The Greeks had always been fond of parades. Every year they held solemn processions in
honor of Dionysos the God of the wine. As everybody in Greece drank wine (the Greeks
thought water only useful for the purpose of swimming and sailing) this particular Divinity
was as popular as a God of the Soda-Fountain would be in our own land.
And because the Wine-God was supposed to live in the vineyards, amidst a merry mob of
Satyrs (strange creatures who were half man and half goat), the crowd that joined the
procession used to wear goat-skins and to hee-haw like real bily-goats. The Greek word
for goat is "tragos" and the Greek word for singer is "oidos." The singer who meh-mehed
like a goat therefore was caled a "tragos-oidos" or goat singer, and it is this strange name
which developed into the modern word "Tragedy," which means in the theatrical sense a
piece with an unhappy ending, just as Comedy (which realy means the singing of
something "comos" or gay) is the name given to a play which ends happily.
But how, you wil ask, did this noisy chorus of masqueraders, stamping around like wild
goats, ever develop into the noble tragedies which have filed the theatres of the world for
almost two thousand years?
The connecting link between the goat-singer and Hamlet is realy very simple as I shal
show you in a moment.
The singing chorus was very amusing in the beginning and attracted large crowds of
spectators who stood along the side of the road and laughed. But soon this business of
tree-hawing grew tiresome and the Greeks thought dulness an evil only comparable to
ugliness or sickness. They asked for something more entertaining. Then an inventive young
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poet from the vilage of Icaria in Attica hit upon a new idea which proved a tremendous
success. He made one of the members of the goat-chorus step forward and engage in
conversation with the leader of the musicians who marched at the head of the parade
playing upon their pipes of Pan. This individual was alowed to step out of line. He waved
his arms and gesticulated while he spoke (that is to say he "acted" while the others merely
stood by and sang) and he asked a lot of questions, which the bandmaster answered
according to the rol of papyrus upon which the poet had written down these answers
before the show began.
This rough and ready conversation—the dialogue—which told the story of Dionysos or
one of the other Gods, became at once popular with the crowd. Henceforth every
Dionysian procession had an "acted scene" and very soon the "acting" was considered
more important than the procession and the meh-mehing.
AEschylus, the most successful of al "tragedians" who wrote no less than eighty plays
during his long life (from 526 to 455) made a bold step forward when he introduced two
"actors" instead of one. A generation later Sophocles increased the number of actors to
three. When Euripides began to write his terrible tragedies in the middle of the fifth
century, B.C., he was alowed as many actors as he liked and when Aristophanes wrote
those famous comedies in which he poked fun at everybody and everything, including the
Gods of Mount Olympus, the chorus had been reduced to the role of mere bystanders
who were lined up behind the principal performers and who sang "this is a terrible world"
while the hero in the foreground committed a crime against the wil of the Gods.
This new form of dramatic entertainment demanded a proper setting, and soon every
Greek city owned a theatre, cut out of the rock of a nearby hil. The spectators sat upon
wooden benches and faced a wide circle (our present orchestra where you pay three
dolars and thirty cents for a seat). Upon this half-circle, which was the stage, the actors
and the chorus took their stand. Behind them there was a tent where they made up with
large clay masks which hid their faces and which showed the spectators whether the
actors were supposed to be happy and smiling or unhappy and weeping. The Greek word
for tent is "skene" and that is the reason why we talk of the "scenery" of the stage.
When once the tragedy had become part of Greek life, the people took it very seriously
and never went to the theatre to give their minds a vacation. A new play became as
important an event as an election and a successful playwright was received with greater
honors than those bestowed upon a general who had just returned from a famous victory.
THE PERSIAN WARS
HOW THE GREEKS DEFENDED EUROPE AGAINST ASIATIC INVASION AND
DROVE THE PERSIANS BACK ACROSS THE AEGEAN SEA
THE Greeks had learned the art of trading from the AEgeans who had been the pupils of
the Phoenicians. They had founded colonies after the Phoenician pattern. They had even
improved upon the Phoenician methods by a more general use of money in dealing with
foreign customers. In the sixth century before our era they had established themselves
firmly along the coast of Asia Minor and they were taking away trade from the
Phoenicians at a fast rate. This the Phoenicians of course did not like but they were not
strong enough to risk a war with their Greek competitors. They sat and waited nor did
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they wait in vain.
In a former chapter, I have told you how a humble tribe of Persian shepherds had
suddenly gone upon the warpath and had conquered the greater part of western Asia. The
Persians were too civilised to plunder their new subjects. They contented themselves with
a yearly tribute. When they reached the coast of Asia Minor they insisted that the Greek
colonies of Lydia recognize the Persian Kings as their over-Lords and pay them a
stipulated tax. The Greek colonies objected. The Persians insisted. Then the Greek
colonies appealed to the home-country and the stage was set for a quarrel.
For if the truth be told, the Persian Kings regarded the Greek city-states as very
dangerous political institutions and bad examples for al other people who were supposed
to be the patient slaves of the mighty Persian Kings.
Of course, the Greeks enjoyed a certain degree of safety because their country lay hidden
beyond the deep waters of the AEgean. But here their old enemies, the Phoenicians,
stepped forward with offers of help and advice to the Persians. If the Persian King would
provide the soldiers, the Phoenicians would guarantee to deliver the necessary ships to
carry them to Europe. It was the year 492 before the birth of Christ, and Asia made ready
to destroy the rising power of Europe.
As a final warning the King of Persia sent messengers to the Greeks asking for "earth and
water" as a token of their submission. The Greeks promptly threw the messengers into the
nearest wel where they would find both "earth and water" in large abundance and
thereafter of course peace was impossible.
But the Gods of High Olympus watched over their children and when the Phoenician fleet
carrying the Persian troops was near Mount Athos, the Storm-God blew his cheeks until
he almost burst the veins of his brow, and the fleet was destroyed by a terrible hurricane
and the Persians were al drowned.
Two years later they returned. This time they sailed straight across the AEgean Sea and
landed near the vilage of Marathon. As soon as the Athenians heard this they sent their
army of ten thousand men to guard the hils that surrounded the Marathonian plain. At the
same time they despatched a fast runner to Sparta to ask for help. But Sparta was envious
of the fame of Athens and refused to come to her assistance. The other Greek cities
folowed her example with the exception of tiny Plataea which sent a thousand men. On
the twelfth of September of the year 490, Miltiades, the Athenian commander, threw this
little army against the hordes of the Persians. The Greeks broke through the Persian
barrage of arrows and their spears caused terrible havoc among the disorganised Asiatic
troops who had never been caled upon to resist such an enemy.
That night the people of Athens watched the sky grow red with the flames of burning
ships. Anxiously they waited for news. At last a little cloud of dust appeared upon the
road that led to the North. It was Pheidippides, the runner. He stumbled and gasped for
his end was near. Only a few days before had he returned from his errand to Sparta. He
had hastened to join Miltiades. That morning he had taken part in the attack and later he
had volunteered to carry the news of victory to his beloved city. The people saw him fal
and they rushed forward to support him. "We have won," he whispered and then he died,
a glorious death which made him envied of al men.
As for the Persians, they tried, after this defeat, to land near Athens but they found the
coast guarded and disappeared, and once more the land of Helas was at peace.
Eight years they waited and during this time the Greeks were not idle. They knew that a
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final attack was to be expected but they did not agree upon the best way to avert the
danger. Some people wanted to increase the army. Others said that a strong fleet was
necessary for success. The two parties led by Aristides (for the army) and Themistocles
(the leader of the bigger-navy men) fought each other bitterly and nothing was done until
Aristides was exiled. Then Themistocles had his chance and he built al the ships he could
and turned the Piraeus into a strong naval base.
In the year 481 B.C. a tremendous Persian army appeared in Thessaly, a province of
northern Greece. In this hour of danger, Sparta, the great military city of Greece, was
elected commander-in-chief. But the Spartans cared little what happened to northern
Greece provided their own country was not invaded, They neglected to fortify the passes
that led into Greece.
A smal detachment of Spartans under Leonidas had been told to guard the narrow road
between the high mountains and the sea which connected Thessaly with the southern
provinces. Leonidas obeyed his orders. He fought and held the pass with unequaled
bravery. But a traitor by the name of Ephialtes who knew the little byways of Malis guided
a regiment of Persians through the hils and made it possible for them to attack Leonidas in
the rear. Near the Warm Wels—the Thermopylae—a terrible battle was fought.
When night came Leonidas and his faithful soldiers lay dead under the corpses of their
enemies.
But the pass had been lost and the greater part of Greece fel into the hands of the
Persians. They marched upon Athens, threw the garrison from the rocks of the Acropolis
and burned the city. The people fled to the Island of Salamis. Al seemed lost. But on the
20th of September of the year 480 Themistocles forced the Persian fleet to give battle
within the narrow straits which separated the Island of Salamis from the mainland and
within a few hours he destroyed three quarters of the Persian ships.
In this way the victory of Thermopylae came to naught. Xerxes was forced to retire. The
next year, so he decreed, would bring a final decision. He took his troops to Thessaly and
there he waited for spring.
But this time the Spartans understood the seriousness of the hour. They left the safe shelter
of the wal which they had built across the isthmus of Corinth and under the leadership of
Pausanias they marched against Mardonius the Persian general. The united Greeks (some
one hundred thousand men from a dozen different cities) attacked the three hundred thou-
sand men of the enemy near Plataea. Once more the heavy Greek infantry broke through
the Persian barrage of arrows. The Persians were defeated, as they had been at
Marathon, and this time they left for good. By a strange coincidence, the same day that the
Greek armies won their victory near Plataea, the Athenian ships destroyed the enemy's
fleet near Cape Mycale in Asia Minor.
Thus did the first encounter between Asia and Europe end. Athens had covered herself
with glory and Sparta had fought bravely and wel. If these two cities had been able to
come to an agreement, if they had been wiling to forget their little jealousies, they might
have become the leaders of a strong and united Helas.
But alas, they alowed the hour of victory and enthusiasm to slip by, and the same
opportunity never returned.
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ATHENS vs. SPARTA
HOW ATHENS AND SPARTA FOUGHT A LONG AND DISASTROUS WAR
FOR THE LEADERSHIP OF GREECE
ATHENS and Sparta were both Greek cities and their people spoke a common language.
In every other respect they were different. Athens rose high from the plain. It was a city
exposed to the fresh breezes from the sea, wiling to look at the world with the eyes of a
happy child. Sparta, on the other hand, was built at the bottom of a deep valey, and used
the surrounding mountains as a barrier against foreign thought. Athens was a city of busy
trade. Sparta was an armed camp where people were soldiers for the sake of being
soldiers. The people of Athens loved to sit in the sun and discuss poetry or listen to the
wise words of a philosopher. The Spartans, on the other hand, never wrote a single line
that was considered literature, but they knew how to fight, they liked to fight, and they
sacrificed al human emotions to their ideal of military preparedness.
No wonder that these sombre Spartans viewed the success of Athens with malicious hate.
The energy which the defence of the common home had developed in Athens was now
used for purposes of a more peaceful nature. The Acropolis was rebuilt and was made
into a marble shrine to the Goddess Athena. Pericles, the leader of the Athenian
democracy, sent far and wide to find famous sculptors and painters and scientists to make
the city more beautiful and the young Athenians more worthy of their home. At the same
time he kept a watchful eye on Sparta and built high wals which connected Athens with
the sea and made her the strongest fortress of that day.
An insignificant quarrel between two little Greek cities led to the final conflict. For thirty
years the war between Athens and Sparta continued. It ended in a terrible disaster for
Athens.
During the third year of the war the plague had entered the city. More than half of the
people and Pericles, the great leader, had been kiled. The plague was folowed by a
period of bad and untrustworthy leadership. A briliant young felow by the name of
Alcibiades had gained the favor of the popular assembly. He suggested a raid upon the
Spartan colony of Syracuse in Sicily. An expedition was equipped and everything was
ready. But Alcibiades got mixed up in a street brawl and was forced to flee. The general
who succeeded him was a bungler. First he lost his ships and then he lost his army, and the
few surviving Athenians were thrown into the stone-quarries of Syracuse, where they died
from hunger and thirst.
The expedition had kiled al the young men of Athens. The city was doomed. After a long
siege the town surrendered in April of the year 404. The high wals were demolished. The
navy was taken away by the Spartans. Athens ceased to exist as the center of the great
colonial empire which it had conquered during the days of its prosperity. But that
wonderful desire to learn and to know and to investigate which had distinguished her free
citizens during the days of greatness and prosperity did not perish with the wals and the
ships. It continued to live. It became even more briliant.
Athens no longer shaped the destinies of the land of Greece. But now, as the home of the
first great university the city began to influence the minds of inteligent people far beyond
the narrow frontiers of Helas.
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ALEXANDER THE GREAT
ALEXANDER THE MACEDONIAN ESTABLISHES A GREEK WORLD-EMPIRE,
AND WHAT BECAME OF THIS HIGH AMBITION
WHEN the Achaeans had left their homes along the banks of the Danube to look for
pastures new, they had spent some time among the mountains of Macedonia. Ever since,
the Greeks had maintained certain more or less formal relations with the people of this
northern country. The Macedonians from their side had kept themselves wel informed
about conditions in Greece.
Now it happened, just when Sparta and Athens had finished their disastrous war for the
leadership of Helas, that Macedonia was ruled by an extraordinarily clever man by the
name of Philip. He admired the Greek spirit in letters and art but he despised the Greek
lack of self-control in political affairs. It irritated him to see a perfectly good people waste
its men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he settled the difficulty by making himself the
master of al Greece and then he asked his new subjects to join him on a voyage which he
meant to pay to Persia in return for the visit which Xerxes had paid the Greeks one
hundred and fifty years before.
Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start upon this wel-prepared
expedition. The task of avenging the destruction of Athens was left to Philip's son
Alexander, the beloved pupil of Aristotle, wisest of al Greek teachers.
Alexander bade farewel to Europe in the spring of the year 334 B.C. Seven years later he
reached India. In the meantime he had destroyed Phoenicia, the old rival of the Greek
merchants. He had conquered Egypt and had been worshipped by the people of the Nile
valey as the son and heir of the Pharaohs. He had defeated the last Persian king—he had
overthrown the Persian empire he had given orders to rebuild Babylon—he had led his
troops into the heart of the Himalayan mountains and had made the entire world a
Macedonian province and dependency. Then he stopped and announced even more
ambitious plans.
The newly formed Empire must be brought under the influence of the Greek mind. The
people must be taught the Greek language—they must live in cities built after a Greek
model. The Alexandrian soldier now turned school-master. The military camps of
yesterday became the peaceful centres of the newly imported Greek civilisation. Higher
and higher did the flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise, when suddenly
Alexander was stricken with a fever and died in the old palace of King Hammurabi of
Babylon in the year 323.
Then the waters receded. But they left behind the fertile clay of a higher civilisation and
Alexander, with al his childish ambitions and his sily vanities, had performed a most
valuable service. His Empire did not long survive him. A number of ambitious generals
divided the territory among themselves. But they too remained faithful to the dream of a
great world brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge.
They maintained their independence until the Romans added western Asia and Egypt to
their other domains. The strange inheritance of this Helenistic civilisation (part Greek, part
Persian, part Egyptian and Babylonian) fel to the Roman conquerors. During the folowing
centuries, it got such a firm hold upon the Roman world, that we feel its influence in our
own lives this very day.
A SUMMARY
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A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 to 20
THUS far, from the top of our high tower we have been looking eastward. But from this
time on, the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia is going to grow less interesting and I must
take you to study the western landscape.
Before we do this, let us stop a moment and make clear to ourselves what we have seen.
First of al I showed you prehistoric man—a creature very simple in his habits and very
unattractive in his manners. I told you how he was the most defenceless of the many
animals that roamed through the early wilderness of the five continents, but being
possessed of a larger and better brain, he managed to hold his own.
Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold weather, and life on this planet
became so difficult that man was obliged to think three times as hard as ever before if he
wished to survive. Since, however, that "wish to survive" was (and is) the mainspring
which keeps every living being going ful tilt to the last gasp of its breath, the brain of
glacial man was set to work in al earnestness. Not only did these hardy people manage to
exist through the long cold spels which kiled many ferocious animals, but when the earth
became warm and comfortable once more, prehistoric man had learned a number of
things which gave him such great advantages over his less inteligent neighbors that the
danger of extinction (a very serious one during the first half milion years of man's
residence upon this planet) became a very remote one.
I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly plodding along when suddenly
(and for reasons that are not wel understood) the people who lived in the valey of the
Nile rushed ahead and almost over night, created the first centre of civilisation.
Then I showed you Mesopotamia, "the land between the rivers," which was the second
great school of the human race. And I made you a map of the little island bridges of the
AEgean Sea, which carried the knowledge and the science of the old east to the young
west, where lived the Greeks.
Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, caled the Helenes, who thousands of years
before had left the heart of Asia and who had in the eleventh century before our era
pushed their way into the rocky peninsula of Greece and who, since then, have been
known to us as the Greeks. And I told you the story of the little Greek cities that were
realy states, where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was transfigured (that is a big
word, but you can "figure out" what it means) into something quite new, something that
was much nobler and finer than anything that had gone before.
When you look at the map you wil see how by this time civilisation has described a semi-
circle. It begins in Egypt, and by way of Mesopotamia and the AEgean Islands it moves
westward until it reaches the European continent. The first four thousand years, Egyptians
and Babylonians and Phoenicians and a large number of Semitic tribes (please remember
that the Jews were but one of a large number of Semitic peoples) have carried the torch
that was to iluminate the world. They now hand it over to the Indo-European Greeks,
who become the teachers of another Indo-European tribe, caled the Romans. But
meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward along the northern coast of Africa and have
made themselves the rulers of the western half of the Mediterranean just when the eastern
half has become a Greek (or Indo-European) possession.
This, as you shal see in a moment, leads to a terrible conflict between the two rival races,
and out of their struggle arises the victorious Roman Empire, which is to take this
Egyptian-Mesopotamian-Greek civilisation to the furthermost corners of the European
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continent, where it serves as the foundation upon which our modern society is based.
I know al this sounds very complicated, but if you get hold of these few principles, the
rest of our history wil become a great deal simpler. The maps wil make clear what the
words fail to tel.