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

the Tigris and Euphrates. They

poured forth in successive streams over Persia, Asia Minor,

Greece, Italy, and the whole of Europe from the Danube and the

Rhine to the shores of the Atlantic. They also descended on the

Punjab, or country of the Indus, where they established their

first colony, and thence spread to the region of the Ganges,

and over the Deccan. They intermarried much with the native

women, but divided the men into servile castes, and kept them

in subjection partly by means of an armed aristocracy, partly

by means of religious terror.

 

These then are the elemental lands; China, India, Babylonia,

and Egypt. In these countries civilisation was invented;

history begins with them. The Egyptians manufactured linen

goods, and beautiful glass wares, and drew gold, ivory, and

slaves from the Sudan. Babylonia manufactured tapestry and

carpets. These people were known to one another only by their

products; the wandering Bedouins carried the trade between the

Euphrates and the Nile. A caravan route was also opened between

Babylon and India via Bokhara or Balkh and Samarkand. India

possessed much wealth in precious stones, but the true

resources of that country were its vegetable products and the

skilful manufactures of the natives. India, to use their own

expression, sells grass for gold. From one kind of plant they

extracted a beautiful blue dye: from another they boiled a

juice, which cooled into a crystal, delicate and luscious to

the taste; from another they obtained a kind of wool, which

they spun, wove, bleached, glazed, and dyed into fabrics

transparent as the gossamer, bright as the plumage of the

jungle birds. And India was also the half-way station between

China, Ceylon, and the Spice Islands on the one hand: and of

the countries of Western Asia on the other. It was enriched not

only by its own industry and produce, but by the transit trade

as well.

 

At an early epoch in history, the Chinese became a

great navigating people; they discovered America, at least so

they say; they freighted their junks with cargoes of the

shining fibre, and with musk in porcelain jars; they coasted

along the shores of the Pacific, established colonies in Burmah

and Siam, developed the spice trade of the Indian Archipelago

and the resources of Ceylon, sailed up the shores of Malabar,

entered the Persian Gulf, and even coasted as far as Aden and

the Red Sea. It was probably from them that the Banians of

Gujrat and the Arabs of Yemen acquired the arts of

shipbuilding and navigation. The Indian Ocean became a basin of

commerce; it was whitened by cotton sails. The Phoenicians

explored the desolate waters of the Mediterranean Sea; with the

bright red cloth, and the blue bugles, and the speckled beads,

they tempted the savages of Italy and Greece to trade; they

discovered the silver mines of Spain; they sailed forth through

the Straits of Gibraltar, they braved the storms of the

Atlantic, opened the tin trade of Cornwall, established the

amber diggings of the Baltic. Thus a long thread of commerce

was stretched across the Old World from England and Germany to

China and Japan. Yet, still the great countries in the central

region dwelt in haughty isolation, knowing foreign lands only

by their products until the wide conquests and the superb

administration of the Persians made them members of the same

community. China alone remained outside. Egypt, Babylonia, and

India were united by royal roads with half-way stations in

Palestine and Bokhara, and with seaports in Phoenicia, and on

the western coast of Asia Minor That country is a tableland

belted on all sides by mountains; but beneath the wall of hills

on the western side is a fruitful strip of coast, the estuary

land of four rivers which flow into the Mediterranean parallel

to one another. That coast is Ionia; and opposite to Ionia lies

Greece.

 

The tableland was occupied by an Aryan or Arya nation,

from whom bands of emigrants went forth in two directions. The

Dorians crossed the Hellespont, and, passing through Thrace,

settled in the hill cantons of Northern Greece, and thence

spread over the lower parts of the peninsula. The Ionians

descended to the fruitful western coast, and thence migrated

into Attica, which afterwards sent back colonies to its ancient

birthplace. These two people spoke the same language, and were

of the same descent; but their characters differed as widely as

the cold and barren mountains from the soft and smiling plains.

The Dorians were rude in their manners, and laconic in their

speech, barbarous in their virtues, morose in their joys. The

Ionians lived among holidays, they could do nothing without

dance and song. The Dorians founded Sparta, a republic which

was in reality a camp, consisting of soldiers fed by slaves.

The girls were educated to be viragoes; the boys to bear

torture, like the Red Indians, with a smile. The wives were

breeding-machines, belonging to the state; a council of elders

examined the new-born children, and selected only the finer

specimens, in order to keep up the good old Spartan breed. They

had no commerce and no arts; they were as filthy in their

persons as they were narrow in their minds. But the Athenians

were the true Greeks, as they exist at the present day;

intellectual, vivacious, inquisitive, shrewd, artistic,

patriotic, and dishonest; ready to die for their country, or to

defraud it. The Greeks received the first rudiments of

knowledge from Phoenicia; the alphabet was circulated

throughout the country by means of the Olympian fairs; colonies

were sent forth all round the Mediterranean; and those of Ionia

and the Delta of the Nile obtained partial access to the arts

and sciences of Babylon and Memphis.

 

The Persian wars developed the genius of the Greeks. The Persian

conquests opened to them the University of Egypt. The immense area of

the Greek world, extending from the Crimea to the straits of

Gibraltar, for at one time the Greeks had cities in Morocco; the

variety of ideas which they thus gathered, and which they interchanged at

the great festival, where every kind of talent was honoured and

rewarded the spirit of noble rivalry, which made city contend

with city, and citizen with citizen, in order to obtain an

Olympian reputation; the complete freedom from theology in art;

the tastes and manners of the land; the adoration of beauty;

the nudity of the gymnasium: all these sufficiently explain the

unexampled progress of the nation, and the origin of that

progress, as in all other cases, is to be found in physical

geography. Greece was divided into natural cantons; each state

was a fortress; while Egypt, Assyria, India, and China were

wide and open plains, which cavalry could sweep, and which

peasants with their sickles could not defend. But the rivalry

of the Greeks among themselves, so useful to the development of

mental life, prevented them from combining into one great

nation; and Alexander, although he was a Greek by descent, for

he had the right of contending at the Olympian games, conquered

the East with an army of barbarians, his Greek troops being

merely a contingent.

 

But the kingdoms of Asia and Egypt were Greek, and in Alexandria

the foundations of science were laid. The astrolabes which had been

invented by the Egyptians were improved by the Greeks and afterwards

by the Arabs, were adapted to purposes of navigation by the Portuguese,

and were developed to the sextant of the nineteenth century. The

Egyptians had invented the blow-pipe, the crucible, and the

alembic; the Alexandrines commenced or continued the pursuit of

alchemy, which the Arabs also preserved, and which has since

grown into the science of Lavoisier and Faraday. Hippocrates

separated medicine from theology; his successors dissected and

experimented at Alexandria, learning something no doubt from

th Egyptian school; the Arabs followed in a servile manner the

medicine of the Greeks, and the modern Europeans obtained from

the Canon of Avicenna the first elements of a science which has

made much progress, but which is yet in its infancy, and which

will some day transform us into new beings. The mathematical

studies of the Alexandrines were also serviceable to mankind,

and the work of one of their professors is a text-book in this

country; they discovered the Precession of the Equinoxes; and

the work which they did in Conic Sections enabled Kepler to

discover the true laws of the planetary motions. But Alexandria

did not possess that liberty which is the true source of

continued progress. With slaves below and with despots above,

the mind was starved in its roots, and stifled in its bud,

dried and ticketed in a museum. The land itself had begun to

languish and decay, when a new power arose in the West.

 

The foot of Italy was lined with Greek towns, and these had

spread culture through the peninsula, among a people of a kindred

race. They dwelt in cities, with municipal governments, public

buildings, and national schools. One Italian city, founded by

desperadoes, adopted a career of war; but the brigands were

also industrious farmers and wise politicians; they conciliated

the cities whom they conquered. Rome became a supreme republic,

ruling a number of minor republics, whose municipal

prerogatives were left undisturbed, who paid no tribute save

military service. The wild Gauls of Lombardy were subdued. The

Greeks on the coast were the only foreigners who retained their

freedom in the land. They called over Pyrrhus to protect them

from the Romans; but the legion conquered the phalanx, the

broadsword vanquished the Macedonian spear. The Asiatic

Carthaginians were masters of the sea; half Sicily belonged to

them; they were, therefore, neighbours of the Romans. They had

already menaced the cities of the southern coast; the Romans

were already jealous and distrustful; they had now a Monroe

doctrine concerning the peninsula: an opportunity occurred, and

they stepped out into the world. The first Punic war gave them

Sicily, the second Punic war gave them Spain, the third Punic

war gave them Africa.

 

Rome also extended her power towards the East. She did not invade,

she did not conquer, she did not ask for presents and taxes, she merely

offered her friendship and protection. She made war, it is true, but only

on behalf of her allies. And so kingdom after kingdom, province after

province, fell into her vast and patient arms. She became at first the

arbiter and afterwards the mistress of the world. Her legions

halted only on the banks of the Euphrates, and on the shores of

the Sahara, where a wild waste of sand and a sea-horizon

appeared to proclaim that life was at an end. She entered the

unknown world beyond the Alps, established a chain of forts

along the banks of the Danube and the Rhine from the Black Sea

to the Baltic, covered France with noble cities, and made York

a Roman town. The Latin language was planted in all the

countries which this people conquered, except in those where

Alexander had preceded them. The empire was therefore divided

by language into the Greek and Latin world. Greece, Asia Minor,

Syria, and Egypt belonged to the Greek world: Italy, Africa,

Spain, and Gaul belonged to the Latin world. But the Roman law

was everywhere in force, though not to the extinction of the

native laws. In Egypt, for instance, the Romans revived some

of the wise enactments of the Pharaohs which had been abrogated

by the Ptolemies. The old courts of injustice were swept away.

Tribunals were established which resembled those of the English

in India. Men of all races, and of all religions, came before a

judge of a foreign race, who sat high above their schisms and

dissensions, who looked down upon them all with impartial

contempt, and who reverenced the law which was entrusted to his

care. But the provinces were forced to support not only a court

but a