The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

of

Bengal, conquered the Greek province of the Punjab. The rise of the

Parthian power cut off the Greek kingdom of Bokhara from the Western

world, and it was destroyed, according to the Chinese historians, by a

powerful horde of Tartars a hundred and thirty years after its foundation.

 

We can now return to African soil, and we find that a city of

incomparable splendour has arisen, founded by Alexander and bearing his

name. For as he was on his way to the oasis of Ammon, travelling along

the seacoast, he came to a place a little west of the Nile’s mouth where an

island close to the shore, and the peculiar formation of the land, formed a

natural harbour, while a little way inland was a large lagoon

communicating with the Nile. A few houses were scattered about, and

this, he was told, was the village of Rhacotis, where in the old days the

Pharaohs stationed a garrison to prevent the Greek pirates from coming

on shore. He saw that the spot was well adapted for a city, and with his

usual impetuosity went to work at once to mark it out. When he returned

from the oasis the building of the city had begun, and in a few years it

had become the residence of Ptolemy and the capital of Egypt. It filled

up the space between the sea and the lagoon. On the one side its harbour

was filled with ships which came from Italy and Greece and the lands of

the Atlantic with amber, timber, tin, wine, and oil. On the other side were

the cargo boats that came from the Nile with the precious stones, the

spices, and the beautiful fabrics of the East. The island on which stood

the famous lighthouse was connected with the mainland by means of a

gigantic mole furnished with drawbridges and forts. It is on this mole

that the modern city stands—the site of the old Alexandria is sand.

 

When Ptolemy the First, one of Alexander’s generals, mounted the throne

he applied himself with much caution and dexterity to that difficult

problem the government of Egypt. Had the Greeks been the first

conquerors of the country, it is doubtful whether the wisest policy would

have kept its natives quiet and content. For they were like the Jews, a

proud, ignorant, narrow-minded, religious race who looked upon

themselves as the chosen people of the gods, and upon all foreigners as

unclean things. But they had been taught wisdom by misfortune; they

had felt the bitterness of an Oriental yoke; the feet of the Persians had

been placed upon their necks. On the other hand, the Greeks had lived

for centuries among them, and had assisted them in all their revolts

against the Persian king. During their interlude of independence the

towns had been garrisoned partly by Egyptian and partly by Greek

soldiers: the two nations had grown accustomed to each other. Persia had

finally re-enslaved them, and Alexander had been welcomed as the

saviour of their country. The golden chain of the Pharaohs was broken.

It was impossible to restore the line of ancient kings. The Egyptians

therefore cheerfully submitted to the Ptolemies, who reciprocated this

kindly feeling to the full. They patronised the Egyptian religion, they

built many temples in the ancient style, they went to the city of Memphis

to be crowned, they sacrificed to the Nile at the rising of the waters, and

they assumed the divine titles of the Pharaohs. The priests were content,

and in Egypt the people were always guided by the priests. The Rosetta

Stone, that remarkable monument which, with its inscription in Greek, in

the Egyptian vernacular, and in the sacred hieroglyphics, has afforded the

means of deciphering the mysterious language of the Nile, was a

memorial of gratitude from the Egyptian priests to a Greek king, to whom

in return for favours conferred they erected an image and a golden shrine.

 

But while the Ptolemies were Pharaohs to the Egyptians, they were

Greeks to the colonists of Alexandria, and they founded or favoured that

school of thought upon which modern science is established.

 

There is a great enterprise in which men have always been unconsciously

engaged, but which they will pursue with method as a vocation and an

art, and which they will devoutly adopt as a religious faith as soon as they

realise its glory. It is the conquest of the planet on which we dwell, the

destruction or domestication of the savage forces by which we are

tormented and enslaved. An episode of this war occurring in ancient

Egypt has been described; the war itself began with the rise of our

ancestors into the human state, and when, drawing fire from wood or

stone, they made it serve them night and day the first great victory was

won. But we can conquer Nature only by obeying her laws, and in order

to obey those laws we must first learn what they are.

 

Storms and tides, thunder and lightning and eclipse, the movements of the

heavenly bodies, the changing aspects of the earth, were among all

ancient people regarded as divine phenomena. In the Greek world there

was no despotic caste, but the people clung fondly to their faith, and the

study of Nature which began in Ionia was at first regarded with

abhorrence and dismay. The popular religion was supported by the

genius of Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey were regarded not only as

epic poems but as sacred writ; even the geography had been inspired.

However, when the Greeks began to travel the old legends could no

longer be received. It was soon discovered that the places visited by

Ulysses did not exist, that there was no River Ocean which ran round the

earth, and that the earth was not shaped like a round saucer with the

oracle of Delphi in its centre. The Egyptians laughed in the faces of the

Greeks, and called them children when they talked of their gods of

yesterday, and so well did their pupils profit by their lesson that they soon

laughed at the Egyptians for believing in the gods at all. Xenophanes

declaimed against the Egyptian myth of an earth-walking, dying

resuscitated god. He said that if Osiris was a man they should not

worship him, and that if he was a god they need not lament his sufferings.

This remarkable man was the Voltaire of Greece; there had been

freethinkers before his time, but they had reserved their opinions for

their disciples.

 

Xenophanes declared that the truth should be made known to all. He

lived, like Voltaire, to a great age; he poured forth a multitude of

controversial works; he made it his business to attack Homer, and reviled

him bitterly for having endowed the gods of his poems with the passions

and propensities of men; he denied the old theory of the Golden Age, and

maintained that civilisation was the work of time and of man’s own toil.

His views were no doubt distasteful to the vulgar crowd by whom he was

surrounded, and even to cultivated and imaginative minds which were

sunk in sentimental idolatry, blinded by the splendour of the Homeric

poems. He was, however, in no way interfered with; religious

persecution was unknown in the Greek world except at Athens. In that

city free thought was especially unpopular because it was imported from

abroad. It was the doctrine of those talented Ionians who streamed into

Athens after the Persian wars. When one of these philosophers

announced, in his open-air sermon in the market-place, that the sun which

the common people believed to be alive—the bountiful god Helios which

shone both on mortals and immortals—was nothing but a mass of red-hot

iron; when he declared that those celestial spirits the stars were only

revolving stones; when he asserted that Jupiter, and Venus and Apollo,

Mars, Juno, and Minerva, were mere creatures of the poet’s fancy, and

that if they really existed they ought to be despised; when he said that

over all there reigned, not blind Fate, but a supreme, all seeing Mind,

great wrath was excited among the people. A prophet went about uttering

oracles in a shrill voice, and procured the passing of a decree that all who

denied the religion of the city or who philosophised in matters

appertaining to the gods should be indicted as state criminals. This law

was soon put in force. Damon and Anaxagoras were banished; Aspasia

was impeached for blasphemy, and the tears of Pericles alone saved her;

Socrates was put to death; Plato was obliged to reserve pure reason for a

chosen few, and to adulterate it with revelation for the generality of his

disciples; Aristotle fled from Athens for his life, and became the tutor of

Alexander.

 

Alexander had a passion for the Iliad. His edition had been corrected by

Aristotle; he kept it in a precious casket which he had taken from the

Persian King, and it was afterwards known as the “edition of the casket.”

When he invaded Asia he landed on the plains of Troy, that he might see

the ruins of that celebrated town and hang a garland upon the tomb of

Achilles. But it was not poetry alone that he esteemed; he had imbibed

his master’s universal tastes. When staying at Ephesus he used to spend

hours in the studio of Apelles, sitting down among the boys who ground

colours for the great painter. He delighted in everything that was new

and rare. He invented exploration. He gave a large sum of money to

Aristotle to assist him in composing the history of animals, and employed

a number of men to collect for him in Asia. He sent him a copy of the

astronomical records of the Babylonians, although by that time they had

quarrelled—like Dionysius and Plato, Frederick and Voltaire. It is taken

for granted that Alexander was the one to blame, as if philosophers were

immaculate and private tutors never in the wrong.

 

The Ptolemies were not unworthy followers of Alexander. They

established the Museum, which was a kind of college, with a hall where

the professors dined together, with corridors for promenading lectures,

and a theatre for scholastic festivals and public disputation. Attached to it

also was the Botanical Garden, filled with medicinal and exotic plants; a

menagerie of wild beasts and rare birds; and the famous Library, where

700,000 volumes were arranged on cedar shelves, and where hundreds of

clerks were continually at work copying from scroll to scroll, gluing the

separate strips of papyrus together, smoothing with pumice-stone and

blackening the edges, writing the titles on red labels, and fastening ivory

tops on the sticks round which the rolls were wrapped.

 

All the eminent men of the day were invited to take up their abode at the

Museum, and persons were dispatched into all countries to collect books.

It was dangerous to bring original manuscripts into Egypt—they were at

once seized and copied, the originals being retained. The city of Athens

lent the autograph editions of its dramatists to one of the Ptolemies, and

saw them no more. It was even said that philosophers were sometimes

detained in the same manner.

 

Soon after the wars of Alexander, the “barbarians” were seized with a

desire to make known to their conquerors the history of their native lands.

Berosus, a priest of Babylon, compiled a history of Chaldea; Menander,

and Phoenician, a history of Tyre; and Manetho wrote in Greek, but from

Egyptian sources, a history which Egyptology has confirmed. It was at

the Museum also that the Old Testament was translated under royal

patronage into Greek, and at the same time the Zoroastrian Bible or Zend-Avesta.

 

There was some good work done at the Museum. Among works of

imagination the pastorals of Theocritus have alone obtained the

approbation of posterity. But it was in Alexandria that