was obliged to conquer his kingdom. His son, Demetrius II, had to do so; and again his nephew, Antigonus Doson, so cele- brated for his victory at Sellasia, and his conquest of Sparta with the help of the Achaean League. It was not till Philip V that these kings succeeded peaceably, and with a general consent on the part of Greece and their northern dependents. And strange to say, it was not until the last two kings, who succeeded peaceably, that we perceive a degra- dation in their character. The first three, who came to a stormy heritage, like Philip and Alexander before them, and fought their way to recognition, were all strong, able, and righteous men ; the last two, Philip and Perseus, who had their kingdom ready for them, were very inferior the former cruel, sen- sual, and treacherous; the latter mean and stingy to an extent which caused his ruin.
But what, you will ask, were the conflicts which the three kings had to fight for their kingdom ? For the Macedonians were loyal to the house, and were wont to be governed by kings. Well, Macedonia proper was so; the nation owed the first Antigonus a great debt for his struggles against the Gauls, and there is no doubt that it accepted him as the lawful sovran. But the kingdom included far more than that. It included a number of semi- barbarous tribes reaching into the modern Dalmatia and Montenegro, as well as into Bulgaria, in an ill- defined way; and these tribes were easily excited to follow some pretender, as soon as the death of the king left the throne vacant and the control was for a moment relaxed. Moreover, there was a constant tendency in the northern barbarians about the Danube to invade the Hellenic peninsula, and it was the greatest service done by Macedonia to the world, after Alexander, that it formed a strong barrier against these invasions, and protected the culture and refinement of Greece from perishing at the hand of savages.
There are periods in the world's history when a single man has done this service. The great Cyrus spent most of his life, and died at last, in defending his northern frontier against the Turanian hordes which would have inundated civilised Asia centuries sooner but for the strong barrier made by the Persian king and his organisation. The same kind of service was done by the Antigonids. There were Illyrians and Dardanians, and many other less-known tribes, which at this time seem to have increased in numbers and in restlessness, and were ready to migrate in thousands, like the Celts, and seek new homes in the warmer and more fruitful south. But they were barbarians, pure and simple, who would not have understood or respected the laws, the religion, the art, or the politeness of the Greeks. Had these latter been destroyed, all the finer elements of Roman culture must have been lost, for these came from Greece during and after this very period; and so the world would have been permanently poorer and worse, but for the efficient frontier duty done by the Antigonids in Macedonia.
But if you imagine that they received thanks or gratitude from the Greeks, you are greatly mistaken. For the Greeks of that day were in the peculiar posi- tion of being sentimentally and artistically superior, while they were materially and, I will add, politically inferior to their neighbours. The Greeks had done wonderful things as a complex of small states, either republican or aristocratic, but their mutual jealousies and wars had worn them out, and the young and vigorous power of Macedonia under its brilliant kings had completely overshadowed them. Their military power was quite fallen into the second rank, and was a mere appendage to the phalanx and heavy cavalry of Alexander and his successors. Nevertheless, neither the second Philip nor Alexander had ever ventured to treat them as mere ordinary subjects. They had been left their constitutions and their liberties. All that was required of them was to acknowledge the headship of Macedon, and to furnish men and money when war was declared at a formal congress of which the king was the president. This sort of imperfect conquest, and the permission of separate assem- blies or parliaments with the traditions of former liberty and of long-past importance, often falsified by exaggeration, were to Macedon, as it has been to every power that ever essayed it since, a constant source of weakness. These little states were either, like Sparta and Athens, coerced into obedience, and always ready to assert their old imperial position ; or else they were little democracies, where the needy and the turbulent had the voting power, and were ready to confiscate the property of the rich, or to join any power hostile to Macedon for the sake of plunder or from the love of change. In many industry was decaying, and the population emigrating to new settlements in the East ; and there was that silly feeling which has not yet died out of the world, that the existing government is to blame for all misfortunes, and that any change of government or of laws may bring with it new times and a recovery of prosperity. Above all, where there were Macedonian garrisons which occasionally interfered with the license of the democracies, and would not allow lawlessness and plunder, there was a bitter feeling that all liberty was gone, and that the Greeks, once free, were now the slaves of Macedonian masters. And in many senses this was really true. The question, however, remains: Would the Greeks have been as happy, and in a deeper sense as free, if they had been allowed to pass every mad resolution which assemblies of needy and reckless persons chose to adopt ?
As soon as any popular assembly loses its dignity, and votes either from fear of threats or from hope of bribes, its real life is gone, and the sooner it is abolished the better. Now, this was the case even with the assembly of Athens, which, we may assume, was the most respectable in Greece. The lives of Phocion and of Demetrius by Plutarch prove it plainly enough. Flattery of foreign tyrants, supplications for foreign subsidies, unjust condemnations of their own citizens, confiscations of property these are the leading features of the later assemblies of Greece, with very few exceptions. And the main exception that of the Achaean League in its good days was distinctly that of a constitution where the propertied classes had all the power. They met in various cities, but the league voted by cities, and so a few men of wealth and public spirit coming from remote towns could counterbalance the whole populace of the town where the meeting was held. This league and other inferior leagues or confederations through Greece, were, however, always a thorn in the side of Macedon, and were dealt with by diplomacy rather than by force.
As regards the isolated states, there were two ways of controlling them possible, and each was adopted in various cases. If the democracy lasted, it must be kept in control by a Macedonian garrison, which interfered when the peace of the citizens or the property of the rich was in danger, and which also prevented the populace from calling in some foreign potentate, and making their city a starting- point for a foreign war against Macedon. It is as if nowadays home-rule were granted to Ireland, and the English found it necessary to keep a garrison in Dublin, both to overawe the violence of the popu- lace, and to prevent the Irish Parliament making a treaty with some hostile power, and inviting it to occupy Irish harbours. The other expedient was to encourage some ambitious man to seize the supreme power in his city, and make himself what the Greeks called a "tyrant," that is, an irresponsible or absolute ruler, but trusting to Macedon for support, and hence governing his city in that interest.
You must not be misled by the violent effusions of many eminent historians, from Herodotus to Free- man, to imagine that all these tyrants were tyrants in the modern sense villains who violated every right and every sacred feeling to gratify their passions; liv- ing, moreover, in constant terror and suspicion, which vented itself in murders and banishments. Such tyrants there were at all times, and not infrequently at this time also. But the majority, I firmly be- lieve, were able and sincere men, persuaded not only by the world's history, as they saw it, but by the arguments of all the Greek philosophers, that the masses were unfit to rule, and that enlightened monarchy was the proper and reasonable form of government. These men did a great deal for art and culture at all periods of Greek history; they insisted upon internal peace, and if they purchased this at the cost of forbidding public discussions or the right of public meetings to protest against their government, they certainly got some return for their bargain. It was the habit of the Macedonian kings to encourage these ambitious men, and yet so thor- oughly was the taste for talking and voting engrained in the people, that, however virtuous or just such men might be, it was thought an act of religious patriot- ism to murder them nay, if possible, to torture them as a punishment for their usurpation.
You can feel, then, the great difficulties connected with the government of Greece by Macedonia, seeing that it was an imperfect conquest, and that the ideas of the world were strongly in favour of preserving, in appearance at least, the liberties of Greece. It was bad enough to be obliged to reconquer again and again the northern barbarians; it was far worse to have to deal with a number of small, jealous, turbulent states, which were always passing resolu- tions against Macedon, always calling in her great rival Egypt, always bringing to mind the old days, when Macedonia was obscure and despised, while Greece played the leading part in the world. It was this social and intellectual inferiority which made Philip and Alexander rather affect to be Greeks them- selves, and assume a Greek genealogy, education, and manners, than subdue Greece as they were able to do, and reduce it to a dependent province. And this weakness proved the ultimate ruin of the kingdom.
The day came when Rome began to meddle with the affairs of the East; or rather when first the out- rages of Illyrian pirates upon Roman ships, and then the interference of Philip V of Macedon in the second Punic war, made some such policy necessary. No sooner did the Greeks perceive this than they saw a splendid opportunity of working Rome against Macedon.
By a curious coincidence, this new and still more powerful neighbour had the same kind of position in civilisation as the kingdom of Philip and Alexander a great military power with a culture quite inferior to the Greeks, and most anxious to adopt it. Hence the petty Greek states were at first treated by Rome with extravagant courtesy. To be allowed to com- pete at the public Greek games, or to be initiated in Greek mysteries, was thought a high honour, and to write or speak in Greek a distinction, at Rome. All the tall talk about ancient liberties, about the virtue of slaying tyrants, about the equality of all free citizens, was paraded for the Romans and they undertook the task, which every Successor of Alex- ander had put forward in turn as a political watch- word, of liberating Greece.
And unfortunately this coincided with the reign in Macedon of Philip V a man in whom military talents and agreeable manners were combined with unbridled passions and political incapacity.
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While he, who had succeeded to his kingdom as the darling of all Greece, was alienating his friends by private outrages and public deceit, the Romans were making capital out of their unselfish policy of liberating without annexing, and of respecting the ancient dignity of the Greeks. The people of Pergamum even invented for the Romans a Greek genealogy, and the story of Aeneas starting from the ruins of Troy for Italy became an article of history at Rome, owing to which the Romans began to write letters in Greek from their senate; they began to shower benefits upon their ancestral home, Ilion; it was a claim to support from Rome to state that your ancestors were among those who had not taken part with the Greeks in the Trojan war, or had even joined the Trojans. So we too have seen ancient history paraded, or rather dressed up, by way of showing that present legislation should direct itself to the atonement of hypothetical crimes committed against the mythical ancestors of imaginary descen- dants; in fact, the substitution of maudlin and false sentimentality for justice and common-sense.
The conflict ended, as you know, in two great wars the first against Philip V, closing with the battle of Cvnoscephalae ( 108), the second with the war against Perseus, and with Pyd na (168). The first was hailed by the Greeks as a great victory, and the proclamation of Flamininus at Corinth that all the Greeks under Macedon should now be free and independent caused transports of delight. Home- rule was established in every little Greek city, and a reign of peace and prosperity was confidently expected.
How is it, then, that within thirty years the defeat of Perseus at Pydna and the final conquest of Macedon were regarded by these same Greeks not as a more complete victory, but as a crushing defeat and a terrible calamity?
The history of this change is one of the most instructive in ancient history, especially as we are face to face with similar problems all over Europe in our own day. What the Greeks were always longing for, ever since they fell under Macedonian sway, was home-rule, and not merely home-rule for all Greece, but separate home-rule for each little subdivision of it. This is what the Romans gave them; and what resulted was that the populace in each town, where there was poverty, began to plunder the property of the rich; or else the leagues of cities, such as the Achaean and ^Etolian, began to make conquests and oppress their neighbours; and finally the disorders of this home-rule became such that every person of property, and almost every person of sense, went to Rome to entreat the great republic to interfere. It was represented to the Romans that, if they had already interfered with Macedonia and given the Greeks their liberty, they were bound at the same time not to permit civil war or confiscation.
The Romans did what they could by way of peaceful intervention. They sent constant commissions and gave decisions in these quarrels; they advised, they warned, they threatened; last of all they actually threatened that they would refrain from all control, which was felt to be the worst danger of all.
But during these weary negotiations the party at Rome which had posed as Philhellenes, and carried out the sentimental civilities to the Greeks, like Flamininus, began to lose ground, and a very different party arose who were for no more nonsense, who thought all this talk of liberty mere fooling, and who were determined on stopping these interminable negotiations with a strong hand. They intended to abolish all this local and separate home-rule, and establish a strict union of Greece with Rome, or rather under Rome. They found strong allies in the scanty richer classes throughout Greece, many of whom were dissolute and idle, seeking to ingratiate themselves at Rome by flattery and complaisance, and by vilifying their own people with the grossest want of patriotism. But there were also the serious people who wanted peace and security, and they, much as they regretted the loss of old traditions, were determined that there was no safety possible except in close union with Rome.
The lower classes, on the other hand, the rabble, the poor, the socialists, began to look on Rome as the chief danger to their independence and the chief obstacle in letting them carry out their views. They found that if Macedon had chastised them with whips, Rome was likely to chastise them with scorpions. So when they saw a new straining of the relations between Rome and Macedon, and knew that the latter had long been preparing for a new conflict, all their hopes turned to King Perseus, whom they encouraged with their sympathy, while they were flattering and paying court in words to the Romans. These latter were not blind to the real sentiments of Greece, and during the long course and doubtful issue of the last Macedonian war must have seen plainly in the conduct of their Greek auxiliaries that they had to deal with faithless allies. All they had done in the way of liberation, of senti- mental politeness, of remission of taxes, had fallen upon ungrateful soil. And this ingratitude was so far justified in that there was a party at Rome which fomented Greek quarrels, and triumphed in the tur- moil and confusion of Greek politics. Still more, it lay in the sentimental complaint that the Romans were a cold, unsympathetic, stupid race, vastly inferior, socially, to the Greeks, who were ever being insulted, misunderstood, despised, and patronised by them. If you knew how powerful a factor this social question has been in the modern difficulties of Ireland with England, you would attach great weight to this remark. The result was that after the battle of Pydna, when endless compromising correspondence were seized among King Perseus' papers, the Romans made a searching and remorse- less inquisition into the Macedonian sympathies of each city, and deported to Italy as captives all the so-called patriot party from many cities. The case of the one thousand Achaeans is the best known, and perhaps the least excusable, as we hear that there was no definite evidence against them; 1 but in spite of all that Polybius, who was one of them, can say, there can be no doubt that it was the only way of pacifying and quieting Greece. But it was done at a terrible expense, with a great deal of hardship and injustice, and to the profit of many worthless Romanizers who now got the reward of their infamous and treacherous truckling to their masters. It is, of course, these wretched creatures who are pilloried for us by the deported home- rule party, and we are told to believe that was the sort of person who sold for money and for blood the liberties of his country. Fortunately we have the evidence of Polybius him- self, a leading member of the home-rule party, who struggled as long as he could for the independence of Achaea. But after his long captivity, and a great intimacy with the Romans and the politics of the world outside the petty cantons of Greece, he gives it as his deliberate opinion that home-rule was impracticable, and that the union with Rome was the only reasonable solution for the difficulties of civil war, anarchy, confusion, and confiscation which were the miserable heritage left to decaying Greece by her past history.
The drama ended by a hopeless and bloody insurrection, conducted with despair and cruelty, in which the so-called patriots behaved much as the Irish patriots did in 1798, and made their war with Rome the excuse for executing, torturing, and plundering their political opponents. The victory at Corinth settled forever the question of home-rule, and put the country under the control of the Roman governor and of the propertied classes, who thus won their fatal victory in this melancholy struggle. From this time the political history of Greece closes for many centuries.
I have been obliged to omit in this lecture all mention of the Greek cities of Asia Minor and the islands, which played a very important part in the history of the day. But these communities are rather associated with the kingdoms of Syria and Egypt, which exercised or claimed sovereignty over them, than with Macedon, and their fortunes were not settled in connection with Greece so much as in connection with Asia Minor, if we except Rhodes, which was ruined commercially for its sympathy with Macedon in the final great war. The great difference between Asiatic and European Greek cities was this, that the former had long learned to be content with local self-government and had given up all claim to political independence or to imperial rights. Hence they long retained the substance, which their European brethren lost by grasping at the shadow, of independence.
But what was the final settlement of Macedon? The conflict was here not one of politics, but of military powers, one of which had ruled, and the other was going to rule, the world. The triumph of Rome was no half-victory, and the conquered power was indeed, to use a notorious modern expres- sion, saignee d, blanc. Every person of importance, all the richer classes, all the officials, the whole court all were carried captives to Italy with their king. Nothing was left in the country but what some extreme patriots would like to see left in Ireland the poor and the ignorant. But by way of parody on this wholesale slavery the country was broken up into four sections, and in each of them was estab- lished what was called in the shibboleth of that day a free constitution, a republic, where each man could talk and vote in a parliament, and pass resolutions binding the minority. Polybius, a sensible man, wonders that the people were not content with this precious boon, more especially as they now paid only one-half the taxes they had formerly paid to their kings. The fact is that they were put under the most intolerable restrictions. The four sections were forbidden all intercourse, connubial, commer- cial, or otherwise, while Roman traders passed freely all through the land. Old connections and friend- ships were dislocated, things were made criminal which had once been lawful, the development of industry was rendered impossible, and the march of civilisation in the country rudely checked. All the men of family and culture had been removed; and what did the wretched Macedonians get in return for all this? A so-called free constitution; that is, the substitution of little parochial parliaments for the rule of the royal house which had brought Macedon all its splendour and to which the nation were loyally and deeply attached! Need we wonder that they broke out time after time into bloody insurrections, that every impostor who claimed royal blood became a popular pretender, and that after several serious struggles the Romans found their experiment in constitution-making so egregious a failure that they were obliged to reduce the whole country to a prov- ince ruled directly by a military governor? The comedy of it is that they blamed the wretched Mace- donians for not appreciating liberty, instead of themselves for such folly as to imagine that the name of a republic can outweigh the effect of massacres and deportations, and the violation of every noble tradition.
Thus the history of that great and dominant people ends in tears and in blood, and ends forever. While Greece never lost the intellectual superiority which made the very slaves of her race the teachers and advisers of the world, and while her traditions have been great enough to cause a national reju- venescence, Macedonia as a nation disappears from history. It was the battlefield for the Romans, when in their great civil war they met at Philippi; it was the home of a Christian church of St. Paul's foundation, in whose time Philippi and Thessalonica appear as flourishing Greek towns; but Macedonia as such was blotted out from the catalogue of nations. It seems to me also that with Macedonian rule there disappeared from Hellenism a valuable type, which has figured largely in modern civilisation I mean the type of the sporting country gentleman, who despises the restraints of city life and lives a life of physical energy in the pure air of untutored nature. How deeply this feeling was engrained in Macedonian life appears from the curious absence of any important capital of the Antigonid dynasty. While Egypt and Syria were all centred in the great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, we never hear of any Macedonian city important enough to exercise any influence. Pella and J£g& were always, so far as we know, insignificant. The reason for this peculiarity I consider to be the habits of the Mace- donian nobility and gentry, who would not settle in a city, and who would not take to commerce or town amusements like the Greeks. But these latter made town life the almost universal type of Hellenism, much to its ultimate loss and decay. The famous seventh oration of Dion Chrysostom, which I have treated very fully in another work, shows how an acute and sympathetic observer regretted this narrowing of later Greek life.
There have been cases where a great body of exiles have produced an effect in their new home. Such, for example, was the powerful influence on civilisation exercised by the French Huguenot refugees upon England and Ireland, when they left their homes upon the revocation of the edict of Nantes. The whole of the nobility that great dominant nobility of Macedon was deported and settled in Roman or Italian towns or villages. We should have expected that some distinguished Italian would have sprung from this new noble blood introduced into the country. And yet the whole Macedonian importation disappears abso- lutely, unless you recall the fact that the son of the captive king earned a poor livelihood as a petty clerk in a country town. Truly Rome was a great boa-constrictor, which not only enveloped, but crushed a large part of the culture of the world.
Lecture III.
EGYPT
We approach today a subject not less in magnitude and importance than the last, but certainly less complicated. The history of Egypt as a Hellenistic kingdom is a very consistent and uniform history, for though the Ptolemies were engaged in many foreign wars and in all the complicated diplomacies of the world, the internal development and the problems of government in Egypt were very clear and definite. But as I was obliged in the last lecture to deal chiefly with politics, so I will endeavour to bring out social and intellectual life in the present discourse.
Egypt, as you know, was seized as his lawful conquest by Ptolemy, son of Lagus, a native Macedonian prince and personal intimate of Alexander, who had fought all through the great campaigns, and in later years wrote the best account of Alexander's life, known to us unfortunately only through the citations of Arrian. This Ptolemy was a very clear-headed man, who saw from the beginning, what most of the other generals did not see, that to keep together Alexander's whole empire was impossible, and that, when it was broken up into separate kingdoms, Egypt was the richest province and the most easily defended.
I need hardly remind you that it is surrounded by deserts, and that it cannot be attacked except through these deserts, or with great difficulty by sea, for the constant north wind and the shallows around the Delta made ancient navigation there a thing of the utmost peril. Accordingly a_good river fleet and good defences upon the outer mouths of the Nile, the Canopic and Pelusiac, make it impregnable. As you also know, the fertility of Egypt is enormous ; though its area is only about two-thirds that of Ireland, it was able to support perhaps seven mil- lions of people, and, moreover, to produce corn enough for great exports. It was said that to bring up a child to maturity in Egypt cost about three and one-half dollars of your money a state of things which I remember in Ireland, when it cost no more to bring up a child to full size on potatoes.
The further source of wealth which Egypt then commanded was the sea route from India by the Red Sea, which was the highway for all the rarities and wonders of the East lately revealed to European ambition and European luxury.
The mart for all these things was Alexandria, the foundation of Alexander which has perhaps brought him the greatest fame, though it consisted in little more than bringing the old Greek mart of Naucratis down its arm of the river to the sea. The same king founded seventeen Alexandrias, from Asia Minor as far as the Punjaub. The present Candahar (Iskender, Al-Iskender, etc.) is another still remaining. But however good the insight of Alexander in the foundation, it was the opening up of eastern traffic and the enlightened rule of Ptolemy which made it the principal city of the world. The population consisted from the beginning of (1) Egyptians, the old inhabitants of the village Rakotis, embraced in the new site. These were the lowest and poorest parts of the population. (2) Jews, whose sudden and hitherto mysterious alliance with Alexander I have explained to you already (p. 38), and who followed his invitation in crowds to the new foundation, where he settled them under their own magistrates, and with certain rights and privileges which were afterward supposed to amount to full civic rights, though they did not imply so much. The other races were the really dominant, viz., (3) the Macedonians, who continued at this new centre to form a military aristocracy about the court which proclaimed formally any new king as the approved choice of the citizen-soldiers of Macedonia. In the case of weak or infant kings, they assumed the power for which we can show parallels in those military bodies called praetorian guards, or mamelukes, or janissaries, at courts otherwise despotic, over all the other subjects. (4) Lastly come the Greeks, in many respects the most important, for they held high posts in the army, where they were well-tried and hereditary mercenaries; about the court, where they often displaced in the civil service the prouder Macedonians; in trade, where they contended with the Jews; and lastly, in the museum and university, where they had it all their own way.
This conglomerate of nations, gathered into a great capital full of refinement and luxury, of splen- dour in shows and military pageants, of great disso- luteness side by side with the most serious scientific study soon became a sort of world of its own, and the Alexandrians were known through Hellenistic history as "a peculiar people, zealous of bad works." Yet, in spite of its cruel mob, in spite of its wild insurrections and massacres, which often remind one of the Paris mob of the revolutions, think what we owe to Alexandria! First of all, the Greek version of the Old Testament. Secondly, the development of pure mathematics and of mechanics, which led the way for the great men of Europe, Descartes, Pascal, and Leibnitz, when they set out upon that great voyage of discovery in science which has revo- lutionised modern life, and of which the immortal Euclid is still the first great name. 1 Thirdly, that first great essay in really religious philosophy which, under the name of Neo-Platonism, passed to the Mystics of the Middle Ages and has been the parent of the deepest and purest elements in all our modern religions, humanly considered.
You will wonder that I have not yet mentioned literature. The fact is that the influence of Alexan- dria was here of a very peculiar kind: indirectly, enormous and permanent ; directly, you might think it an epoch of decadence, but for the idylls of Theocritus.
It is curious, but not strange, that from a city life, in the middle of sand hills, between a great lagoon and a tideless sea, should spring the only poetry in all Greek literature which makes the delights of rural life the bleating of lambs, the whispering of the stream, "the moan of doves in immemorial elms, and murmuring of innumerable bees" a blessed recrea- tion for the cultivated and weary townsman. This reaction from a highly artificial city life is noticeable in other societies, and there was no extravagance of the Italian Renaissance, when pedants posed as shepherds and imitated the supposed innocence of the artless swain, which had not its prototype in the University of Alexandria. You have the Arcadia of Sannazaro, concerning which I have spoken at large in my Rambles and Studies; you have such poems as Milton's Lycidas, where his college tutor appears as old Damcetas, a rustic; in fact, you have all the pastoral poetry of France and Germany, all the art of Watteau and his school down to the Trianon of Marie Antoinette a thousand other develop- ments of artificial innocence are derived from Alexandria.
The second great inheritance left by Alexandria (to which I shall return) was the love-story I mean that kind which forms the backbone of all our modern novels. The notion came in from the East, and is first mentioned in the fragments of Chares of Mytilene, a companion of Alexander in the East.
So you see the world is richer by this now gigantic branch of literature on account of Alexandria, and though it is more than probable that some other society, some modern society, would have thought of it, I beg to remind you that the Greeks a great literary nation, who were just as familiar with fall- ing in love as we are never thought of it in any of their tragedies or histories, till it was produced by Callimachus. I will not detain you here with the indirect effects of Alexandria's work on the Roman poets.
These great literary and scientific results were achieved by the first and second Ptolemies in found- ing what may fairly be called the University of Alexandria, with its college of fellows (the Museum), its botanical and zoological gardens, and its great library. The Museum gave it that precious charac- ter as a home for leisure and research, as well as ultimately a teaching power, which we possess in Oxford and Cambridge, and which has been lost or forgotten in those new foundations of mere examining bodies falsely called universities. But unfortunately the Museum was far too strictly under royal patronage, and suffered by it. The republican character of the private corporations called the schools, or academies, at Athens was far more stable and independent. The Museum and library were part of the royal quarter of the city, close to the palaces built by successive Ptolemies for they were in this like modern kings, who will not be content with the palaces of predecessors and so active was the trade in books copied by slaves from the originals in the Museum, and sold over the world, that a conflagration among the ships in the harbour during Julius Caesar's campaign spread to the stores on the shore and destroyed so many books that the accident was by and by magnified into the destruction of the great library itself.
The rest of the city was designed in a style rather handsome than picturesque, its figure being determined by two great thoroughfares at right angles, whose intersection was the acknowledged centre, and at whose extremities were the four principal gates. The other new features in the city, which was a model to a hundred others, were its systematic lighting of the streets, and its colonnades.
But you will be impatient to know what I have to say about the rest of Egypt and the Ptolemaic rule there, and how the old culture of Egypt harmonised with all this mushroom splendour of Alexandria. The fact is that the first and second Ptolemies thought very little about Egypt, except as a source of revenue, and as a nation to be kept quiet while it fed the glory of the Graeco-Macedonian rule. Though the first Ptolemy did found Ptolemais in upper Egypt (the modern Meushieh), some eighty miles below Thebes, and though we hear of Greek festivals held there, it is most noteworthy that he did not give the city of Alexandria a Greek constitution, with a senate and an assembly. He knew Hellenic assemblies too well. Still, all the care of these two men was directed, not merely to making their military position secure, but also to making Alexandria the rival of Athens. Now, for military purposes the Egyptians were accounted nearly useless. For several generations back, Greek mercenaries had supplanted the old military caste in Egypt, and all kings of Egypt indigenous, Persian, Macedonian trusted to a supply of paid foreign soldiers, who were as veterans settled with property and privileges, and became a sort of new military caste, hereditary in character. The native Egyptians were mostly disarmed, and were not used as soldiers till a great crisis under the fourth Ptolemy in the year 217 B. C.
As regards literature or science, the Greeks had long laid aside the habit of consulting the wisdom of Egypt and of the East, from which their civilisation had once sprung, and no attempt was made, beyond bringing out the annals of the old kingdom in Greek (by Manetho), to examine and utilise all the deep and occult lore of the priests. We may depend upon it that these priests were not willing to impart it to the upstart Greeks, and the hieroglyphic writing and strange language were almost impenetrable barriers to the few Greeks who attempted to learn them. So the wisdom and the art of Memphis, Thebes, Heliopolis, and all the other splendid old Egyptian cities remained a thing apart and foreign to the Alexandrians; the Egyptians were regarded as a foreign and subject population, only fit to labour and pay taxes, and no systematic attempt was made to Hellenize them.
Such has always been the fate of unhappy Egypt. From the earliest days her kings and governors have been strangers, and her people a beautiful, gentle, laborious people have been so engrained with the instinct of submission that it will require long efforts to reverse this ancient and lamentable education in slavery.
But in the days of the Ptolemies Egypt still possessed her powerful and native priestly caste, and with it a fund of resistance to the Macedonian kings with which they were soon obliged to reckon. Neither the first nor the second Ptolemy has left us many monuments of note ; the second, indeed, one which already shows the beginning of the Egyptian reaction a ruined temple, made wholly of red granite blocks brought seven hundred miles from the first cataract to the Delta, adorned with his name and attributes in thoroughly Egyptian fashion.
But with the reign of the third Ptolemy, a great conqueror, who overran all Asia, begins the long series of Ptolemaic temples, still extant in Egypt, which are distinctly not Greek, but Egyptian.
It is usual to speak of the marriage of Greek and Egyptian civilisation, and of the genius of the Ptolemies in producing this fusion. I confess I can see little of the kind. As to Alexandria, very few things have been done in the way of excavation, and not a single old secular building of the early Ptolemaic age survives; but we may be certain that everything they were proud of in the royal quarter of Alexandria was as purely G'reek as they knew how to build it. No statues of Egyptian gods and hieroglyphic ornaments could find a place in these buildings. On the other hand, go into the country, and examine the great temples which the later Ptolemies (from the third on) built at Esneh, Edfu, Denderah, and Thebes, 1 and you will find them so thoroughly Egyptian that until the hieroglyphics were deciphered, only one man, Letronne, ever suspected that they could be the work of Greek-speaking kings. The figures of the kings, the ornaments, the gods worshipped all is purely Egyptian. The same may be said of the smaller specimens of art gathered from various places into the Cairene Museum. I went to Egypt to satisfy myself upon this point, and to study for myself what the marriage or combination of Greek and Egyptian art might be. It was surprising how scarce such combinations were, though they do exist, especially in grotesque figurines, and probably did exist in furniture and household decorations.
You need not tell me that two separate schools of art can not or will not combine. It may be wrong or ugly to do it, but it can be done and has been done, as, for example, when our seventeenth- century people combined Gothic and classical features in architecture, and made ugly buildings; or when the Sicilians about Palermo combined Gothic building with Saracen ornament, and produced very beautiful results. This kind of thing did not take place in Egypt. The Greek towns were distinct, the Greeks lived with the Egyptians under separate laws, and so their public buildings and their art were distinct. The whole of Egyptian society was settled upon principles totally different from those of Macedonia and Greece, and it was only gradually that ' even the strange features of Egyptian life were interfered with by the kings' decrees. The great manuscript even of the ninth Ptolemy, published by Grenfell and Hunt, 1 gives special direction for suits between natives, between Greeks, and between Greeks and natives. There were native courts and judges, with Egyptian as their language, but the natives were encouraged to come into the Greek courts. What was really fused was Macedonian and Greek, nay even Persian and Greek, among the soldiers' settlements.
And not only did the Macedonians and Greeks not amalgamate with the natives, but gradually the patient fellahs of that day, led by their priests an old and wealthy organisation as strong as the Catholic church in Spain or in Ireland began to resist the oppression exercised upon them by the fourth and fifth Ptolemies, and presently there rose up Mahdis, who promised them deliverance from the strangers and a restoration of their old national monarchy. We know that there were several insurrections, put down with trouble and difficulty, and that the kings were obliged to bribe the national priesthood with presents and privileges to declare publicly that the Ptolemy was the real god and king. For if all the Hellenistic monarchs were inclined to assume the attributes and dignities of divinities, the Ptolemies, above all, ruled in a country where for centuries the kings had been systematically deified. The declarations of the priests, therefore, were really a declaration of policy, though they seemed to be mere politenesses and flatteries.
We have now two famous texts of these decrees, the Stone of San and the Rosetta stone, of which you will find the full texts and translations in my Empire of the Ptolemies.
In the end the monarchy became so completely Egyptian, especially after the ninth Ptolemy (Physcon) had let loose the soldiery upon the insurgent Greeks of Alexandria, that when the Romans came to deal with Egypt they found a strong and stubborn national resistance, based on loyalty to the Ptolemaic dynasty. But it was the Ptolemies who became Egyptian, not the Egyptians who became Hellenistic. Such, then, was the internal policy of this remarkable kingdom.
What, you will desire to know, was the foreign policy which marked the course of this Egyptian history? It is an equally interesting, but a more complicated, subject.
The kingdom of Egypt was one of the three great divisions of Alexander's empire, Macedonia and Syria being the other two. Each of the three was perpetually striving to obtain preponderance partly by aggrandisement or conquest, partly by weakening its opponents through insurrections fomented among those opponents' subjects, and partly by securing the influence of a number of Greek city-states established around the Levant. For these had extended their local independence into something like a little kingdom by confederations, and by their naval and commercial resources. Of these Rhodes and Byzantium were the chief. The position of Egypt between Syria and Macedonia was that of a smaller kingdom, relatively richer, and with a safe and central position, opposed to neighbours who were on land decidedly its military superiors, but were checked by its naval resources and its unlimited power of hiring mercenaries. Thus Egypt always kept the ambition of Macedon in check by sending money, and sometimes ships, to the Peloponnesus and to Athens, and so threatening the coasts. Nay, for a time Egypt held coast cities even in Thrace.
The conflict with Syria was longer and more serious, and was the continuation of a duel which is perhaps the most protracted known in history. Since the dawn of civilisation, when the two great alluvial river basins of the Tigris- Euphrates and Nile rose into wealth and then into culture, the conquest of each was always the great ambition of the other. It is for this reason that the history of Palestine is a world-history. That country was the highroad from one to the other, and whether it was Shishak or Necho who came up from Egypt, or Assurbanipal or Nebuchadnezzar who came from Mesopotamia, the inhabitants of Palestine suffered the fate of being on the great thoroughfare.
In the days of Hellenism, when every king desired to be regarded a member of the civilisation which lay around the ^Egean, the Mesopotamian power moved its capital to Antioch, and so the great old struggle is now called the struggle of Syria and Egypt. In the days of the first Ptolemy the conflict was doubtful. He made conquests in Palestine, and lost them again, and it has been observed that it was as easy to hold Egypt by way of defence, as it was difficult to enlarge it by conquest.
The second Ptolemy was a man of peace and of policy, who did perhaps more than his successors in conciliating the Jews and making them friends of Egypt rather than of Syria. There is little doubt in my mind that it was he who first promoted the translation of the Hebrew and of other Scriptures into Greek, though I do not subscribe to all the fables with which the so-called letter of Aristeas adorns this momentous policy. I will add, by way of digression, that by far the greatest contribution of Alexandrian prose to the great literature of the world is this very translation of the Old Testament, entitled the Septuagint, which has preserved for us a text centuries older than any of the Hebrew copies known to exist/ We have, of course, in our recent discoveries found endless documents written in the Greek current in Egypt. The earliest, which I had the good fortune to publish, are in very sound and grammatical Greek. The rest show a somewhat rapid degeneration, according as the Greek idiom of Plato fell into the hands of uneducated people of hybrid descent.
The third Ptolemy was a great conqueror, who dismembered for a moment the whole empire of Syria, conquered Antioch, held its seaport Seleucia with an Egyptian garrison, and then made a progress into the East second only to that of Alexander. This great triumph of Egyptian arms is not only celebrated in the Canopus inscription (San) already mentioned, but was commemorated on a marble throne at Adule far down on the Red Sea which the monk Cosmas luckily copied, and so the text has reached us.
I found, moreover, in the Petrie papyri fragments of the despatch sent by the king, announcing the surrender of Seleucia and Antioch without a struggle. 1 The king had also built a small temple a purely Egyptian temple at Esneh, on which he had told all his history, and this temple was standing up to the time when Champollion and Rosellini were just deciphering the inscriptions. But they had such infinite materials before them that they did not copy these texts, and since then the whole building was destroyed to make a sugar factory, which now exhales its hideous black smoke from a gaunt chimney into the pure and pellucid atmosphere of the Nile. Such are the accidents by which precious history is lost.
The fourth and fifth Ptolemies were a lamentable instance of decay in a great family. The former, said by our historians to be a mere debauchee, certainly maintained himself after the great victory of Raphia over Syria, and died without seeing his control of the iEgean islands diminished. But the consistent evidence against him is too strong to be set aside. The gradual discontent of the Egyptians broke into insurrection, which endangered the first years of his successor, who was yet a child ; and there is no doubt that the energetic Syrian (Antiochus III) would now have captured Egypt, just as his son Antiochus Epiphanes would have done, but for the interference of the Romans. So the tables were turned, and in the latter days Syria, with its active and mature rulers, was more than a match for the infants who succeeded to the Egyptian throne. However, these royal houses were also connected by marriage. It was an able and worthy princess of the Syrian house, married to the youthful fifth Ptolemy, and mother of his two successors, who brought the famous name of Cleopatra into Egyptian history. Till that time (about 200 B. C.) they had all been Arsinoe or Berenice.
These later kings, though living at Alexandria as their capital, though patronising Greek letters, and posing as Hellenistic kings, had fallen under the influence of the national reaction, and all built great temples wherein they appeared as the darlings of the Egyptian gods, as themselves Egyptian gods, with Pshent and Urceus, with the emblems of life, and surrounded by hawk-headed, dog-headed, eagle-headed monsters, such as were commonly portrayed in Egyptian theology.
With the seventh and ninth Ptolemies the reaction goes even farther. It is with Philometor that we find Jews coming to high official positions and beginning to make themselves felt as politicians; and presently the strong Egyptian policy of Physcon, and consequent flight of the learned men from the Museum, gave Greek influence a shock from which it never recovered. The ninth Ptolemy even employed an Egyptian to govern Cyprus an unheard-of thing in earlier days. When the Romans came to deal with the people of Egypt, they found it a strange and essentially oriental country, which they never could understand or control after the manner of the really Hellenistic kingdoms.
In the first place, they did not conquer Egypt in a campaign as they did Syria and Macedonia, but it fell gradually, and partly by the solicitation or bequest of its own princes, under their sway. There had been old commercial relations of a friendly kind between Rome and Egypt. As far back as the second Ptolemy, and in the first Punic war, there had been embassies from Alexandria to Rome, and vice versa, and important trade relations had been established. It was owing to these that Puteoli (Pozzuoli) was made a free port for Egyptian ships, and it was for centuries the great mart for foreign trade, just as Genoa now is for all Italy. Thus, the elegancies of Alexandrian household furniture and decoration spread, not only to Pompeii and Herculaneum, but even to Roman palaces, and the worship of Isis, long since adopted from Egypt by the Greeks, became naturalised in Italian cities. Such was the fusion of creeds and customs produced by the spirit of Hellenism. In the succeeding great wars the second Punic war with Hannibal, the Macedonian wars, and the conquest of Syria Egypt had been prudently neutral. Hence on two occasions, when the Egyptians appealed to Rome to save them from the attacks of the Seleucids, first of Antiochus the Great, and then of Antiochus IV, the great republic intervened and saved the royal house. It was on the second of these occasions that Popilius Laenas drew the famous circle with his vine stick around the Syrian king, and compelled him to decide on the spot for peace or war with Rome.
In spite of all these friendly relations, and the gradual subjection of Egypt to Rome, the land was always, as I have said, strange, and the emperors made special arrangements for its government. Into these I cannot possibly here enter, but I merely wish to point out how different were the relations between Rome and Egypt and the relations of Rome and Syria, of which I shall speak in my next discourse. While you still find splendid Hellenistic temples and colonnades built at Baalbec, Palmyra, Gerasa, and other sites in the old kingdom of Syria, even the latest temples built or restored in Egypt by Roman emperors down to Decius are strictly Egyptian, with their lotus-flower capitals, their hieroglyphic inscriptions, and with that peculiar colouring so distinctive in Egyptian art.
It is perhaps idle to consider whether a different policy on the part of the Ptolemies would have produced a different result. Certain it is that they failed to Hellenize the country, at least the inner country, and that every succeeding generation saw a sharper return to the old ways and habits of the original race. I repeat this, though recent years have shown us not only that they founded one Greek city, Ptolemais in upper Egypt, but that they settled in the Fayyum a large number of their Hellenic soldiers, so as to have there a colony speaking and writing good Greek, and reading good Greek literature. But there is ample evidence in the papyri to show that, though intermarriage with the natives frequently occurred, these people were never amalgamated with them, but lived under laws differing from the old code of the country, which was accepted by the Ptolemies in the native courts. The contrast of this province of Alexander's empire to his Macedonian home is very striking. While Macedonia was raised by a few great kings from obscurity to splendour, and with the Roman conquest sank again into deeper obscurity forever, the Macedonian dynasty founded in Egypt was a mere episode in the immense history of that country, and only meant that that wonderful, patient, eternal race had for three centuries submitted to new masters. They had done so many times before, and nearly all their great kings had been foreigners ; they were to do so many times again. And so the importance of Egypt did not disappear at the fall of its royal house with the famous Cleopatra. We can see that not only the ideas of the great Alexander, but the administration of the Ptolemaic court of Alexandria, were constantly before the mind of Augustus when he framed the constitution of the Roman empire. We have Egypt prominent again in early Christian times for its monks and its controversies, and remember, monks were known in Egypt centuries before Christianity. Then it becomes brilliant under the Saracens, when they founded Cairo with the ruins of Memphis. And so on to our own day, when the "Egyptian question" is ever before us, and admits of no final solution; or, rather, it is a question eternally being solved by the conquerors of the world, from Nebuchadnezzar to Napoleon; and still it remains a great highway for commerce and for conquest, from the dawn of history to the present day, from King Menes to Lord Kitchener.
I should perhaps add something upon the relations of Egypt with Greece proper and with Rhodes during the period with which I am particularly concerned. You must remember that the enormous wealth of Egypt, and the fact that the native population there was disarmed, made it the favourite field for mercenary soldiers. Mercenary service was as fashionable then among Greeks as it was in the seventeenth century throughout Europe; even Spartan kings thought it not beneath their dignity to take service of this kind, and there were always many thousand Greeks pursuing this very mischievous and deteriorating profession in Egypt. These armies were usually commanded by Aetolians or Arcadians, and we know that these captains amassed great fortunes, and at times even endangered the monarchy by the insolence of their power, and by their waste of public money.
There was another class of Greeks who also looked to Egypt as their paymaster the artist class. Pictures and statues were constantly being bought and sent there. Aratus of Sicyon was a sort of agent for the king of Egypt, and used his dealing in art as a pretext for dealing in politics. The famous tomb of Sidon, 1 which commemorates the victories of Alexander, is almost certainly the work of Greek artists in the pay of the Ptolemies ; for the king of Sidon was high admiral under the first Ptolemy. It was for him or some of his companions who had fought under the conqueror, that this splendid monument was prepared.
It was this superiority in money over Macedon which made Egypt always so popular in Greece, so that Aratus and his league regarded the Ptolemy as their support and protector against the Antigonid. It was with subsidies of money that Egypt kept up the agitation against Macedonia.
There was only one class whom the Ptolemies were most anxious to settle in Alexandria, in order to increase the glory of their university, and in this they failed. The philosophers always regarded Athens as their proper home, and no offers of money would induce such men as Zeno, the great founder of the Stoics, to settle in Egypt. Other celebrated men, who were invited and entertained there, returned as soon as they could, and left the wealth, luxury, and turbulence of Alexandria for the "Academic shades" of Attica. It was not till centuries had elapsed that the mystic visions of the East were reconciled to the dialectics of Plato in Alexandria, and produced the latest bloom of Greek philosophy in the hybrid system of Plotinus.
It is most melancholy, and very curious, that we have not a single picture of social and literary life at Alexandria all through its great period. What would we not now give for a letter from Cicero on such a topic ? But such men either did not visit Egypt, or if they did, like Strabo, they tell us nothing that we want to know. Dion Chrysostom, in his oration to the Alexandrians, rather attacks their vices than describes their ordinary life. The great scene in Polybius of the accession of Ptolemy V, and the murder of the favourites of his father, is indeed a vivid picture, but it is a picture of Alexandria mad, not of Alexandria sane. There are a few stray anecdotes of the jealousies and squabbles of the learned at the Museum; there is the famous scene of Theocritus' Adoniazusa, in which two women go to the feast of Adonis, but this latter, if I mistake not, was copied from Sophron, and may possibly be really Syracusan, not Alexandrian, in colour. There are many bald statements that the town was splendid; there is the wonder of the hero in a Greek novel, who finds at night the sun " distributed in small change " by the lamps in the streets. But all these things touch only the outside, and only touch it. We must wait for some new papyrus to reveal to us what many men praise or blame, but nobody describes with intelligent insight. The rest is confusion.
Lecture IV.
SYRIA
In treating so large a subject in a single lecture I must avoid all small details, and above all perplexing you with the various Antiochuses and Seleucuses who make up the pedigree of the Syrian royal house a pedigree by no means so interesting as those of the other two kingdoms, for history has preserved to us nothing worth mention save of two, Antiochus III and IV; the former the king who warred with the Romans and was defeated at Magnesia (190 B. C), the latter (Epiphanes) his elder son, who succeeded his younger brother, and who is famous not only for the circle of Popilius Lamas, but for his persecution of the Jews, and the prominent place he thus occupies in the book of Daniel. But if the kings of Syria are obscure, their kingdom is by far the most important and interesting in the Hellenistic world from many points of view.
I have already told you that the two great struggles in which Macedon was now engaged were that with the northern barbarians and that with the overcultivated Greeks. Egypt had only internal enemies to fear, and, though often struggling for the possession of Cyprus and Cyrene, was secure from invasion or dismemberment. It was the deep severance of the native population from all that was Greek which ultimately drew away that kingdom from the rest of Alexander's empire, and so demoralised the ruling class that Ptolemaic Egypt succumbed to Rome from the mere internal decay of its rulers.
All the conflicts which Syria had to endure were at the same time like and unlike those of her rivals. The very name Syria is a sort of absurdity, seeing that the empire founded by Seleucus had Babylon for its natural centre, and included the "upper provinces," Parthia, Bactria, Ariana, and indeed part of India, till the first great war of Seleucus with Sandracottus determined that Hellenism was not to include the valley of the Indus. But quite apart from these remote Asiatic provinces or kingdoms, the so-called kingdom of Syria included or claimed Mesopotamia, Persia, Media, most of Asia Minor, Ccele- Syria, and Palestine, so that we have here, not a definite conquering race like the Macedonians in their own land, or a still more definite conquered race like the Egyptians in their own land, but a heterogeneous conglomerate of peoples, held together by a Macedonian satrap and his small garrison.
It is true that most of these regions had long been accustomed to obeying, more or less loyally, a sovereign residing at Babylon or Susa or Persepolis, so that they were not shocked at a king of a strange race whom they seldom saw. Indeed, it shows how secure the Seleucids felt on this point that they settled themselves, not in the midst of their vast kingdom, but at Antioch. This policy was adopted, even before the first Seleucus, by Antigonus, the first of Alexander's generals who held this group of provinces till Babylon was seized by Seleucus in 312 B. C.
Why was this particular situation chosen first by Antigonus for his capital Antigoneia, then by Seleucus for his capital Antiocheia, only a few miles farther down the Orontes ?
In the first place, Antioch was in the very thoroughfare from the old and well-known crossing of the Euphrates to reach the Mediterranean. There are deserts separating all Palestine and Syria from Mesopotamia, and only in this particular place is the transit both short and easily practicable. Hence from this inner angle of the Mediterranean to Thapsus or Zeugma on the Euphrates there has always been one of the highways of men. It was necessary, above all things, to hold this route now, for the new kingdom was to be Greek or Hellenistic European, if you like and not oriental, and was to draw its official language, its soldiery, its whole culture, so far as possible, from the West.
So Seleucus and his descendants declared themselves as kings upon the Mediterranean with large inner provinces Asia, in fact to feed and support them, just as the Ptolemies were kings of Alexandria, with Egypt and the Red Sea and Libya Africa, in fact to supply them.
As regards the particular site, I see curious suggestions, both of likeness and of contrast, with the other most notable cities of the Greek world Athens and Alexandria. Of course, Alexandria was the great new thing, but the Syrian port was not at the mouth of its river, for this obvious reason that the Orontes below Antioch was the main drain of a great city, bringing all the pollutions of men into a tideless sea. Hence Seleucia, the fortified port, was placed about five miles north of the river mouth. The history of Antioch is unfortunately known to us only in stray moments, most of them moments of disaster or humiliation. We know that it owed a great deal of its splendour to the two principal Seleucids, Antiochus III and IV, who built new quarters, and did all in their power to magnify and beautify this city. The suburb Daphne was from this time on perhaps the most famous resort of pleasure-seekers in the world, so that this Antioch even came to be called "Antioch near Daphne," to distinguish it from its homonyms in Asia Minor and elsewhere.
Having now considered the capital, we may proceed to consider the provinces; for though this capital was so splendid, and though we know that the early Seleucids put some store on literature and science, yet Antioch was not an art centre, but a centre of pleasure. Under Antiochus Epiphanes we hear of the splendid processions and feasts which rivalled the great mummeries of Alexandria.
But as regards Syria itself, Ccele- Syria, and northern Palestine, we may safely assert that no outlying country in Alexander's empire was ever so thoroughly Hellenized. We know this by many Macedonian names of towns and the renaming of countries; we know that Greek was spoken commonly all through this region, and when we come to consider the ruins of great cities founded then or refounded under Roman rule, we find them not oriental or foreign, but strictly Hellenistic or Roman-Greek, as it is vulgarly called. Baalbec and Palmyra, Gerasa and the Decapolis, represent Hellenistic culture, and direct imitation of Antioch.
There we find the Syrian population thoroughly loyal to the Seleucids, and no revolution ever seems to flourish there. We may say almost the same of Mesopotamia, where the first Seleucus had long reigned, and where before him Alexander the Great had made a great impression. There was, indeed, under Antiochus III, or rather shortly after his succession when he was still but a boy, an insurrection under Molon and Alexander in Media and Persia, who easily defeated the generals he sent against them, and appeared a most dangerous opposition to the new king. But as soon as he went in person against them, their whole force melted away, for, says Polybius, their soldiers thought it "foul scorn" to fight against their hereditary king. Thus we may say that on this side of the second great desert, which severed
the various parts of this ill- cemented kingdom I mean west of the great desert of Persia the oriental inhabitants, whether Aryan or Semitic, were quite loyal. Seleucia on the Tigris was their capital now the great successor of Nineveh and Babylon.
But let us look farther east and north. The first limitation of Alexander's empire came from the region of India, where Chandragupta (Sandracottus) made himself a great oriental kingdom which was essentially non-Hellenistic. Even here, however, a knowledge of what the Macedonians had done produced its effects. There was always, we may be sure, a Macedonian agent or minister at the court of Chandragupta, and we are quite sure, from the inscriptions of Acoka, his successor, who adopted Buddhism, that Buddhist missionaries were sent to preach their doctrine to all the Hellenistic kings of the West. We have no detail of their number or of their success, but when you consider that they must have preached in Syria two centuries before Christ, the strange likenesses in the story of the birth and life of Buddha to that of the life of Christ assume a new and deep interest.
We are told that Seleucus made peace with the Indian king on the basis of ceding provinces and taking an Indian wife, while Chandragupta gave him that enormous park of elephants wherewith he crushed his great rival, Antigonus, at Ipsus (301 B. C).
It was not till more than half a century later (about 247 B. C.) that the next great revolt took place in the East. It was from that date that the Parthian Arsakids dated the rise of their sovereignty. These people, as you know, became gradually stronger and stronger, and though subdued or kept in check by Antiochus the Great, they were never reunited to the Hellenistic kingdom of Syria, and later on they became the heart of the oriental opposition to Roman extension.
Yet how deeply Greek ideas and culture here penetrated we know from the story of the death of Crassus. A strolling company of Greek players were performing the Baccha at court when the news came in of the Roman defeat, and the raging Bacchante came on the stage with the actual head of the great adversary. But these Parthians were blocked out from Hellenism and so was the still more remote province of the empire Bactria (Balkh), where we should hardly have suspected that any Greek influences remained, were it not that the beautiful coins, and the names of their kings upon these coins, show that they assumed Greek titles and copied the coinage of the Hellenistic empires.
Thus then you see two great facts: (1) the gradual breaking off of eastern provinces from the Seleucid empire, which was ill-cemented in many ways, and moreover severed by two gigantic deserts; and (2) the revolting provinces or kingdoms, though distinctly oriental in the main, were modified considerably by the influence of Alexander's conquest. If it be true that this fusion of people brought Buddhist teaching into Galilee, who can estimate its vast significance ?
Let us now turn to Asia Minor, the other extremity of the vast kingdom of Seleucus. Here the power which asserted itself as a separate kingdom, and had a great effect upon the politics and the art of the world, was the city and afterward the kingdom of Pergamum. Originally the seat, not of government, but of treasure, its strong position made it the natural spot for a resolute governor (Philetaerus) to assert his independence, and when the greater kingdoms were disturbed, King Lysimachus of Thrace warring with Syria for the rule in Asia Minor, the first satrap steered his way between the contending parties. His greatest successor, the first Attalus, from whom the whole dynasty is called Attalid, ruled long and brilliantly, having not only defeated all the attempts of the Seleucids, but having earned the gratitude of all Asia Minor by a great victory over the Galatians, who were both terrifying and plundering all Asia. During a reign of forty-five years he consolidated the wealth and position of Pergamum so as to make it something distinctive in the history of Hellenism.
A careful study of the relations of the Pergamene kings to their city and people disclose to me clearly the peculiar character of the Hellenistic sovereignties so popular in that age of the world. Pergamum was a regular Greek city, with its assembly, its council, its annual officers, its right of treaty with other free states apparently untouched. The first Attalid never pretended to be king over them, but was merely an officer of a distant prince, keeping treasure for him in the fortress, and commanding a garrison there. Presently he asserts his independence, and shows it by declaring the independence of Pergamum as a city-state. Hence he is hailed as the "benefactor" of the state, presently as the "founder" of its liberties, and its "defender." Even when he assumes the title of king, it is an abstract title, not the King of Pergamum. He keeps armies and conquers outlying territory, but he never interferes, except by way of advice, with the deliberations of the city. Of course, his advice is that of a superior, with power to enforce it, but theoretically he stands outside the constitution as a powerful and ever-present friend. The whole conception seems to us a strange hypocrisy, which deceived no one; yet how jealously did the Emperor Augustus copy this very policy !
I thought it right to enter upon this digression because my sketch of the Hellenistic world would not only be incomplete, which it must be, but false, which I hope it will not be, if you did not hear something about these second-rate states, which were always striving to keep the balance of power among their formidable neighbours.
Of course, there was a great contrast between the eastern and the western revolt against Syria. The eastern were national, the western political; for Syria, or rather the kingdom of Antioch, affected Hellenism thoroughly, as much as Pergamum or Byzantium. But the restless nature of the Asiatic Greeks, and their love of local liberties, still more their fancy for the nobler title of "free cities," made them bad subjects in the sense that Greeks have always been bad subjects of any power.
I have left, however, for the last in the series of revolts far the most interesting and important that of the Jews, resulting in a national dynasty and a consolidation of a distinct national type.
Let me review for a moment the history of the Jews from the Babylonian conquest down to this famous struggle. When they had returned from their captivity and rebuilt their temple, it was natural that the many Jews who had not come back, from various motives, should nevertheless look with sentimental pride to their old religious capital and regard it as a sort of spiritual centre. This was the famous diaspora, of which we hear so much, and which gradually came to support the temple by sending yearly offerings, like the Peter's pence sent from Ireland and other countries to Rome. These foreign Jews were in many respects more devout than the Palestine people, especially when the favour of Alexander brought Hellenism into good repute among the latter.
We find the educated classes gradually dividing themselves into a worldly, cultivated, cosmopolitan party, which thought it enough to believe the letter of the five books of Moses, and adopt free-thinking along with Greek culture beyond it ; and the stricter people, who with Ezra had given deeper meaning and development to their faith, had adopted the Prophets and the fuller interpretation of the Law, and above all were exclusive as to all foreign culture. You will have recognised in the former the aristocrats and people of dry Mosaic orthodoxy, the Sadducees; in the latter, the Pharisees. During the first century of Hellenism the influences of both Egypt and Syria were such that the Sadducees had their own way in Jerusalem. We are told by Josephus that Greek games and exercises were coming into fashion, that the Jewish youths were assuming the ephebic dress, and that everything seemed to portend a rapid Hellenization of this clever and practical race. With the decay of the Egyptian royal house, and . the rise of Antiochus the Great, Palestine passed permanently out of Egyptian hands, and became annexed to Syria, so that henceforth it is to Antioch they look as their capital, and no longer to Alexandria. It is, however, most characteristic of how far the Jewish domestication in Egypt had gone, that they proposed to the seventh Ptolemy, and carried out, the scheme of establishing an imitation temple with its worship near Heliopolis, so as to save the trouble and expense of their many pilgrimages to Jerusalem, now the province of another kingdom. The practice, however, of both Ptolemies and Seleucids had been to require of the Jewish high-priest, who was practically their satrap, a definite yearly tribute, and for the rest to allow the Jews to abide by their own customs and laws. All ambitious Jews learned Greek, and went to study manners, and spend money, at Antioch or Alexandria, and there seemed every prospect that gradually Palestine would follow the example of Syria, and conform to the habits of the many Greek cities settled along the coast, and in groups at the upper course of the Jordan. The literature which remains to us shows clearly this progressive influence of Hellenism.
But there came a crisis when one madman was the instrument of Providence in staying all this natural development and in restoring to its pristine preciseness and vigour the definite and now indelible nationality of the Jews. When the Romans came to know them, there is not a word of what Josephus tells regarding their Hellenistic tendencies. The crisis was the reign of Antiochus IV, the Antiochus Epiphanes of history, the "abomination of desolation" in the prophet Daniel, whose persecutions roused the national resistance, and established the Maccabees on the throne of Jewish Palestine all these things you will find told and estimated in my Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman Conquest.
And now that we have gone through in brief detail the principal features of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Egypt, and Syria, as part of Alexander's Hellenistic empire, I think I shall best occupy our remaining time with some remarks upon the general features of Hellenistic life, in which I shall resume and repeat some of the points to which I have already called your passing attention.
Lecture V.
GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM
If we consider in its large features what the early Hellenistic period has done for us in literature, we may divide its action into the care and preservation of Hellenic masterpieces, and the production of works of its own. As regards the former, there can be no doubt that the creation of the great cosmopolitan library at Alexandria, and the great trade in books which came thence, were the greatest acts of protection ever done for the greatest literature the world has seen. And not only were all the masterpieces of the Golden Age sought out and catalogued, but the chief librarian made it his business to publish critical studies on the purity of the texts, and to see that the Alexandrian text represented the best and soundest tradition. Recent discoveries on papyri, commencing with the scrap I found in the Petrie papyri, show, e. g., that the current texts of Homer were very loose and various, so that the critics of Alexandria, especially the famous Aristarchus, had much to do in pruning, and in rejecting unauthorised additions and repetitions. The Homer we now have is that purified edition. What we now read is probably shorter by one-sixth than the pre-Alcxandrine texts. As regards the lyric and tragic poets, we may be sure the same care was exercised, though the variations and additions and corruptions which occurred in the texts of the widely diffused and much-recited Homer could hardly occur in the early lyric poets, where the very strict metre preserved the poet's words and made the interpolation of stray lines generally impossible. It is a credible tradition that the second Ptolemy borrowed from Athens the original stage copies of the great tragedians on the huge deposit of one hundred talents of silver, and that he abandoned the money and secured the originals, sending back copies to the city. So there was collected at this wonderful library all that was rare and precious, ordered and catalogued by competent scholars. I go a step farther, and say that, though we have no explicit record telling us the fact, there must have been some regular permission to copy books in the library, and, multiplying them by slave hands, to disperse them by way of trade all over the Greek-speaking world. Let me cite to you one piece of evidence which I think conclusive. We have now got to know one Greek-speaking district an outlying and remote district of Egypt the Fayyum. By the researches first of Mr. Petrie, then of Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt, we have unearthed in the walls of coffins, in rubbish heaps, or even laid beside the dead, during a period not merely post-Christian or Roman, but reaching back to the second Ptolemy, all manner of fragments of writing, which show us that not only the great masters Homer, Pindar, Euripides, Demosthenes, Menander were household books, but all manner of the more outof-the-way authors the Contest o] Homer and Hesiod, the more difficult lyric poets, works on metric and on chronology all had filtered into this outlying province, and had become part of the people's education. If these things happened in the Fayyum, how much more easily would the export of books take place directly from Alexandria to all the old Hellenic coasts ?
I say, then, that not merely for the preservation, but for the diffusion, of Hellenic literature, the work of Alexandria was a permanent education to the whole Greek-speaking world; and we know that in due time Pergamum began to do similar work. The very words "paper" and "parchment" are the echo of "papyrus" and "Pergamene," thus perpetuating to modern Europe a record of the benefits of Hellenism.
But men who devote themselves to preserving books are not the men likely to produce books, unless it be books of learning; and of such there were plenty. The Greek notes we call scholia, preserved in some manuscripts of our classical texts, show us the care and skill with which the Alexandrian scholars published explanations and commentaries upon the great masters.
But returning to literature, there is no doubt that the most fashionable poets and prose writers of Alexandria the Robert Louis Stevensons and the Rudyard Kiplings of their day were not of the level of the Golden Age. Yet withal, as I already have told you, we have from Alexandria Theocritus, and we have the love-novel. 1 I will here add a word upon two more of these poets, whom I had then passed by. The first is Aratus, who was indeed a Hellenistic, but not an Alexandrian, poet, whose didactic work on the astronomy of use for navigation, and on the signs of the weather of use for farming, has survived to us complete. The poem in itself is calm and prosy, nor would it command any modern interest, had not one of the greatest artists the world has ever seen the poet Virgil used it as the model for the signs of weather in his exquisite Georgics. He has translated faithfully and closely enough, but by his marvellous alchemy has transformed the Greek silver into Roman gold.
Nor is this the only debt that Virgil, and through him the whole world of European literature, owes to the Hellenism of Alexandria. We still possess the Argonautics of Apollonius the Rhodian a pedantpoet of the same generation. In the midst of pages of tedious prolixity, which have forever damned the popularity of the work, occurs the great episode of the meeting and love at first sight of Medea and Jason.
The treatment of this world-wide, but never worldworn, theme is so wholly fresh, so wholly un-Hellenic, that it requires no subtle criticism to see in it the broad light of the oriental love-novel which had first dawned in the East upon the companions of Alexander. It is no longer the physical, but the sentimental, side of that passion which interests the poet and his readers. The actual marriage of the lovers is but an episode, in which the surrounding anxieties and the unhappy omens take the foremost place. Whether Virgil, in painting the love of Dido for Aeneas, had any closer model to copy we may never know. But it is now a commonplace of criticism that the episode has been inspired by the spirit, if not the letter, of Apollonius. There are the same psychology, the same portrait of the allabsorbing sentiment, the same chastity of language where a Hellenic poet would have been naturalistic. The world has neglected this third book of the Argonautics as if it were a poem of no importance, and it is not for me to do more than record my dissent. But even were my judgment astray, surely the poet who attuned the delicate instrument on which Virgil rendered his pathetic melody has done no ordinary service to mankind.
Time fails me to speak of the other Alexandrians from whom lesser Roman poets Tibullus, Propertius, Catullus drew whatever quasi-inspiration they possessed. The most remarkable poem of the best of these Catullus is the Atys. We have no direct clue or indication that it is borrowed from the Greek. And yet there is no man who has studied the obligations of Latin to Greek poetry who is not convinced that it must have been derived from some Hellenistic original.
If you will learn fully what that age of Hellenism produced, look at the huge catalogues of Susemihl {Liter atur der Alexandrinerzeit) and Vol. V of Croiset's Litterature Grecque. And yet, astonishing to relate, both these books omit all mention of our greatest and best specimen of Syrian Greek I mean the books of the New Testament. Here, if anywhere, you will see the force of Hellenism in interpenetrating and moulding the culture of a very foreign, a very stubborn, race. I shall not dwell on Paul of Tarsus, for though born a Jew and always in spirit a Jew, he had enjoyed the education of a great centre of Greek learning the schools of Tarsus. But consider the language of the synoptic gospels. Here we have the ordinary Greek of Palestine and Syria written by men who seem to have laid little claim to be literary artists. They write a dialect simple and rude in comparison with Attic Greek; they use forms which shock the purists who examine for Cambridge scholarships. But did any men ever tell . a great story with more simplicity, with more directness, with more power? Take, for example, the opening chapter of St. Luke's gospel. Can any artist from Theocritus down show us an idyll of more perfect grace? Take the narrative of the Passion. Who has ever told great sorrow with simpler pathos, with more touching modesty, with more native dignity? Believe me against all the pedants of the world, the dialect that tells such a story in such a way is no poor language, but the outcome of a great and a fruitful intellectual education. Such was the education that Hellenism brought to the Syrian world. Let us now turn to art, and ask what was the influence of Hellenism upon the nations which it drew within its mighty influence. Of the recognised fine arts the two most subtle and subjective are lost to us music and painting. The hand of time has been against us, and we have only stray fragments which give us not even adequate suggestions. The wall-painting of Pompeii, and in a few of the Palatine rooms at Rome, is not the work of artists, but of operatives, and ? is as defective in drawing as are most of the clay figurines of similar date from Tanagra and elsewhere. The remains of Greek melodies, of which we understand the notation, are not only to us exceedingly ugly, but so queer and strange that no musician can attempt to restore a single bar, where there is a gap or fracture in the inscription. But let us take up sculpture and architecture. And first of all let us reduce to its proper value the vulgar phrase which assigns to Greek art a golden and a silver age. The life of Alexander was supposed to be the dividing line. Lysippus the sculptor, who had the privilege of reproducing the king's form, was the last of the real masters. Among the many falsehoods I was taught about Greek art when I was young, that was one of the most flagrant. Go now to the Louvre in Paris, and walk through that famous collection of Greek and Graeco-Roman sculpture. Two masterpieces will forever stand out from the rest in your memory. The first is the Nike of Samothrace, that figure of victory that once stood on a marble prow heralding the success of King Demetrius the Besieger with her trumpet. The other, in the place of honour in its gallery, surrounded by a crowd whose comments admiration is wont to hush, is the Venus of Melos. Both are works of the so-called silver age one of them as late as the Roman domination of Greece. Need I add that at Rome the very inferior Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon, truly works of a silver age, yet have fascinated centuries of men ever since the Renaissance ?
In recent years we have much fresh evidence of the diffusion of this noble art into the East. The great glory of the museum at Constantinople is the famous tomb of Sidon, which so amazed its discoverers that they called it the tomb of Alexander the Great. That, of course, was absurd. But as to its age there is no doubt. It commemorates in its noble reliefs the conflicts of Macedonians, Greeks, and Persians, and was evidently intended to honour the tomb of some companion of Alexander, probably the Sidonian king Philocles, who was high admiral to the first Ptolemy. We have never found any sepulchral monument of such consummate beauty.
But if the date had not been thus fixed, we should have seen another recurrence of the controversy which rages over every new masterpiece in marble or in bronze which is recovered from the earth or the sea. Is it Hellenic or Hellenistic ? Is it of the fourth or the third century before Christ ? Can there be any better proof than this, that Hellenism had not only spread a knowledge of, and a taste for, great plastic art throughout the nearer East, but that it also raised up no mean successors to the great men of genius whose work in marble and in bronze has never since been rivalled, not even by all the study and all the resources of modern civilisation ?
The case is far simpler with architecture. We may say broadly that the Corinthian style is exclusively Hellenistic and Roman. All the great remains in that style, from the splendours of the Olympian temple at Athens to the colonnades at Palmyra all are essentially the product of Hellenism. Nay more, the restorations of old buildings in that age are so artistic that in many cases as, for example, at the temple of Eleusis we are still in doubt whether the work is archaistic or archaic; whether it be the original execution of Mnesicles, the contemporary of Pericles, or a far later Hellenistic, nay possibly Roman- Greek, restoration.
As regards the refinements and the luxuries of everyday life, we may confidently assert that this age advanced with great strides. Hellenic and Macedonian household furniture was so simple as to be almost rude, and we can quite appreciate the astonishment of Alexander when he burst in upon the splendours of the Persian court, even under canvas, in the midst of a campaign. "This indeed," he cried when he saw the purple and the plate, "is dining like a king !" So in Egypt the antique refinements of a civilisation of thousands of years must have impressed the Macedonians, whose life had been spent in rude camps and campaigns, and we may be sure that all manner of small conveniences in daily life were added to the so-called necessities of an advancing culture. The implements of toilet found at Pompeii show what the middle classes of Italy had attained when in near contact with Hellenistic refinement.
Recent discoveries have shed new light on the achievements of Hellenism in pure science and in practical business. The longer we study the mathematical books of the Greeks, most of them dating from this epoch, the more we are persuaded that they knew vastly more than we learn from their explicit statements. It was only of late years that Mr. Penrose discovered the delicate and complicated system of curves applied to the building of the Parthenon, which does not contain in its plan a single straight line. There must have been large mathematical knowledge in the mind of this Hellenic Wren; we know from the fragments of Pythagorean lore that the science of numbers occupied the deepest attention of that early sect. We know also that the somewhat clumsy notation of quantities in Attic accounts, which is very analogous to the Roman figures, was replaced by the much simpler alphabetic notation, wherein all the accountants of the Fayyum papyri make up their sums. Historians of Greek mathematics, in ignorance of this new notation, have said marvellous things concerning the impossibility of multiplication and division, and the necessity of using the primitive abacus with its counters. We have never yet found a Greek abacus, and shall not find one till we dig up an infant school. The papyri deal in very large and complicated computations which range from the use of millions down to series of minute fractions, and though they do make mistakes, their counting is as accurate as average work of the present day. It would lead us too far to give you the details proving these statements. They will presently be published by my friend, Professor Smyly, who combines an exceptional knowledge of Greek papyri with a very complete training in mathematics.
Not only in pure science, and in practical science, but in the whole management of affairs by departments, by a series of graduated officials, by keeping careful minutes, by all the machinery now used in business houses, and in state bureaus in all this the Hellenistic age had reached quite a high level. Need I add that banking, the keeping of money out on interest, the payment of bills and draughts on bankers, were all perfectly understood and practised in Greek Egypt two centuries before Christ ? If all this attainment had not been lost or hopelessly blurred in the Dark Ages, what centuries of time would Europe have saved in her painful progress toward civilisation ?
On the change in the political ideals of the age I have already said a good deal in my discourse on Xenophon. According as Greek conquests and Greek culture spread over a vast area, the old city constitutions with their tiny states were found wholly inadequate. Two solutions were possible: either large confederations or monarchies. The natural question for any American to ask is this: How was it that a confederation among free states did not commend itself universally, as opposed to monarchy an idea to which almost all the Greeks had been for centuries hostile ? The answer is very direct and simple, and will come home with peculiar force to those who have lived through a great crisis in the history of these United States. When a number of independent states enter a league or confederation and enjoy its benefits, has each one of them a right to carry on separate negotiations with foreign states; or, if that be not permitted, has it a right to secede? To these two questions the Greeks gave but the one answer. Each contracting state preserves its inherent right to treat with any power it chooses, and every such state has also the right to secede from its confederation. Even when states bound themselves by promises to maintain joint action, all Greek sentiment was against coercing disobedient members. It might be done by force, but it was never done as a matter of argument upon the rights of the case. This condition of the Greek mind wrecked all confederations in the long run and left as the only other imperial solution the acquiescence in a monarchy with sufficient military force to keep its subject cities in order. From a material point of view, these monarchies had the power to carry out conquests, and so open up new provinces to Greek commerce and Greek enterprise. Moreover, there were many city-states, especially in Asia Minor, which were bordered by wild mountaineers, or semi-savage tribes, from whom they required protection. A strong monarch could subdue, or at least repress, the raids of these people, and so the subjects of a king found themselves far safer then the members of a league. These converging reasons, not to speak of the brilliant example set by Alexander the Great, determined the Hellenistic world, still jealous for the internal liberties of every Greek city, to acquiesce in the sundry "benefactors" and "saviours," by which titles they justified to themselves the submission to personages who differed only in outward circumstances from the tyrants that were the bugbears of Hellenic life.
Yet one more reflection, and I conclude. The brilliancy of city life, the comforts and conveniences with which the citizens became supplied, the privileges which they obtained, gave to all this epoch of men a strong tendency to migrate from the country into the towns. So it was that to live kco/xtjSov, in villages, like the pagani of the Romans, came to suggest boorishness and want of refinement. In the book of Revelations, which concludes our New Testament, the ideal of the future is no longer the Elysian fields, but the New Jerusalem come down from heaven, a city with walls and gates and splendid streets. This, and not fair glades and trees and streams, was the conception of the highest happiness produced by average Hellenism. But with the change there was also a loss of simplicity and innocence such as has always been the boon and privilege of country life, and this was felt by a few superior minds. The old adage, "God made the country, but the devil made the towns," is best of all illustrated by Dion Chrysostom in his famous oration (VII) About Poverty, which you will see fully rehearsed in my forthcoming Greek Life from Polybius to Plutarch; and so it came to pass that strong and fresh barbarians from their wild fields and forests were able to overthrow all the refined but effete town civilisation of the Graeco-Roman empire.
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