The Life of Greece

In 334 he returned to Athens, and—probably aided by funds from Alexander—opened a school of rhetoric and philosophy. He chose as its home the most elegant of Athens’ gymnasiums, a group of buildings dedicated to Apollo Lyceus (God of Shepherds), surrounded with shady gardens and covered walks. In the morning he taught advanced subjects to regular students; in the afternoon he lectured to a more popular audience, probably on rhetoric, poetry, ethics, and politics. He collected here a large library, a zoological garden, and a museum of natural history. The school came to be called the Lyceum, and the group and its philosophy were named Peripatetic from the covered walks (peripatoi) along which Aristotle liked to move with his students as he discoursed.¹⁴⁷ A sharp rivalry developed between the Lyceum, whose students were mostly of the middle class, the Academy, which drew its membership largely from the aristocracy, and the school of Isocrates, which was frequented chiefly by colonial Greeks. The rivalry was eased in time by the emphasis of Isocrates on rhetoric, of the Academy on mathematics, metaphysics, and politics, and of the Lyceum on natural science. Aristotle set his pupils to gathering and co-ordinating knowledge in every field: the customs of barbarians, the constitutions of the Greek cities, the chronology of victors in the Pythian games and the Athenian Dionysia, the organs and habits of animals, the character and distribution of plants, and the history of science and philosophy. These researches became a treasury of data upon which he drew, sometimes too confidently, for his varied and innumerable treatises.

For the layman he wrote some twenty-seven popular dialogues, which Cicero and Quintilian considered equal to Plato’s; it was chiefly by these that he was known in antiquity.¹⁴⁸ These dialogues were among the casualties of the barbarian conquest of Rome. What remains to us is a mass of technical, highly abstract, and inimitably dull works rarely referred to by ancient scholars, and apparently composed, in the last twelve years of his life, of notes made for his lectures by himself, or from his lectures by his pupils. These technical compendiums were not known outside the Lyceum until they were published by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century B.C.¹⁴⁹ Forty of them survive, but Diogenes Laertius mentions 360 more—probably brief monographs. In these ashes of scholarship we must seek the once living thought that in later ages won for Aristotle the title of The Philosopher. We must approach him expecting no brilliance like Plato’s and no wit like Diogenes’, but only a rich argosy of knowledge, and such conservative wisdom as befits the friend and pensioner of kings.*

2. The Scientist

Aristotle has traditionally been considered as primarily a philosopher. Perhaps this is a mistake. Let us, if only for a fresh view, consider him chiefly as a scientist.

His curious mind is interested, to begin with, in the process and technique of reasoning; and so acutely does he analyze these that his “Organon,” or Instrument—the name given after his death to his logical treatises—became the textbook of logic for two thousand years. He longs to think clearly, though he seldom, in his extant works, succeeds; he spends half his time defining his terms, and then feels that he has solved the problem. Definition itself he defines definitively as the specification of an object or idea by naming the genus or class to which it belongs (“man is an animal”) and the specific difference that distinguishes it from all other members of that class (“man is a rational animal”). It is characteristic of his methodical way that he arranged in ten “categories” the basic aspects under which anything may be considered: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, activity, passivity—a classification that some writers have found an aid in the amplification of their flagging thought.

He accepts the senses as the only source of knowledge. Universals are generalized ideas, not innate but formed from many perceptions of like objects; they are conceptions, not things.¹⁵⁰ He lays down resolutely, as the axiom of all logic, the principle of contradiction: “It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing in the same relation.”¹⁵¹ He exposes the fallacies into which sophists fall or lure us. He criticizes his predecessors for having drawn the universe, or their theories of it, out of their heads, instead of devoting themselves to patient observation and experiment.¹⁵² His ideal of deductive reasoning is the syllogism—a trio of propositions of which the third follows necessarily from the others; but he recognizes that a syllogism, to avoid begging the question, must presuppose a wide induction to make its major premise probable. Though in his philosophical treatises he too often loses himself in deductive reasoning, he lauds induction, accumulates in his scientific works a mass of specific observations, and occasionally records his own or others’ experiments.* With all his errors he is the father of scientific method, and the first man known to have organized co-operative scientific research.

He takes up science where Democritus left it, and dares to enter every field. He is weakest in mathematics and physics, and confines himself there to a study of first principles. He seeks in the Physics not new discoveries but clear definitions of the terms used—matter, motion, space, time, continuity, infinite, change, end. Motion and space are continuous, they are not made up, as Zeno assumed, of small indivisible moments or parts; the “infinite” exists potentially, but not actually.¹⁵³ He feels, though he does nothing to solve, the problems that were to arouse Newton—inertia, gravity, motion, velocity; he has some idea of the parallelogram of forces, and states the law of the lever: “The moving weight will more easily move” (the object) “the farther away it is from the fulcrum.”¹⁵⁴

He argues that the heavenly bodies—certainly the earth—are spherical, for only a spherical earth could explain the shape of the moon when it is eclipsed by the intervention of the earth between it and the sun.¹⁵⁵ He has an admirable sense of geological time; periodically but imperceptibly, he tells us, the sea is replaced by land and land by the sea;¹⁵⁶ countless nations and civilizations have appeared and disappeared, whether through swift catastrophe or slow time: “Probably every art and philosophy has been repeatedly developed to the utmost and has perished again.”¹⁵⁷ Heat is the chief agent of geological and meteorological changes. He hazards explanations of clouds, fog, dew, frost, rain, snow, hail, wind, thunder, lightning, the rainbow, and meteors. His theories are often bizarre; but the epochal importance of the little treatise on meteorology is that it invokes no supernatural agencies, but seeks to account for the apparent whims of the weather through natural causes operating in certain sequences and regularities. Natural science could go no further until invention gave it instruments of greater scope and precision in observation and measurement.

It is in biology that Aristotle is most at home, observes most widely and abundantly, and makes the most mistakes. The consolidation of previous discoveries in the final establishment of this vital science is his supreme achievement. With the help of his pupils, he gathered data on the fauna and flora of the Aegean countries, and brought together the first scientific collections of animals and plants. If we may follow Pliny,¹⁵⁸ Alexander gave orders to his hunters, gamekeepers, fishermen, and others to supply Aristotle with whatever species and information he might request. The philosopher apologizes for his interest in lowly things: “In all natural objects there lies some marvel, and if any one despises the contemplation of the lower animals, he must despise himself.”¹⁵⁹

He classifies the animal kingdom into enaima and anaima—blooded and bloodless—approximately corresponding to our “vertebrates” and “invertebrates.” He subdivides the bloodless animals into testaceans, crustaceans, mollusks, and insects; the sanguineous into fishes, amphibians, birds, and mammals. He covers an impressively vast and varied field: organs of digestion, excretion, sensation, locomotion, reproduction, and defense; the types and ways of fishes, birds, reptiles, apes, and hundreds of other groups; their pairing seasons and their methods of bearing and rearing their young; the phenomena of puberty, menstruation, conception, pregnancy, abortion, heredity, twins; the habitats and migrations of animals, their parasites and diseases, their modes of sleep and hibernation. . . . He gives an excellent account of the life of the bee.¹⁶⁰ He is full of queer incidental observations: that the blood of oxen coagulates more rapidly than that of most other animals; that some male animals, especially the goat, have been known to give milk; that “in both sexes the horse is the most salacious of animals after man.*¹⁶¹

He is particularly interested in the reproductive structures and habits of animals, and marvels at the multiplicity of ways in which nature achieves the continuance of species, “preserving the type when she is unable to preserve the individual”;¹⁶² in this field his work remained unequaled until the last century. The life of animals moves about two foci—eating and procreation.¹⁶³ “The female has an organ which must be regarded as an ovary, for it contains that which at first is undifferentiated egg, and which becomes by differentiation many eggs.”†¹⁶⁴ The female element contributes to the embryo material and food, the male element contributes energy and movement; the female is the passive element, the male is the activating agent.¹⁶⁵ Aristotle rejects the opinions of Empedocles and Democritus, that the sex of the embryo is determined by the temperature of the womb, or by the preponderance of one reproductive element over the other, and then reformulates the theories as his own: “Whenever the formative (male) principle fails to gain the upper hand, and from deficient warmth fails properly to cook the material and so fashion it into its own shape, then will this material pass over into . . . the female.”¹⁶⁶ “Sometimes,” he adds, “women bring forth three or even four children, especially in certain parts of the world. The largest number ever brought forth is five, and such an occurrence has been witnessed on several occasions. There was once upon a time a woman who had twenty children at four births; and most of them grew up.”¹⁶⁷

He anticipates many theories of nineteenth-century biology. He believes that the organs and characteristics of the embryo are formed by tiny particles (the “gemmules” of Darwin’s “pangenesis”) that pass from every part of the adult into the reproductive elements.¹⁶⁸ Like Von Baer he teaches that in the embryo the characters belonging to the genus appear first, those belonging to the species second, those belonging to the individual third.¹⁶⁹ He states a principle on which Herbert Spencer prided himself, that the fertility of organisms, by and large, varies inversely as the complexity of their development.¹⁷⁰ His description of the chick embryo shows him at his best:

If you wish, try this experiment. Take twenty or more eggs and let them be incubated by two or more hens. Then each day, from the second to that of hatching, remove an egg, break it, and examine it. . . . With the common hen the embryo becomes first visible after three days. . . . The heart appears like a speck of blood, beating and moving as though endowed with life; and from it two veins with blood in them pass in a convoluted course, and a membrane carrying bloody fibers from the vein-ducts now envelops the yolk. . . . When the egg is ten days old, the chick and all its parts are distinctly visible.¹⁷¹

The human embryo, Aristotle believes, develops like the chick: “In the same way the infant lies within its mother’s womb . . . for the nature of the bird can be likened to that of man.”¹⁷² His theory of analogous organs enables him to see the animal world as one: “A nail is the analogue of a claw, a hand of a crab’s nipper, a feather of a fish’s scale.”¹⁷³ At times he comes close to a doctrine of evolution:

Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation. . . . Thus, next after lifeless things in the upward scale comes the genus of plants, relatively lifeless as compared with animals, but alive as compared with corporeal objects. There is in plants a continuous scale of ascent towards the animal. There are certain objects in the sea concerning which one would be at a loss to determine whether they be animal or vegetable. . . . The sponge is in every respect like a vegetable. . . . Some animals are rooted, and perish if detached. . . . In regard to sensibility, some animals give no sign of it, others indicate it obscurely. . . . And so throughout the animal scale there is a graduated differentiation.¹⁷⁴

He considers the ape an intermediate form between man and other viviparous animals.¹⁷⁵ He rejects Empedocles’ notion of the natural selection of accidental mutations; there is no fortuity in evolution; the lines of development are determined by the inherent urge of each form, species, and genus to develop itself to the fullest realization of its nature. There is design, but it is less a guidance from without than an inner drive or “entelechy”* by which each thing is drawn to its natural fulfillment.

Intermingled with these brilliant suggestions there are (as might be expected from the hindsight of twenty-three centuries) errors so numerous, and some so gross, that we are warranted in suspecting that the zoological works of Aristotle have suffered some admixture of his own notes with those of his students.¹⁷⁶ The History of Animals is a mine of mistakes. We learn there that mice die if they drink in summer; that elephants suffer from only two diseases—catarrh and flatulence; that all animals but man develop rabies when bitten by a mad dog; that eels are generated spontaneously; that only men have palpitation of the heart; that the yolk of several eggs shaken together collects into the middle; that eggs float in strong brine.¹⁷⁷ Aristotle knows the internal organs of animals better than those of men, for neither he nor Hippocrates seems to have overridden religious taboos and practiced human dissection.¹⁷⁸ He thinks that man has only eight ribs, that women have fewer teeth than men,¹⁷⁹ that the heart lies higher than the lungs, that the heart and not the brain is the seat of sensation,*¹⁸⁰ that the function of the brain is (literally) to cool the blood.¹⁸¹ Finally he (or some ponderous proxy) carries the theory of design to depths that make the judicious smile. “It is evident that plants are created for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of men.” “Nature has made the buttocks for repose, since quadrupeds can stand without fatigue, but man needs a seat.”¹⁸² And yet even this last passage reveals the scientist: the author takes it for granted that man is an animal, and seeks natural causes for the anatomical differences between beasts and men. All in all, the History of Animals is Aristotle’s supreme work, and the greatest scientific product of fourth-century Greece. Biology waited twenty centuries for its equal.

3. The Philosopher

Whether through a sincere piety, or through a cautious respect for the opinions of mankind, Aristotle becomes less of a scientist and more of a metaphysician as he turns to the study of man. He defines the soul (psyche), or vital principle as “the primary entelechy of an organism”—i.e., the organism’s inherent and destined form, its urge and directon of growth. The soul is not something added to, or residing in, the body, it is coextensive with the body; it is the body itself in its “powers of self-nourishment, self-growth, and selfdecay”; it is the sum of the functions of the organism; it is to the body as vision is to the eye.¹⁸³ Nevertheless, this functional aspect is basic; it is the functions that make the structures, the desires that mold the organs, the soul that forms the body: “All natural bodies are organs of the soul.”†¹⁸⁴

The soul has three grades—nutritive, sensitive, and rational. Plants share with animals and men the nutritive soul—the capacity for self-nourishment and internal growth; animals and men have in addition the sensitive soul—the capacity for sensation; the higher animals as well as men have the “passive rational” soul—the capacity for the simpler forms of intelligence; man alone has the “active rational” soul—the capacity to generalize and originate. This last is a part or emanation of that creative and rational power of the universe which is God; and as such it cannot die.¹⁸⁷ But this immortality is impersonal; what survives is the power, not the personality; the individual is a unique and mortal compound of nutritive, sensitive, and rational faculties; he achieves immortality only relatively, through reproduction, and only impersonally, through death.*

Just as the soul is the “form” of the body, so God is the “form” or “entelechy” of the world—its inherent nature, functions, and purposes.† All causes‡ at last go back to the First Cause Uncaused, all motions to the Prime Mover Unmoved; we must assume some origin or beginning for the motion and power in the world, and this source is God. As God is the sum and source of all motion, so he is the sum and goal of all purposes in nature; he is the Final, as well as the First, Cause. Everywhere we see things moving to specific ends; the front teeth grow sharp to cut food, the molars grow flat to grind it; the eyelid winks to protect the eye, the pupil expands in the dark to let in more light; the tree sends its roots into the earth, its shoots toward the sun.¹⁸⁹ As the tree is drawn by its inherent nature, power, and purposes toward the light, so the world is drawn by its inherent nature, power, and purposes, which are God. God is not the creator of the material world, but its energizing form; he moves it not from behind, but as an inner direction or goal, as something beloved moves the lover.¹⁹⁰ Finally, says Aristotle, God is pure thought, rational soul, contemplating itself in the eternal forms that constitute at once the essence of the world, and God.

The purpose of art, like that of metaphysics, is to capture the essential form of things. It is an imitation or representation of life,¹⁹¹ but no mechanical copy; that which it imitates is the soul of the matter, not the body or matter itself; and through this intuition and mirroring of essence even the representation of an ugly object may be beautiful. Beauty is unity, the co-operation and symmetry of the parts in a whole. In drama this unity is primarily a unity of action; the plot must concern itself with one action chiefly, and may admit other actions only to advance or illuminate this central tale. If the work is to be of high excellence the action must be noble or heroic. “Tragedy,” says Aristotle’s celebrated definition, “is a representation of an action that is heroic and complete and of a certain magnitude, by means of language enriched with all kinds of ornament . . . it represents men in action, and does not use narrative; and through pity and fear it brings relief to these and similar emotions.”¹⁹² By arousing our profoundest feelings, and then quieting them through a subsiding denouement, the tragic drama offers us a harmless and yet soul-deepening expression of emotions that might otherwise accumulate to neurosis or violence; it shows us pains and sorrows more awful than our own, and sends us home discharged and cleansed. In general there is a pleasure in contemplating any work of true art; and it is the mark of a civilization to provide the soul with works worthy of such contemplation. For “nature requires not only that we should be properly employed, but that we should be able to enjoy our leisure in an honorable way.”¹⁹³

What, then, is the good life? Aristotle answers, with frank simplicity, that it is the happy life; and he proposes to consider, in his Ethics,* not (like Plato) how to make men good, but how to make them happy. All other things than happiness, he thinks, are sought with some other end in view; happiness alone is sought for its own sake.¹⁹⁴ Certain things are necessary to lasting happiness: good birth, good health, good looks, good luck, good reputation, good friends, good money, and goodness.¹⁹⁵ “No man can be happy who is absolutely ugly.”¹⁹⁶ “As for those who say that he who is being tortured on the wheel, or falls into great misfortunes, is happy provided only he be good, they talk nonsense.”¹⁹⁷ Aristotle quotes, with a candor rare in philosophers, the answer of Simonides to Hieron’s wife, who had asked whether it was better to be wise or to be rich: “Rich, for we see the wise spending their time at the doors of the rich.”¹⁹⁸ But wealth is merely means; it does not of itself satisfy anyone but the miser; and since it is relative, it seldom satisfies a man long. The secret of happiness is action, the exercise of energy in a way suited to a man’s nature and circumstances. Virtue is a practical wisdom, an intelligent appraisal of one’s own good.¹⁹⁹ Usually it is a golden mean between two extremes; intelligence is needed to find the mean, and self-control (enkrateia, inner strength) to practice it. “He who is angry at what and with whom he ought,” says a typically Aristotelian sentence, “and further, in right manner and time, and for a proper length of time, is praised.”²⁰⁰ Virtue is not an act but a habit of doing the right thing. At first it has to be enforced by discipline, since the young cannot judge wisely in these matters; in time that which was the result of compulsion becomes a habit, “a second nature,” and almost as pleasant as desire.

Aristotle concludes, quite contrary to his initial placing of happiness in action, that the best life is the life of thought. For thought is the mark or special excellence of man, and “the proper work of man is a working of the soul in accordance with reason.”²⁰¹ “The most fortunate of men is he who combines a measure of prosperity with scholarship, research, or contemplation; such a man comes closest to the life of the gods.”²⁰² “Those who wish for an independent pleasure should seek it in philosophy, for all other pleasures need the assistance of men.”²⁰³

4. The Statesman

As ethics is the science of individual happiness, so politics is the science of collective happiness. The function of the state is to organize a society for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. “A state is a collective body of citizens sufficient in themselves for all the purposes of life.”²⁰⁴ It is a natural product, for “man is by nature a political animal”²⁰⁵—i.e., his instincts lead him to association. “The state is by nature prior to the family and the individual”: man as we know him is born into an already organized society, which molds him in its image.

Having collected and studied, with his students, 158 Greek constitutions,* Aristotle divided them into three types: monarchy, aristocracy, and timocracy—government respectively by power, by birth, and by excellence. Any one of these forms may be good according to time, place, and circumstance. “Though one form of government may be better than others,” reads a sentence which every American should memorize, “yet there is no reason to prevent another from being preferable to it under particular conditions.”²⁰⁸ Each form of government is good when the ruling power seeks the good of all rather than its own profit; in the contrary case each is bad. Each type, therefore, has a degenerate analogue when it becomes government for the governors instead of for the governed; then monarchy lapses into despotism, aristocracy into oligarchy, timocracy into democracy in the sense of rule by the common man.²⁰⁷ When the single ruler is good and able, monarchy is the best form of government; when he is a selfish autocrat we have tyranny, which is the worst form of government. An aristocratic government may be beneficial for a time, but aristocracies tend to deteriorate. “Noble character is now seldom found among those of noble birth, most of whom are good for nothing. . . . Highly gifted families often degenerate into maniacs, as, for example, the descendants of Alcibiades and the elder Dionysius; those that are stable often degenerate into fools and dullards, like the descendants of Cimon, Pericles, and Socrates.”²⁰⁶ When aristocracy decays it is usually replaced by a plutocratic oligarchy, which is government by wealth. This is better than the despotism of a king or a mob; but it gives power to men whose souls have been cramped by the petty calculations of trade, or the villainous taking of interest,²⁰⁹ and issues, as like as not, in the conscienceless exploitation of the poor.²¹⁰

Democracy—which here means government by the demos, by the common citizen—is just as dangerous as oligarchy, for it is based upon the passing victory of the poor over the rich in the struggle for power, and leads to a suicidal chaos. Democracy is at its best when it is dominated by peasant proprietors; it is at its worst when ruled by the urban rabble of mechanics and tradesmen.²¹¹ It is true that the “multitude judge of many things better than any one person, and that from their numbers they are less liable to corruption, as water is from its quantity.”²¹² But government requires special ability and knowledge; and “it is impossible for one who lives the life of a mechanic or hired servant to acquire excellence”²¹³—i.e., good character, training, and judgment. All men are created unequal; “equality is just, but only between equals”;²¹⁴ and the upper classes will as readily make seditions if an unnatural equality is enforced, as the lower classes will rebel when inequality is unnaturally extreme.*²¹⁵ When a democracy is dominated by the lower classes the rich are taxed to provide funds for the poor. “The poor receive it and again want the same supply, while the giving it is like pouring water into a sieve.”²¹⁷ And yet a wise conservative will not let people starve. “The true patriot in a democracy ought to take care that the majority are not too poor . . . he should endeavor that they may enjoy perpetual plenty; and as this is also advantageous to the rich, what can be saved out of the public money should be divided among the poor in such quantity as may enable each of them to buy a little field.”²¹⁸

Having thus given back almost as much as he took away, Aristotle offers some modest recommendations, not for a utopia but for a moderately better society.

We proceed to inquire what form of government and manner of life is best for communities in general, not adapting it to that superior virtue which is above the reach of the common people, or that education which only every advantage of nature and fortune can furnish, nor to those imaginary plans which may be formed at pleasure; but to that mode of life which the greater part of mankind can attain to, and that government which most cities may establish.²¹⁹ . . . Whoever would establish a government upon community of goods ought to consult the experience of many years, which would plainly enough inform him whether such a scheme is useful; for almost all things have already been found out.²²⁰ . . . What is common to many is taken least care of; for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others.²²¹ . . . It is necessary to begin by assuming a principle of general application, viz., that the part of the state which desires the continuance of the new constitution ought to be stronger than that which does not.²²² . . . It is plain, then, that those states are best instituted wherein the middle classes are a larger and more formidable part than either the rich or the poor. . . . Whenever the number of those in the middle state has been too small, those who were the more numerous, whether the rich or the poor, always overpowered them, and assumed to themselves the administration of public affairs. . . . When either the rich get the better of the poor, or the poor of the rich, neither of them will establish a free state.²²³

To avoid these illiberal dictatorships from above or below, Aristotle proposes a “mixed constitution” or “timocracy”—a combination of aristocracy and democracy, in which the suffrage will be restricted to landowners, and a strong middle class will be the balance wheel and pivot of power. “The land ought to be divided into two parts, one of which should belong to the community in general, the other to the individuals separately.”²²⁴ All the citizens will own land; they “are to eat at public tables in certain companies”; and only they shall vote or bear arms. They will constitute a small minority—ten thousand at most—of the population. “None of them should be permitted to exercise any mechanic employment or live by trade, for these are ignoble, and destroy excellence.”²²⁵ But “neither should they be husbandmen; . . . the husbandmen should be a separate order of people”—presumably slaves. The citizens will elect the public officials, and hold each to account at the end of his term,. “Laws, properly enacted, should define the issue of all cases as far as possible, and leave as little as possible to the discretion of the judges. . . .”²²⁶ “It is better that law should rule than any individual. . . . He who entrusts any man with the supreme power gives it to a wild beast, for such his appetites sometimes make him; passion influences those who are in power, even the very best of men; but law is reason without desire.”²²⁷ The state so constructed shall regulate property, industry, marriage, the family, education, morals, music, literature, and art. “It is even more necessary to take care that the increase of the people should not exceed a certain number . . . to neglect this is to bring certain poverty upon the citizens.”²²⁸ “Nothing imperfect or maimed shall be brought up.”²²⁹ Out of these sound foundations will grow the flowers of civilization and tranquillity. “Since the highest virtue is intelligence, the pre-eminent duty of the state is not to train the citizens to military excellence, but to educate them for the right use of peace.”²³⁰

It is unnecessary to sit in judgment upon Aristotle’s work. Never before, so far as we know, had anyone reared so impressive an edifice of thought. When a man covers a vast field many errors may be forgiven him if the result adds to our comprehension of life. Aristotle’s faults—or those of the volumes that we perhaps wrongly count as the considered product of his pen—are too obvious to need retailing. He is a logician, but is quite capable of bad reasoning; he lays down the laws of rhetoric and poetry, but his books are a jungle of disorder, and no breath of imagination stirs their dusty leaves. And yet, if we penetrate this verbiage we find a wealth of wisdom, and an intellectual industry that opened many paths in the country of the mind. He did not quite found biology, or constitutional history, or literary criticism—there are no beginnings—but he did more for them than any other ancient whom we know. To him science and philosophy owe a multitude of terms that in their Latin forms have facilitated learned communication and thought—principle, maxim, faculty, mean, category, energy, motive, habit, end. . . . He was, as Pater called him, “the first of the Schoolmen”;²³¹ and his long ascendancy over philosophical method and speculation suggests the fertility of his ideas and the depth of his insight. His treatises on ethics and politics stand above every rival in fame and influence. When all deductions have been made he still remains “the master of those who know,” an encouraging testimony to the elastic range of the human intellect, and a comforting inspiration to those who labor to bring man’s scattered knowledge together into perspective and understanding.

CHAPTER XXII

Alexander

I. THE SOUL OF A CONQUEROR

THE intellectual career of Aristotle, after he left his royal pupil, paralleled the military career of Alexander; both lives were expressions of conquest and synthesis. Perhaps it was the philosopher who instilled into the mind of the youth that ardor for unity which gave some grandeur to Alexander’s victories; more probably that resolve descended to him from his father’s ambitions, and was fused into a passion by his maternal blood. If we would understand Alexander we must always remember that he bore in his veins the drunken vigor of Philip and the barbaric intensity of Olympias. Furthermore, Olympias claimed descent from Achilles. Therefore the Iliad had a special fascination for Alexander; when he crossed the Hellespont he was, in his interpretation, retracing the steps of Achilles; when he conquered Hither Asia he was completing the work that his ancestor had begun at Troy. Through all his campaigns he carried with him a copy of the Iliad annotated by Aristotle; often he placed it under his pillow at night beside his dagger, as if to symbolize the instrument and the goal.

Leonidas, an austere Molossian, trained the boy’s body, Lysimachus taught him letters, Aristotle tried to form his mind. Philip was anxious that Alexander should study philosophy, “so that,” he said, “you may not do a great many things of the sort that I am sorry to have done.”¹ To some extent Aristotle made a Hellene of him; through all his life Alexander admired Greek literature, and envied Greek civilization. To two Greeks sitting with him at the wild banquet at which he slew Cleitus he said, “Do you not feel like demigods among savages when you are sitting in company with these Macedonians?”²

Physically, Alexander was an ideal youth. He was good in every sport: a swift runner, a dashing horseman, a brilliant fencer, a practiced bowman, a fearless hunter. His friends wished him to enter the foot races at Olympia; he answered that he would be willing, if his opponents were kings. When all others had failed to tame the giant horse Bucephalus, Alexander succeeded; seeing which, says Plutarch, Philip acclaimed him with prophetic words: “My son, Macedonia is too small for you; seek out a larger empire, worthier of you.”³ Even on the march his wild energy found vent in shooting arrows at passing objects, or in alighting from, and remounting, his chariot at full speed. When a campaign lagged he would go hunting and, unaided and on foot, face any animal in combat; once, after an encounter with a lion, he was pleased to hear it said that he had fought as though it had been a duel to decide which of the two should be king.⁴ He liked hard work and dangerous enterprises, and could not bear to rest. He laughed at some of his generals, who had so many servants that they themselves could find nothing to do. “I wonder,” he told them, “that you with your experience do not know that those who work sleep more soundly than those for whom other people work. Have you yet to learn that the greatest need after our victories is to avoid the vices and the weaknesses of those whom we have conquered?”⁵ He grudged the time given to sleep, and said that “sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was mortal.”⁶ He was abstemious in eating, and, until his last years, in drinking, though he loved to linger with his friends over a goblet of wine. He despised rich foods, and refused the famous chefs who were offered him, saying that a night march gave him a good appetite for breakfast, and a light breakfast gave him an appetite for dinner.⁷ Perhaps in consequence of these habits his complexion was remarkably clear, and his body and breath, says Plutarch, “were so fragrant as to perfume the clothes that he wore.”⁸ Discounting the flattery of those who painted or carved or engraved his likeness, we know from his contemporaries that he was handsome beyond all precedents for a king, with expressive features, soft blue eyes, and luxuriant auburn hair. He helped to introduce into Europe the custom of shaving the beard, on the ground that whiskers offered too ready a handle for an enemy to grasp.^8a In this little item, perhaps, lay his greatest influence upon history.

Mentally he was an ardent student, who was too soon consumed with responsibilities to reach maturity of mind. Like so many men of action, he mourned that he could not be also a thinker. “He had,” says Plutarch, “a violent thirst and passion for learning, which increased as time went on. . . . He was a lover of all kinds of reading and knowledge,” and it was his delight, after a day of marching or fighting, to sit up half the night conversing with scholars and scientists. “For my part,” he wrote to Aristotle, “I had rather surpass others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion.”⁹ Possibly at Aristotle’s suggestion he sent a commission to explore the sources of the Nile, and he gave funds generously for a variety of scientific inquiries. Whether a longer life would have brought him to Caesar’s clear intelligence, or the subtle understanding of Napoleon, is to be doubted. Royalty found him at twenty, after which warfare and administration absorbed him; in consequence he remained uneducated to the end. He could talk brilliantly, but fell into a hundred errors when he wandered from politics and war. With all his campaigns he seems never to have gained such acquaintance with geography as the science of his time could have given him. He rose at times above the narrowness of dogma, but remained to the last a slave to superstition. He put great confidence in the soothsayers and astrologers that crowded his court; before the battle of Arbela he spent the night performing magic ceremonies with the magician Aristander, and offered sacrifices to the god Fear; he who faced all men and beasts with a very ecstasy of courage was “easily alarmed by portents and prodigies,” even to changing important plans.¹⁰ He could lead many thousands of men, could conquer and rule millions, but he could not control his own temper. He never learned to recognize his own faults or limitations, but allowed his judgment to be soaked and drowned in praise. He lived in a frenzy of excitement and glory, and so loved war that his mind never knew an hour of peace.

His moral character hovered between similar contradictions. He was at bottom sentimental and emotional, and had, we are told, “melting eyes”; he was moved sometimes beside himself by poetry and music; he played the harp with great feeling in his early youth. Teased about this by Philip, he abandoned the instrument, and thereafter, as if to overcome himself, refused to listen to any but martial airs.¹¹ Sexually he was almost virtuous, not so much on principle as by preoccupation. His incessant activity, his long marches and frequent battles, his complex plans and administrative burdens, used up his resources, and left him little appetite for love. He took many wives, but as a sacrifice to statesmanship; he was gallant to ladies, but preferred the company of his generals. When his aides brought a beautiful woman to his tent late at night he asked her, “Why at this time?” “I had to wait,” she replied, “to get my husband to bed.” Alexander dismissed her, and rebuked his servants, saying that because of them he had narrowly escaped becoming an adulterer.¹² He had many of the qualities of a homosexual, and loved Hephaestion to madness; but when Theodorus of Taras offered to sell him two boys of great beauty he sent the Tarentine packing, and begged his friends to tell him what baseness of soul he had shown that anyone should make such a proposal to him.¹³ He gave to friendship the tenderness and solicitude that most men give to love. No statesman known to us, much less any general, ever surpassed him in simple trustfulness and warmheartedness, in open sincerity of affection and purpose, or in generosity even to acquaintances and enemies.¹⁴ Plutarch remarks “upon what slight occasions he would write letters to serve friends.” He endeared himself to his soldiers by his kindliness; he risked their lives, but not heedlessly; and he seemed to feel all their wounds. As Caesai for gave Brutus and Cicero, and Napoleon Fouche and Talleyrand, so Alexander forgave Harpalus, the treasurer who had absconded with his funds and had returned to beg forgiveness; the young conqueror reappointed him treasurer to all men’s astonishment, and apparently with good results.¹⁵ At Tarsus, in 333, Alexander being ill, his physician Philip offered him a purgative drink. At that moment a letter was brought to the King from Parmenio, warning him that Philip had been bribed by Darius to poison him. Alexander handed the letter to Philip, and as the latter read it, Alexander drank the draught—with no ill effect. His reputation for generosity helped him in his wars; many of the enemy allowed themselves to be taken prisoner, and cities, not fearing to be sacked, opened their gates at his coming.—Nevertheless, the Molossian tigress was in him, and it was his bitter fate to be ruined by his occasional paroxysms of cruelty. Having taken Gaza by siege and assault, and infuriated by its long resistance, Alexander caused the feet of Batis, its heroic commandant, to be bored, and brazen rings passed through them; then, intoxicated with memories of Achilles, he dragged the now dead Persian, tied by cords to the royal chariot, at full speed around the city.¹⁶ His increasing resort to drink as a means of quieting his nerves led him more and more frequently, in his last years, to outbreaks of blind ferocity, followed by brooding fits of violent remorse.

One quality in him dominated all the rest—ambition. As a youth he had fretted over Philip’s victories: “Father,” he complained to his friends, “will get everything done before we are ready, and will leave me and you no chance of doing anything great and important.”¹⁷ In his passion for achievement he assumed every task, and faced every risk. At Chaeronea he was the first man to charge the Theban Sacred Band; at the Granicus he indulged to the full what he called his “eagerness for encountering danger.”¹⁸ This, too, became an uncontrollable passion; the sound and sight of battle intoxicated him; he forgot then his duties as a general, and plunged ahead into the thickest of the fight; time and again his soldiers, fearful of losing him, had to plead with him to go to the rear. He was not a great general; he was a brave soldier whose obstinate perseverance marched on, with boyish heedlessness of impossibilities, to unprecedented victories. He supplied the inspiration; probably his generals, who were able men, contributed organization, training, tactics, and strategy. He led his troops by the brilliance of his imagination, the fire of his unstudied oratory, the readiness and sincerity with which he shared their hardships and griefs. Without question he was a good administrator: he ruled with kindness and firmness the wide domain which his arms had won; he was loyal to the agreements which he signed with commanders and cities; and he tolerated no oppression of his subjects by his appointees. Amid all the excitement and chaos of his campaigns he kept clearly at the center of his thoughts the great purpose that even his death would not defeat: the unification of all the eastern Mediterranean world into one cultural whole, dominated and elevated by the expanding civilization of Greece.

II. THE PATHS OF GLORY

On his accession Alexander found himself at the head of a tottering empire. The northern tribes in Thrace and Illyria revolted; Aetolia, Acarnania, Phocis, Elis, Argolis renounced their allegiance; the Ambraciotes expelled the Macedonian garrison; Artaxerxes III boasted that he had instigated the killing of Philip, and that Persia now had nothing to fear from the immature stripling of twenty who had succeeded to the throne. When the glad tidings of Philip’s death reached Athens, Demosthenes donned festal garb, placed a garland of flowers upon his head, and moved in the Assembly that a crown of honor should be voted to the assassin Pausanias.¹⁹ Within Macedonia a dozen factions conspired against the young King’s life.

Alexander rose to the situation with a decisive energy that ended all internal opposition, and set the tempo of his career. Having arrested and decapitated the chief plotters at home, he marched south into Greece (336), and within a few days reached Thebes. The Greek states hastened to renew their allegiance; Athens sent him a profuse apology, voted him two crowns, and conferred upon him divine honors. Alexander, appeased, declared all dictatorships abolished in Greece, and decreed that each city should live in freedom according to its own laws. The Amphictyonic Council confirmed him in all the rights and honors that it had given to Philip; and a congress of all Greek states except Sparta, meeting at Corinth, proclaimed him captain general of the Greeks, and promised to contribute men and supplies for the Asiatic campaign. Alexander returned to Pella, put the capital in order, and then marched north to suppress the rebellion of the barbarian tribes (335). With Napoleonic swiftness he led his troops as far as the modern Bucharest, and planted his standards upon the northern bank of the Danube. Then, hearing that the Illyrians were advancing upon Macedonia, he marched two hundred miles through Serbia, surprised the invaders in the rear, defeated them, and drove the remnant back to their mountains.

But in the meantime a rumor had stirred Athens that Alexander had been killed in fighting on the Danube. Demosthenes called for a war of independence, and felt justified in accepting large sums from Persia to further his plans. At his instigation Thebes revolted, killed the Macedonian officials left there by Alexander, and besieged the Macedonian garrison in the Cadmeia. Athens sent help to Thebes, and invited Greece and Persia to join in an alliance against Macedon. Alexander, furious over what seemed to him not a passion for freedom but the crudest ingratitude and treachery, marched his weary troops down again into Greece. Reaching Thebes after thirteen days, he defeated the army sent out against him. He left the fate of the defenseless city to her ancient enemies—Plataea, Orchomenos, Thespiae, and Phocis; they voted that Thebes should be burned to the ground, and her inhabitants sold as slaves. Hoping to give other rebels a lesson, Alexander signed the order, but stipulated that the victorious troops should spare the home of Pindar, and the lives of priests and priestesses, and of all Thebans who could prove that they had opposed the revolt. Later he looked back with shame upon this violent revenge, and “was sure to grant without the least difficulty whatsoever any Theban asked of him.”²⁰ He atoned in part by his leniency with Athens; he forgave her violation of the pledges made to him a year before, and did not press his demand for the surrender of Demosthenes and the other anti-Macedonian leaders. To the end of his life he maintained an attitude of respect and affection for Athens: he dedicated on the Acropolis various spoils from his Asiatic victories, sent back to Athens the Tyrannicide statues that Xerxes had taken away, and remarked, after an arduous campaign, “O ye Athenians, will you believe what dangers I incur to merit your praise?”²¹

Having received again the allegiance of all the Greek states except Sparta, Alexander returned to Macedonia, and prepared for the invasion of Asia. He found his state treasury almost empty, with a deficit of five hundred talents ($3,000,000) as a legacy from Philip’s reign.²² He borrowed eight hundred talents, and set out to conquer not the world but his debts. He had hoped to fight Persia as the champion of all Hellas, but he knew that half of Greece was praying that he would soon be killed. It was reported that the Persians could muster a million men; Alexander’s expeditionary force did not exceed thirty thousand infantry and five thousand cavalry. Nevertheless the new Achilles, leaving twelve thousand soldiers under Antipater to guard Macedonia and watch Greece, set out in 334 upon the most daring and romantic enterprise in the history of kings. He would live eleven years more, but would never see home or Europe again. While his army crossed the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos, he himself chose to land at Cape Sigeum, and retrace what he believed to have been Agamemnon’s path to Troy. At every step he quoted to his comrades passages from the Iliad, which he knew almost by heart. He anointed the reputed tomb of Achilles, crowned it with garlands, and ran naked around it according to the custom of antiquity. “Happy Achilles!” he exclaimed, “to have had in life so faithful a friend, and, after his death, so famous a poet to celebrate him.”²³ He vowed now to carry through to a successful end that long struggle, between Europe and Asia, which had begun at Troy.

It is not necessary to our purpose to tell again the story of his victories. He met the first Persian contingent at the river Granicus, and overwhelmed it. There Cleitus saved his life by severing the arm of the Persian who was about to strike Alexander from behind; a whimsical student might build upon such events an accidental interpretation of history. After giving his men a rest he marched down into Ionia, offering the Greek cities democratic self-government under his protectorate. Most of them opened their gates without resistance. At Issus he met the main force of the Persians, 600,000 men, under Darius III. Once more he won by using his cavalry for attack, his infantry for defense. Darius fled, leaving his purse and his family behind him, to be treated the one with gratitude, the other with chivalry. After peaceably taking Damascus and Sidon Alexander laid siege to Tyre, which was harboring a large Phoenician squadron in the pay of Persia. The ancient city resisted so long that when at last he captured it Alexander lost his head and allowed his men to massacre eight thousand Tyrians, and to sell thirty thousand as slaves. Jerusalem surrendered quietly, and was well treated; Gaza fought till every man in the city was dead and every woman raped.

The triumphant march of the Macedonians was resumed through the Sinai desert into Egypt, where, when he showed a tactful respect for the country’s gods, Alexander was welcomed as a divinely sent liberator from Persian rule. Knowing that religion is stronger than politics, he crossed another desert to the oasis of Siwa, and paid his respects to the god Ammon—his very father if Olympias could be believed. The pliant priests crowned him Pharaoh with the ancient rites, and so eased the way for the Ptolemaic dynasty. Returning to the Delta, Alexander conceived or approved the idea of building a new capital at one of the Nile’s many mouths; perhaps the Greek merchants at near-by Naucratis suggested it as providing a more convenient depot for the enlarged Greek trade that might now be expected between Egypt and Greece. He marked out the orbit of the walls of Alexandria, the outline of the principal streets, and the sites for temples to the Egyptian and Grecian gods; further details he left to his architect, Dinocrates.*

Marching back into Asia, he met the vast polyglot army of Darius at Gaugamela, near Arbela, and was dismayed by their multitude; he knew that one defeat would cancel all his victories. His soldiers comforted him: “Be of good cheer, Sire; do not fear the great number of the enemy, for they will not be able to stand the very smell of goat that clings to us.”²⁵ He spent the night in reconnoitering the ground on which he was to give battle, and in offering sacrifices to the gods. His victory was decisive. The disorderly hosts of Darius could make no headway against the phalanxes, and knew not how to defend themselves against the swift and incalculable dashes of the Macedonian cavalry; they broke and fled, and Darius was not the last to go. While Darius’ generals assassinated him as a coward, Alexander received the submission of Babylon, partook of its wealth, distributed some of it to his soldiers, but charmed the city by making obeisance to its gods, and decreeing the restoration of its sacred shrines. By the end of the year (331) he had reached Susa, whose population, still remembering the ancient glory of Elam, welcomed him as a deliverer. He protected the city from pillage, but comforted his troops by dividing among them some of the fifty thousand talents ($300,000,000) that he found in Darius’ vaults. To the people of Plataea he sent a substantial sum because they had so bravely resisted the Persians in 480; and to the Greek cities of Asia he appears to have remitted the “donations” that he had elicited from them at the outset of his campaign.²⁶ And he announced proudly to the Greeks of the world that they were now completely free from Persian rule.

Hardly stopping to rest at Susa, he marched over mountains in the depth of winter to seize Persepolis; and so rapidly did he move that he was in Darius’ palace before the Persians could conceal the royal treasury. Here again his good judgment left him, and he burned the magnificent city to the ground. His soldiers looted the houses, ravaged the women, and killed the men. Perhaps they had been infuriated by seeing, on their approach to the town, eight hundred Greeks who, for various reasons, had suffered mutilation at the hands of Persians by the cutting off of legs, arms, or ears, or the gouging out of the eyes. Alexander, moved to tears by the sight, gave them lands, and assigned dependents to work for them.

Still insatiate, he attempted now what Cyrus the Great had failed to accomplish—the subjugation of the tribes that hovered on the eastern borders of Persia. Perhaps in his simple geography he hoped to find, beyond that mystic East, the ocean that would serve as a natural frontier for his conquered realm. Entering Sogdiana, he came upon a village inhabited by the descendants of those Branchidae who, in 480, had surrendered to Xerxes the treasures of their temple near Miletus. Fevered with the thought that he was revenging the pillaged god, he ordered all the inhabitants slain, including the women and children—visiting the sins of the fathers upon the fifth generation. His campaign in Sogdiana, Ariana, and Bactriana was bloody and bootless; he achieved some victories, found some gold, and left enemies everywhere behind him. Near Bokhara his men captured Bessus, who had slain Darius. Alexander, suddenly making himself the avenger of the Great King, had Bessus whipped almost to death, had his nose and ears cut off, and then sent him to Ecbatana, where he was executed by having his arms tied to one, and his legs to the other, of two trees that had been drawn together by ropes, so that when the ropes were cut the trees pulled the body to pieces.²⁷ At every new remove from Greece Alexander was becoming less and less a Greek, more and more a barbarian king.

The year 327 found him passing over the Himalayas into India. Vanity conspired with curiosity to lead him into such distant territory; his generals advised against it, his army obeyed him unwillingly. Crossing the Indus, he defeated King Porus, and announced that he would continue to the Ganges. But his soldiers refused to go farther. He pled with them, and for three days, like a scion of Achilles, pouted in his tent; but they had had enough. Sadly he turned back, loath to face west again, and forced his way through hostile tribes with such personal bravery that his soldiers wept at their inability to realize all his dreams. He was the first to scale the walls of the Mallians; after he and two others had leaped into the city the ladders broke, and they found themselves alone amidst the enemy. Alexander fought till he sank exhausted by his wounds. Meanwhile his troops had made their way into the town, and soldier after soldier sacrificed his life to protect the fallen King. When the battle was over Alexander was carried to his tent, and his veterans kissed his garments as he passed. After three months of convalescence he renewed his march along the Indus, and at last reached the Indian Ocean. There he sent on part of his forces by water under Nearchus, who skillfully accomplished the long voyage in unfamiliar seas. Alexander himself led the rest of his army northwest along the coast of India and through the desert of Gedrosia (Baluchistan), where the sufferings of his men rivaled those of Napoleon’s army on the return from Moscow. Heat killed thousands, thirst killed more. A little water was found, and was brought to Alexander, but he deliberately poured it out upon the ground.²⁸ When the remnants of his force reached Susa some ten thousand had died, and Alexander was half insane.

III. THE DEATH OF A GOD

He had now spent nine years in Asia, and he had changed the continent by his victories less than it had transformed him by its ways. He had been told by Aristotle to treat Greeks as freemen, “barbarians” as slaves. But he had been surprised to find among the Persian aristocrats a degree of refinement and good manners not often seen in the turbulent democracies of Greece; he admired the manner in which the Great Kings had organized their empire, and wondered how his rough Macedonians could replace such governors. He concluded that he could give some permanence to his conquests only by reconciling the Persian nobles to his leadership, and using them in administrative posts. More and more charmed by his new subjects, he abandoned the idea of ruling over them as a Macedonian, and conceived himself as a Greco-Persian emperor governing a realm in which Persians and Greeks would be on an equal footing, and would peaceably mingle their culture and their blood. The long quarrel of Europe and Asia would end in a wedding feast.

Already thousands of his soldiers had married native women, or were living with them; should he not do likewise, marry the daughter of Darius, and reconcile the nations by begetting a king who would unite both dynasties in his veins? He had already married Roxana, a Bactrian princess; but this was a negligible impediment. He broached the plan to his officers, and suggested that they, too, should take Persian wives. They smiled at his hopes of uniting the two nations, but they had been a long time away from home, and the Persian ladies were beautiful. So in one great nuptial at Susa (324) Alexander married Statira, daughter of Darius III, and Parysatis, daughter of Artaxerxes III, attaching himself in this way to both branches of Persian royalty, while eighty of his officers took Persian brides. Thousands of similar marriages were soon afterward celebrated among the soldiers. Alexander gave each officer a substantial dowry, and paid the debts of the marrying soldiers—which amounted (if we may believe Arrian) to twenty thousand talents ($120,000,000).²⁹ To further this union of peoples he opened lands in Mesopotamia and Persia to Greek colonists, thereby reducing the pressure of population in some of the Greek states, and mitigating the class war; now began those Hellenized Asiatic cities which were to be a vital part of the Seleucid Empire. At the same time he drafted thirty thousand Persian youths, had them educated on Greek lines, and taught them the Greek manual of war.

Possibly his wives had something to do with his rapid adoption of Oriental ways; possibly it was a failure of modesty, or a part of his plan. “In Persia,” says Plutarch, “he first put on the barbaric” (i.e., foreign) “dress, perhaps with the view of making the work of civilizing the Persians easier, as nothing gains more upon men than a conformity to their customs. . . . However, he followed not the Median fashion . . . but taking a middle way between the Persian mode and the Macedonian, so contrived his habit that it was not so flaunting as the one, and yet more pompous and magnificent than the other.”³⁰ His soldiers saw in this change the conquest of Alexander by the Orient; they felt that they had lost him, and they mournfully missed the signs of solicitude and affection which he had once showered upon them. The Persians made every obeisance to him, and flattered him to his heart’s content; the Macedonians, themselves softened by Oriental luxury, grumbled at the tasks that he laid upon them, forgot his beneficence, murmured of desertion, and even plotted against his life. He began to prefer the society of the Persian grandees.

His culminating apostasy, or diplomacy, was his announcement of his own divinity. In 324 he sent word to all the Greek states except Macedonia (where the insult to Philip might have aroused resentment) that he wished hereafter to be publicly recognized as the son of Zeus-Ammon. Most of the states complied, feeling it to be merely a form; even the obstinate Spartans agreed, saying, “Let Alexander be a god if he wants to.” It was not so much for a man to be a god in the Greek sense of the term; the chasm between humanity and deity was not as wide then as it was to become in modern theology; several Greeks had overleaped it, like Hippodameia, Oedipus, Achilles, Iphigenia, and Helen. The Egyptians had always thought of their Pharaohs as gods; if Alexander had neglected to rank himself similarly the Egyptians might have been disturbed by so bold a violation of precedent. The priests at Siwa, Didyma, and Babylon, who were believed to have special sources of information in this field, had all assured him of his divine origin. That (as Grote thought³¹) Alexander actually believed himself to be a god in a more than metaphorical sense is quite unlikely. It is true that after his self-deification he became increasingly irritable and arrogant; that he sat on a golden throne, wore sacred vestments, and sometimes adorned his head with the horns of Ammon.³² But when he was not playing his divinity for world stakes he smiled at his own honors. Being injured by an arrow, he remarked to some friends, “This, you see, is blood, and not such ichor as flows from the wounds of the Immortals.”³³ That he had not taken too seriously his mother’s tale of the thunderbolt appears from his flaming anger at Attalus’ imputations on his birth, and his remark about the need of sleep as distinguishing man from the gods. Even Olympias laughed when she heard that Alexander had made her legend official. “When,” she asked, “will Alexander stop slandering me to Hera?”³⁴ Despite his godhead Alexander continued to offer sacrifice to the gods—an unheard-of thing for a divinity. Plutarch and Arrian, able to judge the matter as Greeks, took it for granted that Alexander deified himself as a means to easier rule over a superstitious and heterogeneous population.³⁵ Doubtless he felt that the task of unifying two hostile worlds would be facilitated by the reverence which the common people would give him if his claims to divinity were accepted by the upper classes. Perhaps, indeed, he thought to overcome the disruptive diversity of faiths in his empire by providing, in his own person, the beginning of a sacred myth and a common unifying faith.*

The Macedonian officers could not fathom Alexander’s policy. The Greek spirit had touched them to the point of mental emancipation, but not to the point of philosophical toleration; they found it humiliating to prostrate themselves, as he now demanded, in approaching the King. One of his bravest officers, Philotas, son of his ablest and most favored general, Parmenio, entered into a conspiracy to kill the new god. Alexander got wind of it, had Philotas arrested, and wrung from him by torture a confession implicating his own father. Philotas was forced to repeat the confession before the soldiers, who, in accord with their custom in such cases, at once stoned him to death; Parmenio was executed by messenger as probably guilty, and in any case a presumptive enemy. From that moment to the end, the relations between Alexander and his army became increasingly strained—the troops ever more discontent, the King ever more suspicious, severe, and lonely.

His solitary exaltation and the growing multitude of his cares inclined him to seek forgetfulness in heavy draughts of wine. At a banquet in Samarkand Cleitus, who had saved his life at the Granicus, drank himself into such candor as to tell Alexander that his victories had been won by his soldiers rather than by him, and that Philip’s achievement had been much greater. Alexander, equally drunk, rose to strike him, but Ptolemy Lagus (soon to be ruler of Egypt) hurried Cleitus away. Cleitus, however, had more to say; he escaped from Ptolemy, and went back to finish his tirade. Alexander hurled a lance at him and killed him. Overcome with remorse, the King secluded himself for three days, refused to eat, fell into hysteria, and tried to end his own life. Soon afterward Hermolaus, a page whom Alexander had unjustly punished, formed another conspiracy against him. The boy was apprehended, and under torture made a confession incriminating Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes. The latter, who was accompanying the expedition as official historian, had already offended the King by refusing to prostrate himself before him, openly criticizing him for his Oriental ways, and boasting that Alexander would be known to posterity only through Callisthenes the historian. Alexander had him put in prison, where, seven months later, he died.* This incident put an end to the friendship between Alexander and Aristotle, who had for years been risking his life to defend Alexander’s cause in Athens.

In the end the discontent in the army verged on open mutiny. When the King announced that he would send back to Macedon the oldest of the soldiers, each richly paid for his services,† he was shocked to hear many muttering that they wished he would dismiss them all, since, being a god, he had no need of men to realize his purposes. He ordered the leaders of the sedition executed, and then addressed to his troops an affecting (but probably apocryphal) speech³⁹ in which he reminded them of all that they had done for him, and he for them, and asked which of them could show more scars than he, whose body bore the marks of every weapon used in war. Finally he gave them all permission to go home: “Go back and report that you deserted your king and left him to the protection of conquered foreigners.” Then he retired to his rooms, and refused to see anyone. His soldiers, stricken with remorse, came and lay down before the palace, saying that they would not leave till he had forgiven them and reaccepted them into his army. When at last he appeared they broke into tears and insisted on kissing him; and after being reconciled with him they went back to their camp shouting a song of thanksgiving.

Deceived by this show of affection, Alexander dreamed now of further campaigns and victories; he planned the subjugation of hidden Arabia, sent a mission to explore the Caspian regions, and thought of conquering Europe to the Pillars of Hercules. But his strong frame had been weakened by exposure and drink, and his spirit by the conspiracies of his officers and the mutinies of his men. While the army was in Ecbatana his dearest companion, Hephaestion, fell sick and died. Alexander had loved him so much that when Darius’ queen, entering the conqueror’s tent, bowed first to Hephaestion, thinking him Alexander, the young King said, graciously, “Hephaestion is also Alexander”⁴⁰—as if to say that he and Hephaestion were one. The two often shared one tent, and drank from one cup; in battle they fought side by side. Now the King, feeling that half of him had been torn away, broke down in uncontrolled grief. He lay for hours upon the corpse, weeping; he cut off his hair in mourning, and for days refused to take food. He sentenced to death the physician who had left the sick youth’s side to attend the public games. He ordered a gigantic funeral pile to be erected in Hephaestion’s memory, at a cost, we are told, of ten thousand talents ($60,000,000), and sent to inquire of the oracle of Ammon whether it was permitted to worship Hephaestion as a god. In his next campaign a whole tribe was slain, at his orders, as a sacrifice to Hephaestion’s ghost. The thought that Achilles had not long survived Patroclus haunted him like a sentence of death.

Back in Babylon, he abandoned himself more and more to drink. One night, reveling with his officers, he proposed a drinking match. Promachus quaffed twelve quarts of wine, and won the prize, a talent; three days later he died. Shortly afterward, at another banquet, Alexander drained a goblet containing six quarts of wine. On the next night he drank heavily again; and cold weather suddenly setting in, he caught a fever, and took to his bed. The fever raged for ten days, during which Alexander continued to give orders to his army and his fleet. On the eleventh day he died, being in the thirty-third year of his age (323). When his generals asked him to whom he left his empire he answered, “To the strongest.”⁴¹

Like most great men he had been unable to find a successor worthy of him, and his work fell unfinished from his hands. Even so his achievement was not only immense, but far more permanent than has usually been supposed. Acting as the agent of historical necessity, he put an end to the era of city-states, and, by sacrificing a substantial measure of local freedom, created a larger system of stability and order than Europe had yet known. His conception of government as absolutism using religion to impose peace upon diverse nations dominated Europe until the rise of nationalism and democracy in modern times. He broke down the barriers between Greek and “barbarian,” and prepared for the cosmopolitanism of the Hellenistic age; he opened Hither Asia to Greek colonization, and established Greek settlements as far east as Bactria; he united the eastern Mediterranean world into one great web of commerce, liberating and stimulating trade. He brought Greek literature, philosophy, and art to Asia, and died before he could realize that he had also made a pathway for the religious victory of the East over the West. His adoption of Oriental dress and ways was the beginning of Asia’s revenge.

It was just as well that he died at his zenith; added years would almost surely have brought him disillusionment. Perhaps if he had lived he might have been deepened by defeat and suffering, and might have learned—as he was beginning—to love statesmanship more than war. But he had undertaken too much; the strain of holding his swollen realm together, and watching all its parts, was probably disordering his brilliant mind. Energy is only half of genius; the other half is harness; and Alexander was all energy. We miss in him—though we have no right to expect—the calm maturity of Caesar, or the subtle wisdom of Augustus. We admire him as we admire Napoleon, because he stood alone against half the world, and because he encourages us with the thought of the incredible power that lies potential in the individual soul. And we feel a natural sympathy for him, despite his superstitions and his cruelties, because we know that he was at least a generous and affectionate youth, as well as incomparably able and brave; that he fought against a maddening heritage of barbarism in his blood; and that through all battles and all bloodshed he kept before his eyes the dream of bringing the light of Athens to a larger world.

IV. THE END OF AN AGE

When the news of his death reached Greece, revolts against the Macedonian authority broke out everywhere. Theban exiles in Athens organized a force of patriots, and besieged the Macedonian garrison in the Cadmeia. In Athens itself, where many had prayed for an end to Alexander, the antiMacedonian party, feeling that its prayers had been heard, crowned themselves with garlands and feasted over the death of him whom they had courted as a god—singing, says Plutarch, “triumphant songs of victory, as if by their own valor they had vanquished him.”⁴²

For a moment Demosthenes was in his glory. He had not fared well during Alexander’s campaigns: he had been convicted of accepting a heavy bribe from Harpalus, and had been flung into jail; he had been allowed to escape, and had lived nine months of fretting exile in Troezen. Now he was recalled, and was sent as envoy to the Peloponnesus to raise allies for Athens in a war of liberation. A united force marched north, met Antipater at Crannon, and was destroyed. The old soldier, who lacked Alexander’s sensitivity to Athenian culture, laid the most arduous terms upon the city, requiring it to pay the cost of the war, to receive a Macedonian garrison, to abandon its democratic constitution and courts, to disfranchise and deport to colonial settlements all citizens (12,000 out of 21,000) possessing less than two thousand drachmas’ worth of property, and to surrender Demosthenes, Hypereides, and two other anti-Macedonian orators. Demosthenes fled to Calauria and took refuge in a temple sanctuary. Surrounded by Macedonian pursuers, he drank a phial of poison, and died before he could drag himself out of the sacred court.

The same tragic year saw the end of Aristotle. He had long been unpopular in Athens: the Academy and the school of Isocrates disliked him as a critic and a rival, while the patriots looked upon him as a leader of the pro-Macedonian party. Advantage was taken of Alexander’s death to bring an accusation of impiety against Aristotle; heretical passages from his books were brought in as evidence; he was charged with having offered divine honors to the dictator Hermeias, who, being a slave, could not have been a god. Aristotle quietly left the city, saying that he would not give Athens a chance to sin a second time against philosophy.⁴³ He withdrew to the home of his mother’s family in Chalcis, leaving the Lyceum in the care of Theophrastus. The Athenians passed sentence of death upon him, but had neither opportunity nor need to execute it. For either through a stomach illness aggravated by his flight, or, as some say,⁴⁴ by taking poison, Aristotle died a few months after leaving Athens, in the sixty-third year of his age. His will was a model of kindly consideration for his second wife, his family, and his slaves.

The death of Greek democracy was both a violent and a natural death, in which the fatal agents were the organic disorders of the system; the sword of Macedon merely added the final blow. The city-state had proved incapable of solving the problems of government: it had failed to preserve order within, and defense without; despite the appeals of Gorgias, Isocrates, and Plato for some Dorian discipline to tame Ionian freedom, it had discovered no way of reconciling local autonomy with national stability and power; and its love of liberty had seldom interfered with its passion for empire. The class war had become bitter beyond control, and had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting. The Assembly, a noble body in its better days, had degenerated into a mob hating all superiority, rejecting all restraint, ruthless before weakness but cringing before power, voting itself every favor, and taxing property to the point of crushing initiative, industry, and thrift. Philip, Alexander, and Antipater did not destroy Greek freedom; it had destroyed itself; and the order that they forged preserved for centuries longer, and disseminated through Egypt and the East, a civilization that might otherwise have died of its own tyrannous anarchy.

And yet, had oligarchy or monarchy done any better? The Thirty had committed more atrocities against life and property in the few months of their power than the democracy in the preceding hundred years.⁴⁵ And while democracy was producing chaos in Athens, monarchy was producing chaos in Macedonia—a dozen wars of succession, a hundred assassinations, and a thousand interferences with freedom—with no redeeming glory of literature, science, philosophy, or art. The weakness and smallness of the state in Greece had been a boon to the individual, if not in body, certainly in soul; that freedom, costly though it was, had generated the achievements of the Greek mind. Individualism in the end destroys the group, but in the interim it stimulates personality, mental exploration, and artistic creation. Greek democracy was corrupt and incompetent, and had to die. But when it was dead men realized how beautiful its heyday had been; and all later generations of antiquity looked back to the centuries of Pericles and Plato as the zenith of Greece, and of all history.

BOOK V

THE HELLENISTIC DISPERSION

322-146 B.C.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK V

B.C.

348-39:

Speusippus head of the Academy

339-14:

Xenocrates head of the Academy

323-285:

Ptolemy I (Soter) founds Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt

323:

Judea made a satrapy of Syria

322-288:

Theophrastus head of the Lyceum

321:

Partition of Alexander’s empire; Menander’s first play

320:

Ptolemy I captures Jerusalem; Pyrrho of Elis and Crates of Thebes, philosophers

319:

Philemon and the New Comedy

318:

Aristoxenus of Tarentum, theorist of music

317-07:

Demetrius of Phalerum in power at Athens

316:

Cassander King of Macedonia

315-01:

Antigonus I (Cyclops) King of Macedonia

314:

Antigonus I proclaims freedom of Greece; Zeno comes to Athens

314-270:

Polemo head of the Academy

312-198:

Judea under the Ptolemies

312-280:

Seleucus I (Nicator) establishes Seleucid Empire

311:

Hamilcar invades Sicily

310:

Agathocles, dictator of Syracuse, invades Africa

307:

Law against the philosophers

307-287:

Demetrius Poliorcetes King of Macedonia

306:

Epicurus opens his school at Athens

306-02:

War between Cassander and Demetrius Poliorcetes for mastery of Greece

B.C.

305:

Timaeus of Tauromenium, historian

301:

Zeno opens his school at the Stoa; Seleucus I founds Antioch; Lysimachus defeats Antigonus I at Ipsus

300:

Euclid of Alexandria, mathematician; Euhemerus, rationalist

295-72:

Pyrrhus King of the Molossians

290:

Rhodian school of sculpture

288-70:

Strato head of the Lyceum

285-46:

Ptolemy II (Philadelphus); Alexandrian Museum and Library

285:

Zenodotus head of the Library; Herophilus of Chalcedon, anatomist

283-39:

Antigonus II (Gonatas) King of Macedonia

280:

Aristarchus of Samos, astronomer; rise of Achaean League; Pyrrhus helps Tarentum against Rome

280-62:

Antiochus I (Soter) Seleucid emperor

280-79:

Gauls invade Macedonia and Greece

279:

Pyrrhus invades Sicily

278:

The Colossus of Rhodes

277:

Gauls invade Asia Minor

275:

Aratus of Soli, poet

271:

Timon of Phlius, satirist

270:

Callimachus of Alexandria and Theocritus of Cos, poets; Berosus of Babylon, historian

270-69:

Crates of Athens head of the Academy

270-16:

Hieron II Dictator of Syracuse

B.C

269-41:

Arcesilaus head of the Middle Academy

266-61:

Chremonidean War

261:

Antigonus II takes Athens

261-47:

Antiochus II (Theos) Seleucid emperor

261-32:

Cleanthes head of the Stoa

260:

Herodas of Cos, poet

258:

Erasistratus of Ceos, physiologist

257-180:

Aristophanes of Byzantium, philologist

251:

Aratus of Sicyon frees his city

250:

Arsaces founds kingdom of Parthia; the Laocoön; Manetho, Egyptian historian; Lycophron of Chalcis, poet

247:

Archimedes of Syracuse, scientist

247-26:

Seleucus II (Callinicus)

246-21:

Ptolemy II (Euergetes I)

243:

Aratus leads Achaean League against Macedonia

242:

Agis IV attempts reforms in Sparta

240:

Apollonius of Rhodes, poet

239-29:

Demetrius II King of Macedonia

235-197:

Attalus I establishes kingdom of Pergamum

235-195:

Eratosthenes librarian at Alexandria

232-07:

Chrysippus head of the Stoa

229:

Aratus frees Athens

229-21:

Antigonus III (Doson) King of Macedonia

226-24:

Reforms of Cleomenes III in Sparta

226-23:

Seleucus III (Soter)

225:

Earthquake destroys Rhodes

223-187:

Antiochus III (the Great) Seleucid emperor

221:

Antigonus III defeats Cleomenes III at Sellasia

221-179:

Philip V King of Macedonia

221-03:

Ptolemy IV (Philopator)

220:

Apollonius of Perga, mathematician

217:

Ptolemy IV defeats Antiochus III at Raphia

215:

Alliance of Philip V and Hannibal

214-05:

First Macedonian War with Rome

212:

Marcellus takes Syracuse; death of Archimedes

210:

Sicily becomes a Roman province

208:

Zeno of Tarsus, philosopher

207:

Revolution of Nabis in Sparta

205:

Egypt a Roman protectorate

203-181:

Ptolemy V (Epiphanes)

200-197:

Second Macedonian War

200:

Diogenes of Seleucia, philosopher

B.C.

197:

Battle of Cynoscephalae

197-160:

Zenith of Pergamum under Eumenes II

196:

Flamininus proclaims freedom of Greece; foundation of Pergamene Library

195-80:

Aristophanes of Byzantium librarian at Alexandria

190:

The Farnese Bull

189:

Romans defeat Antiochus III at Magnesia

188:

Philopoemen abolishes Lycurgean constitution in Sparta

187-75:

Seleucus IV (Philopator)

181-45:

Ptolemy VI (Philometor)

180:

Great altar of Pergamum; Aristarchus of Samothrace librarian at Alexandria

179-68:

Perseus King of Macedonia

175-63:

Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) Seleucid emperor

175-38:

Mithradates I King of Parthia

174:

Antiochus IV rebuilds Olympieum

173:

Carneades head of New Academy

171-68:

Third Macedonian War

168:

Aemilius Paullus defeats Perseus at Pydna; Antiochus IV despoils the Temple at Jerusalem

167:

Deportation of the Achaeans, including Polybius, historian

166:

First rising of the Maccabees; Book of Daniel

165:

Judas Maccabee restores the Temple services

163-62:

Antiochus V (Eupator) Seleucid emperor

162-50:

Demetrius I (Soter) Seleucid emperor

161:

Judas Maccabee makes treaty with Rome

160:

Defeat and death of Judas Maccabee

160-39:

Attalus II King of Pergamum

157:

Judea becomes an independent priestly state

155:

Carneades in Rome

150-45:

Alexander Balas, Seleucid emperor

150:

Hipparchus of Nicaea and Seleucus of Seleucia, astronomers; Moschus of Smyrna, poet

146:

Mummius sacks Corinth; Greece and Macedonia become a province of Rome

CHAPTER XXIII

Greece and Macedon

I. THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER

HISTORIANS divide the past into epochs, years, and events, as thought divides the world into groups, individuals, and things; but history, like nature, knows only continuity amid change: historia non facit saltum—history makes no leaps. Hellenistic Greece did not feel Alexander’s death as “the end of an age”; it looked upon him as the beginning of “modern” times, and as a symbol of vigorous youth rather than a factor in decay; it was convinced that it had now entered upon its richest maturity, and that its leaders were as magnificent as any in the past except the incomparable young King himself.¹ In many ways it was right. Greek civilization did not die with Greek freedom; on the contrary it conquered new areas and spread in three directions as the formation of vast empires broke down the political barriers to communication, colonization, and trade. Still enterprising and alert, the Greeks moved by hundreds of thousands into Asia and Egypt, Epirus and Macedon; and not only did Ionia flower again, but Hellenic blood, language, and culture made its way into the interior of Asia Minor, into Phoenicia and Palestine, through Syria and Babylonia, across the Euphrates and the Tigris, even to Bactria and India. Never had the Greek spirit shown more zest and courage; never had Greek letters and arts won so wide a victory.

Perhaps that is why historians are wont to end their histories of Greece with Alexander; after him the extent and complexity of the Greek world baffle any unified view or continuous narrative. There were not only three major monarchies—Macedonia, Seleucia, and Egypt; there were a hundred Greek city-states, of all degrees of independence; there was a maze of alliances and leagues; there were half-Greek states in Epirus, Judea, Pergamum, Byzantium, Bithynia, Cappadocia, Galatia, Bactria; and in the west were Greek Italy and Sicily, torn between aging Carthage and youthful Rome. Alexander’s rootless empire was too loosely bound together by language, communication, customs, and faith to survive him. He had left not one but several strong men behind him, and none could be content with less than sovereignty. The size and diversity of the new realm dismissed all thought of democracy; self-government, as the Greeks understood it, presupposed a city-state whose citizens could come periodically to a common meeting place; and besides, had not the philosophers of democratic Athens denounced democracy as the enthronement of ignorance, envy, and chaos? Alexander’s successors—who were therefore termed Diadochi—had been Macedonian chieftains, long accustomed to rule by the sword; democracy, except as the occasional consultation of their aides, never entered their heads. After some minor trials at arms which disposed of lesser contenders, they divided the empire into five parts (321)—Antipater taking Macedonia and Greece, Lysimachus Thrace, Antigonus Asia Minor, Seleucus Babylonia, and Ptolemy Egypt. They did not bother to call a confirming synod of the Greek states. From that moment, except for some fitful interludes in Greece, and the aristocratic republic of Rome, monarchy ruled Europe until the French Revolution.

The basic principle of democracy is freedom inviting chaos; the basic principle of monarchy is power inviting tyranny, revolution, and war. From Philip to Perseus, from Chaeronea to Pydna (338-168), the foreign and civil wars of the city-states were supplemented by the external and internal wars of the kingdoms, for the perquisites of government tempted a hundred generals to contests for thrones. Violence was as popular, condottieri as numerous and brilliant, in Hellenistic Greece as in Renaissance Italy. When Antipater died Athens revolted again, and put to death old Phocion, who had ruled it as justly as possible in Antipater’s name. Cassander, Antipater’s son, recaptured the city for Macedon (318), widened the franchise to holders of a thousand drachmas, and left as his regent the philosopher, scholar, and dilettante Demetrius of Phalerum, who gave the city ten years of prosperity and peace. Meanwhile Antigonus I (“Cyclops”) dreamed of uniting all of Alexander’s empire under his one eye; he was defeated at Ipsus (301) by a coalition, and lost Asia Minor to Seleucus I. His son Demetrius Poliorcetes (“Taker of Cities”) liberated Greece from Macedonian rule, gave Athens twelve years more of democracy, was lodged as the grateful city’s guest in the Parthenon, brought courtesans to live with him there,² drove some young men to desperation by his amorous attentions,* won a brilliant naval victory over Ptolemy I at Cyprus (308), besieged Rhodes for six years with new siege instruments but without success, made himself king of Macedon (294), ended Athenian liberty with a garrison, fell into ever new wars, was defeated and captured by Seleucus, and drank himself to death.

Four years later (279), taking advantage of the disorder brought on by the struggle for power in the eastern Mediterranean, a horde of Celts, or “Gauls,” under Brennus* marched down through Macedonia into Greece. Brennus, says Pausanias, “pointed out the weak state of Greece, the immense wealth of her cities, the votive offerings in the temples, the great quantities of silver and gold.”⁴ At the same time a revolution broke out in Macedonia under the leadership of Apollodorus; part of the army joined in, and helped the angry poor in their periodical revenge of despoiling the rich. The Gauls, doubtless guided by a Greek, found their way through secret passes around Thermopylae, killed and plundered indiscriminately, and advanced upon the rich temple at Delphi. Repulsed there by a Greek force and a storm that in Greek belief was Apollo’s defense of his shrine, Brennus retreated and killed himself in shame. The surviving Gauls crossed over into Asia Minor. “They butchered all the males,” writes Pausanias,

and likewise old women, and babes at their mothers’ breasts; they drank the blood, and feasted on the flesh of infants that were fat. High-spirited women, and maidens in their flower, committed suicide . . . those that survived were subjected to every kind of outrage. . . . Some of the women rushed upon the swords of the Gauls, and voluntarily courted death; to others death came from absence of food or sleep, as these merciless barbarians ravished them in turn, and wreaked their lusts upon them whether dying or dead.†⁵

After suffering years of such devastation, the Greeks of Asia bought off the invaders, and persuaded them to retire into northern Phrygia (where their settlements become known as Galatia), Thrace, and the Balkans. For two generations the Gauls levied fear tribute from Seleucus I and the Greek cities of the Asiatic coasts and the Black Sea; Byzantium alone paid them $240,000 a year.‡⁶ As the emperors and generals of Rome were to be occupied, in the third century after Christ, in repelling barbarian inroads, so the kings and generals of Pergamum, Seleucia, and Macedonia gave much of their resources and energies, in the third century before Christ, to driving back the recurring waves of Celtic invasion. Throughout its history ancient civilization lived on the edge of a sea of barbarism that repeatedly threatened to inundate it. The stoic courage of citizens perpetually prepared had once kept back the peril; but stoicism was dying in Greece precisely at the time that devised its classic formulation and its name.

Antigonus II, son of Demetrius Poliorcetes and called “Gonatas” for reasons now unknown, drove the Gauls out of Macedonia, put down the revolt of Apollodorus, and ruled Macedonia with ability and moderation for thirty-eight years (277-39). He gave generously to literature, science, and philosophy, brought poets like Aratus of Soli to his court, and formed a lifelong friendship with Zeno the Stoic; he was the first of that very discontinuous line of philosopher-kings which ended in Marcus Aurelius. Nevertheless it was during his reign that Athens made a last bid for freedom. In 267 the nationalist party came into power under the leadership of a young pupil of Zeno’s, Chremonides. It secured the aid of Egypt, ousted the Macedonian troops, and announced the liberation of Athens. Antigonus came down at his leisure and recaptured the city (262), but dealt with it as became one who respected philosophy and old age. He established garrisons in the Piraeus, on Salamis, and at Sunium, and enjoined Athens from engaging in alliances or wars; for the rest he left the city completely free.

Other Greek states were solving in other ways the problem of reconciling liberty with order. About 279 little Aetolia, peopled like Macedon with half-barbarous and never-conquered mountaineers, began to organize the cities of northern Greece—chiefly those of the Delphic Amphictyony—into the Aetolian League; and about the same time the Achaean League of Patrae, Dyme, Pellene, and other towns attracted to its membership many cities of the Peloponnese. In either league the constituent municipalities kept control of all local government, but surrendered their armed forces and foreign relations to a federal council, and a strategos, elected by such of the citizens as could attend the annual assembly at Aegium in Achaea, or at Thermus in Aetolia. Each league maintained peace, and established common-measures, weights, and coinages throughout its area—an achievement in co-operation that makes the third century in some ways politically superior to the age of Pericles.

The Achaean League was transformed into a first-class power by Aratus of Sicyon. At the age of twenty this new Themistocles freed Sicyon from its dictator by a night attack with a handful of men. By eloquence and subtle negotiation he persuaded all the Peloponnesus except Sparta and Elis to join the League, which chose him as its strategos annually for ten years (245-35). With a few hundred men he secretly entered Corinth, scaled the almost inaccessible Acrocorinthus, routed the Macedonian troops, and restored the city to freedom. Passing on to the Piraeus, he bribed the Macedonian garrison to surrender, and announced the liberation of Athens. From that moment to the Roman conquest Athens enjoyed a unique self-government—militarily powerless, but left inviolate by the Hellenistic states because her universities had made her the intellectual capital of the Greek world. Athens turned to philosophy, and contentedly disappeared from political history.

Now at the height of their power, the two leagues began to weaken themselves by war with each other and class war within. In 220 the Aetolian League, with Sparta and Elis, fought the bitter “Social” War against the Achaean League and Macedon. Aratus, the defender of freedom, was also the protector of wealth; in each city the League supported the party of property. The poorer citizens complained that they could not afford to attend the distant assemblies of the League, and were thereby in effect disfranchised; they were skeptical of a liberty that meant the full privilege of the clever and the strong to exploit the simple and the weak; more and more they gave their applause to demagogues who called for a redistribution of the land. Like the rich of a century before, the poor began to favor Macedonia against their own governments.

Macedonia, however, was ruined by the honesty of Antigonus III. He had assumed power as regent for his stepson, Philip, and had promised to surrender the throne upon Philip’s coming of age. The cynics of the time called him “Doson”—the Promiser—apparently because they took it for granted that he was lying. But he kept his word, and in 221 Philip V, aged seventeen, began a long reign of intrigue and war. He was a man of courage and capacity, but of unscrupulous subtlety. He seduced the wife of Aratus’ son, poisoned Aratus, killed his own son on suspicion of conspiracy, and arranged banquets of poisoned wine for those who stood in the way of his plans.⁷ He enlarged and enriched Macedonia, and left it more populous and prosperous than for one hundred and fifty years past. But in 215, fearful of the growing power of Rome, he made the historic mistake of allying himself with Hannibal and Carthage. A year later Rome declared war upon Macedonia, and began the conquest of Greece.

II. THE STRUGGLE FOR WEALTH

Athenaeus, who is as reliable as any gossip, tells us that Demetrius of Phalerum, about 310, took a census of Athens, and reported 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics or aliens, and 400,000 slaves.⁸ The last figure is incredible, but we know nothing that contradicts it. Very probably the number of rural slaves had grown; estates were becoming larger, and were being worked more and more by slaves under a slave overseer managing for an absentee landlord.⁹ Under this system a more scientific agriculture developed; Varro knew fifty Greek manuals of the art. But the processes of erosion and deforestation had already gutted much of the land. Even in the fourth century Plato had expressed the belief that rain and flood, in the flow of time, had carried away much of the arable surface of Attica; the surviving hills, in his metaphor, were a skeleton from which the flesh had been washed away.¹⁰ Many areas of Attica were in the third century so denuded of topsoil that their ancient farms were abandoned. The forests of Greece were vanishing, and timber, like food, had to be brought in from abroad.¹¹ The mines at Laurium were worn out and almost deserted; silver could be gotten more cheaply from Spain; and the gold mines of Thrace, which had once poured their wealth into Athens, now enriched the treasury and beautified the coinage of Macedon.

While the source of a virile and independent citizenry was drying up in the villages, industry and the class war were progressing in the towns. Small factories, and the slaves in them, were growing in number at Athens, as in all the larger cities of the Hellenistic world. Slave dealers accompanied the armies, bought unransomed captives, and sold them at three or four minas ($ 150 or $200) a head in the great slave markets of Delos and Rhodes. Some scruples, moral or economic, were felt about this ancient institution. A humanitarian sentiment arose as a by-product of philosophy; the cosmopolitan spirit of the age was negligent of racial distinctions; and casual hired labor, which could be thrown upon public relief whenever it ceased to be privately profitable, was in many circumstances cheaper than slave labor that had to be continuously maintained.¹² Towards the close of this period there was a substantial rise in manumissions.

Commerce languished in the older cities, but flourished in the new. The Greek ports of Asia and Egypt grew at the expense of the Piraeus; and even on the mainland it was Chalcis and Corinth that caught the swelling currents of Hellenistic trade. Through these strategically situated and wellequipped centers, as through Antioch, Seleucia, Rhodes, Alexandria, and Syracuse, a busy stream of merchants flowed, spreading a cosmopolitan and skeptical point of view. Bankers multiplied, and lent not only to traders and proprietors but to cities and governments.¹³ Some cities, like Delos and Byzantium, had public or national banks holding government funds and managed by state officials.¹⁴ In 324 Antimenes of Rhodes organized the first known system of insurance by guaranteeing owners, for a premium of eight per cent, against loss from the flight of their slaves.¹⁵ The release of Persian accumulations and the quickened circulation of capital reduced the rate of interest to ten per cent in the third century and seven per cent in the second. Speculation was widespread, but not organized. Some manipulators sought to raise prices by limiting production; there were advocates of restricting crops to keep up the purchasing power of the farming community.¹⁶ Prices in general were high, again because of the Achaemenid treasuries that Alexander had poured into the currency of the world; but at the same time, and partly by the same cause, trade was facilitated, production was stimulated, and prices gradually fell back to a normal range. The wealth of the wealthy grew beyond any precedent in Greek history. Homes became palaces, furniture and carriages more sumptuous, servants more numerous; dinners became orgies, and women became show windows of their husbands’ prosperity.¹⁷

Wages lagged behind rising prices, and rapidly followed their fall. They could support a single man only, and made for celibacy, pauperism, and depopulation; they left a diminishing economic distance between free worker and slave. Employment was irregular, and thousands of men abandoned the mainland cities for mercenary soldiering abroad, or to hide their poverty in rural isolation.¹⁸ The Athenian government relieved the destitute with grants of corn; the rich amused them with free tickets to celebrations and games. The wealthy stinted in wages but were generous in charity; often they lent money to their cities without interest, or rescued them from bankruptcy with large gifts, or built public works out of their private funds, or endowed temples or universities, or paid handsomely for the statues or the poems that published their features or their largess. The poor organized themselves into unions for mutual aid, but they could do little against the power and cleverness of the rich, the conservatism of the peasants, and the readiness of otherwise rival governments and leagues to exchange armed assistance in suppressing revolts.¹⁹ The freedom of unequal ability to accumulate or starve brought on again, as in Solon’s days, an extreme concentration of wealth. The poor lent readier ear to socialistic gospels; their spokesmen called for the cancellation of debts, the redivision of the land, and the confiscation of large fortunes; the boldest now and then proposed the liberation of the slaves.²⁰

The decay of religious belief promoted the growth of compensatory utopias: Zeno the Stoic described an ideal communism in his Republic (ca. 300), and his follower Iambulus (ca. 250) inspired Greek rebels with a romance in which he described a Blessed Isle in the Indian Ocean (perhaps Ceylon); there, he reported, all men were equal, not only in rights but in ability and intelligence; all worked equally, and shared equally in the product; all took equal part, turn by turn, in administering the government; neither wealth nor poverty existed there, nor any war of the classes; nature produced fruit abundantly of her own accord, and men lived in harmony and universal love.^20a

Some governments nationalized certain industries: Priene took over the saltworks, Miletus the textile factories, Rhodes and Cnidus the potteries; but the governments paid as low wages as the private employer, and squeezed all possible profit from the labor of their slaves. The gulf between rich and poor widened;²¹ the class war became bitterer than before. Every city, young or old, echoed with the hatred of class for class, with uprisings, massacres, suppressions, banishments, and the destruction of property and life. When one faction won it exiled the other and confiscated its goods; when the exiles returned to power they revenged themselves in kind, and slaughtered their enemies; imagine the stability of an economic system subject to such decerebrations and disturbances. Some ancient Greek cities were so devastated by class strife that industry and men fled from them, grass grew in the streets, cattle came there to graze.²² Polybius, writing about 150 B.C., describes certain timeless phases of the war from the viewpoint of a rich conservative:

When they (the radical leaders) have made the populace ready and greedy to receive bribes, the virtue of democracy is destroyed, and it is transformed into a government of violence and the strong hand. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has found a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, . . . produces a reign of violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land.²³

It was war and class war that weakened mainland Greece to the point of being easily overcome by Rome. The bitter ruthlessness of the victors—the destruction of crops, vineyards, and orchards, the razing of farmhouses, the selling of captives into slavery—ruined one locality after another, and left an empty shell for the ultimate enemy. A land so wasted by strife, by erosion, deforestation, and the listless tillage of impoverished tenants or slaves, could not compete with the alluvial plains of the Orontes, the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile. The northern cities were no longer on the great routes of trade; they had lost their navies, and could not control the sources and avenues of the grain supply that Athens and Sparta had mastered in their imperial days. The centers of power, even of literary and artistic creation, passed back again to Asia and Egypt, from which, a thousand years before, Greece had humbly learned her letters and her arts.

III. THE MORALS OF DECAY

The failure of the city-state accelerated the decay of the orthodox religion; the gods of the city had proved helpless to defend it, and had forfeited belief. The population was intermingled with foreign merchants who had no share in the city’s civic or religious life, and whose amused skepticism spread among the citizens. The mythology of the ancient local gods survived among the peasantry and the simple townsfolk, and in the official rites; the educated used it for poetry and art, the half-liberated attacked it bitterly, the upper classes supported it as an aid to order, and discountenanced open atheism as bad taste. The growth of large states brought on a sympolity of the gods and made for a vague monotheism, while philosophers strove to formulate pantheism for the literate in a manner not too obviously incompatible with orthodox belief. About 300 Euhemerus of Messana in Sicily published his Hiera Anagrapha (literally Holy Scriptures, or Records), in which he argued that the gods were either personified powers of nature, or, more often, human heroes deified by popular imagination or gratitude for their benefits to mankind; that myths were allegories, and that religious ceremonies were originally exercises in commemoration of the dead. So Zeus was a conqueror who had died in Crete, Aphrodite was the founder and patroness of prostitution, and the story of Cronus eating his children was only a way of saying that cannibalism had once existed on the earth. The book had a sharply atheistic effect in third-century Greece.*^23a

Skepticism, however, is uncomfortable; it leaves the common heart and imagination empty, and the vacuum soon draws in some new and encouraging creed. The victories of philosophy and Alexander cleared the way for novel cults. Athens in the third century was so disturbed by exotic faiths, nearly all of them promising heaven and threatening hell, that Epicurus, like Lucretius in first-century Rome, felt called upon to denounce religion as hostile to peace of mind and joy of life. The new temples, even in Athens, were now usually dedicated to Isis, Serapis, Bendis, Adonis, or some other alien deity. The Eleusinian mysteries flourished, and were imitated in Egypt, Italy, Sicily, and Crete; Dionysus Eleutherios—the Liberator—remained popular until he was absorbed into Christ; Orphism won fresh devotees as it renewed contact with the Eastern faiths from which it had sprung. The old religion had been aristocratic, and had excluded foreigners and slaves; the new Oriental cults accepted all men and women, alien or bond or free, and held out to all classes the promise of eternal life.

Superstition spread while science reached its apogee. Theophrastus’ portrait of the Superstitious Man reveals how frail was the film of culture even in the capital of enlightenment and philosophy. The number seven was unspeakably holy; there were seven planets, seven days of the week, seven Wonders, seven Ages of Man, seven heavens, seven gates of hell. Astrology was rejuvenated by commerce with Babylonia; people took it for granted that the stars were gods who ruled in detail the destinies of individuals and states; character, even thought, was determined by the star or planet under which one had been born, and would therefore be jovial, or mercurial, or saturnine; even the Jews, the least superstitious of all peoples, expressed good wishes by saying Mazzol-tov—“May your planet be favorable.”²⁴ Astronomy fought for its life against astrology, but finally succumbed in the second century A.D. And everywhere the Hellenistic world worshiped Tyche, the great god Chance.

Only an act of persistent imagination, or a gift for observation, can enable us to realize what it means to a nation to have its traditional religion die. Classic Greek civilization had been built upon a patriotic devotion to the city-state, and classic morality, though rooted in folkways rather than in faith, had been powerfully reinforced by supernatural belief. But now neither faith nor patriotism survived in the educated Greek; civic frontiers had been erased by empires; and the growth of knowledge had secularized morals, marriage, parentage, and law. For a time the Periclean Enlightenment helped morality, as in modern Europe; humanitarian feelings were developed, and aroused—ineffectually—a keener resentment against war; arbitration grew among cities and men. Manners were more polished, argument more urbane; courtesy trickled down, as in our Middle Ages, from the courts of the kings, where it was a matter of personal safety and royal prestige; when the Romans came Greece was amazed at their bad manners and blunt ways. Life was more refined; women moved about in it more freely, and stimulated the males to unwonted elegance. Men shaved now, especially in Byzantium and Rhodes, where the laws forbade it as effeminate.²⁵ But the pursuit of pleasure consumed the adult life of the upper classes. The old problem of ethics and morals—to reconcile the natural epicureanism of the individual with the necessary stoicism of the state—found no solution in religion, statesmanship, or philosophy.

Education spread, but spread thin; as in all intellectual ages it stressed knowledge more than character, and produced masses of half-educated people who, uprooted from labor and the land, moved about in unplaced discontent like loosened cargo in the ship of state. Some cities, like Miletus and Rhodes, established public—i.e., government-supported—schools; at Teos and Chios boys and girls were educated together, with an impartiality that only Sparta had shown²⁶ The gymnasium developed into a high school or college, with classrooms, lecture hall, and library. The palaestra flourished, and proved popular in the East; but public games had degenerated into professional contests, chiefly boxing, in which strength counted for more than skill; the Greeks, who had once been a nation of athletes, became now a nation of spectators, content to witness rather than to do.

Sexual morality was relaxed even beyond the loose standards of the Periclean age. Homosexualism remained popular; the youth Delphis “is in love,” says Theocritus’ Simaetha, “but whether for a woman or for a man I cannot say.”²⁷ The courtesan still reigned: Demetrius Poliorcetes levied a tax of two hundred and fifty talents ($750,000) upon the Athenians, and then gave it to his mistress Lamia on the ground that she needed it for soap; which led the angry Athenians to remark how unclean the lady must be.²⁸ Dances of naked women were accepted as part of the mores, and were performed before a Macedonian king.²⁹ Athenian life was portrayed in Menander’s plays as a round of triviality, seduction, and adultery.

Greek women participated actively in the cultural pursuits of the time, and contributed to letters, science, philosophy, and art. Aristodama of Smyrna gave recitals of her poetry throughout Greece, and received many honors. Some philosophers, like Epicurus, did not hesitate to admit women into their schools. Literature began to stress the physical loveliness of woman rather than her worth and charm as a mother; the literary cult of feminine beauty arose in this period alongside the poetry and fiction of romantic love. The partial emancipation of woman was accompanied by a revolt against wholesale maternity, and the limitation of the family became the outstanding social phenomenon of the age. Abortion was punishable only if practiced by a woman against the wish of her husband, or at the instigation of her seducer. When a child came it was in many cases exposed. Only one family in a hundred, in the old Greek cities, reared more than one daughter: “Even a rich man,” reports Poseidippus, “always exposes a daughter.” Sisters were a rarity. Families with no child, or only one, were numerous. Inscriptions enable us to trace the fertility of seventy-nine families in Miletus about 200 B.C.: thirty-two had one child, thirty-one had two; altogether they had one hundred and eighteen sons and twenty-eight daughters.³⁰ At Eretria only one family in twelve had two sons; hardly any had two daughters. Philosophers condoned infanticide as reducing the pressure of population; but when the lower classes took up the practice on a large scale, the death rate overtook the birth rate. Religion, which had once frightened men into fertility lest their dead souls be untended, no longer had the power to outweigh considerations of comfort and cost. In the colonies immigration replaced the old families; in Attica and the Peloponnesus immigration trickled down to a negligible figure, and population declined. In Macedonia Philip V forbade the limitation of the family, and in thirty years raised the man power of the country fifty per cent;³¹ we may judge from this how widespread the practice of limitation had become, even in half-primitive Macedon. “In our time,” wrote Polybius about 150 B.C.,

the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit. . . . For as men had fallen into such a state of luxury, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or, if they married, to rear the children born to them, or at most but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance—the evil insensibly but rapidly grew. For in cases where, of one or two children, the one was carried off by war and the other by sickness, it was evident that the houses must have been left empty . . . and by small degrees cities became resourceless and feeble.³²

IV. REVOLUTION IN SPARTA

Meanwhile that concentration of wealth, which everywhere in Greece was enflaming the eternal conflict of classes, produced in Sparta two attempts at revolutionary reform. Isolated by its mountain barriers, Sparta had maintained its independence, had fought back the Macedonians, and had bravely defeated the immense army of Pyrrhus (272). But the greed of the strong generated from within the ruin that enemy forces had failed to bring from without. The Lycurgean laws against alienating the land from the family by sale, or dividing it in bequests, had been abrogated,* and the fortunes made by Spartans in empire or war had gone to buying up the soil.³³ By 244 the 700,000 acres of Laconia were owned by one hundred families,³⁴ and only seven hundred men had preserved the rights of citizenship. Even these no longer ate in common; the poor could not make the necessary contribution, while the rich preferred to feast in private. A large majority of the families that had once enjoyed the franchise had sunk into poverty, and called for a cancellation of debts and a redivision of the land.

It is to the credit of monarchy that the attempt to reform this condition came from the Spartan kings. In 242 Agis IV and Leonidas succeeded to the dual throne. Convinced that Lycurgus had meant the land to be equally divided among all freemen, Agis proposed to redistribute it, to annul all debts, and to restore the semicommunism of Lycurgus. Those landowners whose property was mortgaged supported the move for cancellation; but when the measure had been passed they resisted violently the remaining elements of Agis’ reforms. At the instigation of Leonidas, Agis was murdered, along with his mother and his grandmother, both of whom had volunteered to surrender their great estates for division among the people. In this royal drama the noblest characters were women. Chilonis, daughter of Leonidas, was the wife of Cleombrotus, who supported Agis. When Leonidas was exiled, and Cleombrotus seized his throne, Chilonis left her triumphant husband to share her father’s banishment; when Leonidas recaptured power and exiled Cleombrotus, Chilonis chose exile with her husband.³⁵

Leonidas, to get the rich property of Agis’ widow into his family, compelled her to marry his son Cleomenes. But Cleomenes fell in love with his wife, and imbibed from her the ideas of the dead king. When he came to the throne as Cleomenes III he resolved to carry out Agis’ reforms. Having won over the army by his courage in war, and the people by the simplicity of his life, he abolished the oligarchic ephorate on the ground that Lycurgus had never sanctioned it; he killed fourteen resisters, exiled eighty, canceled all debts, divided the land among the free population, and restored the Lycurgean discipline. Not content, he set out to conquer the Peloponnese for the revolution. The proletariat everywhere hailed him as a liberator, and many towns surrendered to him gladly; he took Argos, Pellene, Phlius, Epidaurus, Hermione, Troezen, at last even rich Corinth. The ferment of his program spread: in Boeotia the payment of debts was abandoned, and the state appropriated funds to appease the poor; in Megalopolis the philosopher Cercidas pled with the rich to aid the needy before revolution destroyed all wealth.³⁶ When Cleomenes invaded Achaea and defeated Aratus all upper-class Greece trembled for its property. Aratus appealed to Macedonia. Antigonus Doson came down, overwhelmed Cleomenes at Sellasia (221), and restored the oligarchic regime in Lacedaemon. Cleomenes fled to Egypt, tried and failed to win the help of Ptolemy III, tried and failed to rouse the Alexandrians to revolution, and killed himself.³⁷

The class war continued. A generation after Cleomenes the people of Sparta overthrew the government, and set up a revolutionary dictatorship. Philopoemen, who had succeeded Aratus as head of the Achaean League, invaded Laconia, and restored the rule of property. As soon as Philopoemen had gone the people rose again, and set up Nabis as dictator (207). Nabis was a Syrian Semite who had been captured in war and sold into slavery at Megalopolis; smarting under suppressed ability, he had revenged himself by organizing a revolt among the Helots. Now he gave Spartan citizenship to all freemen, and freed all the Helots with one word. When the rich obstructed him he confiscated their wealth and cut off their heads. The news of his doings went abroad, and he found it a simple matter, with the help of the poorer classes, to conquer Argos, Messenia, Elis, and part of Arcadia. Everywhere he nationalized large estates, redistributed the land, and abolished debts.³⁸ The Achaean League, unable to overthrow him, appealed to Rome for aid. Flamininus came, but Nabis offered so resolute a resistance that the Roman accepted a truce by which Nabis was to release the imprisoned rich, but would retain his power. At this juncture Nabis was assassinated by an agent of the Aetolian League (192).³⁹ Four years later Philopoemen marched in again, propped up the oligarchs, abolished the Lycurgean regimen, and sold three thousand of Nabis’ followers into slavery. The revolution was ended, but so was Sparta; it continued to exist, but it played no further part in the history of Greece.

V. THE ASCENDANCY OF RHODES

Frightened by the violence of faction and drawn by the movements of population, trade and capital passed from the mainland and sought new havens in the Aegean. Delos, once rich through Apollo, flourished in the second century as a free port under the protection of Rome and the management of Athens. The little isle was crowded with alien merchants, business offices, palaces and hovels, and the diverse temples of exotic faiths.

Rhodes reached her zenith in the third century, and was then by common consent the most civilized and beautiful city in Hellas. Strabo described the great port as “so far superior to all others in harbors, roads, walls, and improvements that I am unable to speak of any other city as equal to it, or even as almost equal to it.”⁴⁰ Situated at one of the crossroads of the Mediterranean, in a position to take advantage of that expanding trade which Alexander’s conquests had made possible between Europe, Egypt, and Asia, Rhodes’ spacious harbors replaced Tyre and the Piraeus as a port of reshipment for goods, and as a clearinghouse for the organization and financing of commerce in the eastern sea. Her merchants established a profitable reputation for honesty, her banks and her government for stability, in a world of treachery and change; her powerful fleet, manned by her citizens, cleared the Aegean of pirates, maintained an equal security for the merchant vessels of all nations, and established a code of maritime law so ably devised and so widely accepted that it governed Mediterranean trade for centuries, and passed down into the marine law of Rome, Constantinople, and Venice.

Having freed herself from Macedonian domination by her heroic resistance to Demetrius Poliorcetes (305), Rhodes steered successfully through the troubled politics of the age by maintaining a wise neutrality, or by going to war only to check the growth of an aggressor state, or to preserve the freedom of the seas. She united many of the Aegean cities in an “Island League,” and exercised her presidency so fairly that no one questioned her right to lead. Her government—an aristocracy resting on a democratic base as in republican Rome—ruled the synoecized cities of Lindus, Camirus, Ialysus, and Rhodes with skill and comparative justice, gave to alien residents such privileges as Athens had never yielded to her metics, protected a large population of slaves so well that when in danger it dared to arm them, and laid upon the rich men of the city the obligation to take care of the poor.⁴¹ The state met its expenses by a two per cent tax upon imports and exports. It lent money generously, sometimes without interest, to cities in distress.

When Rhodes herself was physically ruined by an earthquake (225), all the Greek world came to her aid, for everyone recognized that her disappearance from the Aegean would lead to commercial and financial chaos. Hieron II sent one hundred gold talents ($300,000), and set up in the restored city a statuary group showing the people of Rhodes being crowned by the people of Syracuse. Ptolemy III sent three hundred talents* of silver; Antigonus III sent three thousand, together with great quantities of timber and pitch for building; his queen Chryseis gave three thousand talents of lead, and 150,000 bushels of corn. Seleucus III sent 300,000 bushels of corn and ten fully equipped quinqueremes. “As for the towns that contributed each according to its means,” says Polybius, “it would be difficult to enumerate them.”⁴² It was a bright interlude in the dark annals of political history, one of the rare occasions when all the Greek world thought and acted as one.

CHAPTER XXIV

Hellenism and the Orient

I. THE SELEUCID EMPIRE

AS we move from the mainland through the Aegean into the Greek settlements in Asia and Egypt we are surprised to find a fresh and flourishing life, and we perceive that the Hellenistic age saw not so much the decay as the dissemination of Greek civilization. From the end of the Peloponnesian War a stream of Greek soldiers and immigrants had entered Asia. Alexander’s conquests widened this stream by offering new opportunities and avenues to Hellenic enterprise.

Seleucus, called “Nicator” (Victor), was distinguished among Alexander’s generals as a man of courage, imagination, and unscrupulous generosity. It was characteristic of him that he gave his second wife, the beautiful Stratonice, to his son Demetrius when he learned that the boy was pining away for love of her. Antigonus I, challenging the allotment of Babylonia to Seleucus, set out to conquer for himself all the Near East; Seleucus and Ptolemy I defeated him at Gaza in 312. From that moment the house of Seleucus dated the Seleucid Empire, and a new era—a mode of reckoning that survived in western Asia till Mohammed. Seleucus united under his scepter the old kingdoms and cultures of Elam, Sumeria, Persia, Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, Phoenicia, and, at times, Asia Minor and Palestine. At Seleucia and Antioch he built capitals richer and more populous than any ever known in mainland Greece. For Seleucia he chose a site near the aged Babylon and the future Baghdad, almost at the junction of the Euphrates and the Tigris; it was conveniently located to attract commerce between Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf and beyond; within half a century it had a population of 600,000 souls—a motley mass of Asiatics dominated by a minority of Greeks.* Antioch was similarly situated on the Orontes, not too far from its mouth to be reached by ocean shipping, yet sufficiently inland to be safe from naval attack, to tap the fertile fields of the river valley, and to draw the Mediterranean trade of northern Mesopotamia and Syria. Here the later Seleucid emperors established their residence, until under Antiochus IV it became the wealthiest city of Seleucid Asia, adorned with temples, porticoes, theaters, gymnasiums, palaestras, flower gardens, landscaped boulevards, and parks so beautiful that the Garden of Daphne was known throughout Greece for its laurels and cypresses, its fountains and streams.

Seleucus I was assassinated in 281, after thirty-five years of beneficent and popular rule. From his death his empire began to disintegrate, torn with geographical and racial divisions, violent struggles for the throne, and barbarian invasions on every side. Antiochus I Soter (Savior) fought gallantly against the Gauls. Antiochus II Theos (the God) lived in a perpetual intoxication, as if again to illustrate the gamble of hereditary monarchy; his wife Laodice began that chain of intrigue which disrupted and finally ruined the royal house. Antiochus III the Great was a man of capacity and culture; his bust in the Louvre shows a Greco-Macedonian with the courage of Macedon and the intelligence of Greece. He recaptured by untiring war most of the territory which the empire had lost since Seleucus I. He established a library at Antioch, and promoted the literary movement that culminated in Meleager of Gaza at the close of the second century. He preserved the Greek custom of municipal autonomy, writing to the cities that “if he should order anything contrary to the laws they should pay no attention, but assume that he had acted in ignorance.”² He was ruined by ambition, imagination, and a flair for love. In 217 he was defeated by Ptolemy IV at Raphia, and lost Phoenicia, Syria, and Palestine; he consoled himself by a victorious expedition into Bactria and India (208), duplicating the exploits of Alexander. Lured by Hannibal into helping him against Rome, he landed an army in Euboea, fell in love at fifty with a pretty maid of Chalcis, courted her honorably, married her elaborately, forgot the war, and spent the winter enjoying his happiness.³ The Romans defeated him at Thermopylae, drove him into Asia Minor, and overwhelmed him at Magnesia. Restless, he plunged into another eastern campaign, and died in its course (187), after a reign of thirty-six years.

His son Seleucus IV loved peace, administered the empire with economy and wisdom, and was assassinated in 175. At that time his younger brother was serving as archon at Athens, where he had gone to study philosophy. Hearing of Seleucus’ death, he organized an army, marched to Antioch, deposed the assassin, and took the throne (175). Antiochus IV was both the most interesting and the most erratic of his line, a rare mixture of intellect, insanity, and charm. He governed his kingdom ably despite a thousand injustices and absurdities. He allowed his delegates to abuse their power, and gave his mistress authority over three cities. He was generous and cruel without judgment, often forgiving or condemning by whim, surprising simple folk with costly gifts, and tossing money with a child’s ecstasy among the crowds in the street. He loved wine, women, and art; he drank to excess, and left his royal seat, at banquets, to dance naked with the entertainers, or to carouse with wastrels;⁴ he was a Bohemian whose dream of power had come true. He despised the solemnity and trappings of the court, played practical jokes upon his dignitaries, and disguised himself to know the luxury of anonymity; it delighted him to mingle with the people and overhear their comments on the King. He liked to wander among the shops of the artisans, watching and studying the work of engravers and jewelers, and discussing with them the technical details of their craft. He felt a sincere enthusiasm for Greek art, literature, and thought. He made Antioch for a century the art center of the Greek world; he paid artists handsomely to set up statuary and temples in other cities of Hellas; he redecorated the shrine of Apollo at Delos, built a theater for Tegea, and financed the completion of the Olympieum at Athens. Having lived fourteen impressionable years in Rome, he had imbibed a taste for republican institutions; and as if to foreshadow Augustus, it pleased his humor and policy to clothe his monarchical power in the forms of republican freedom. The chief effect of his passion for things Roman was the introduction of gladiatorial games in Antioch, his capital. The people resented the brutal sport, but Antiochus won them over by lavish and spectacular displays; when they became accustomed to the butchery he considered their degeneration a personal victory. It was characteristic of him that he began as an ardent follower of the Stoics, and ended as an easy convert to the Epicureans. He enjoyed his own qualities so keenly that he labeled his coins Antiochus Theos Epiphanes—the God Made Manifest. Overreaching himself in the manner of his imaginative kind, he attempted in 169 to conquer Egypt. He was succeeding when Rome, herself a candidate for the Egyptian plum, ordered him to retire from African soil. Antiochus asked time to consider; but the Roman envoy, Popilius, drew a circle in the sand around Antiochus, and bade him decide before stepping over its line. Antiochus yielded in fury, plundered the Temple at Jerusalem to restore his treasury, sought glory like his father in a campaign against the eastern tribes, and died in Persia on the way, of epilepsy, madness, or disease.⁵

II. SELEUCID CIVILIZATION

The function of the Seleucid Empire in history was to give to the Near East that economic protection and order which Persia had provided before Alexander, and which Rome would restore after Caesar. Despite the wars, revolutions, spoliations, and corruption normal to human affairs, that function was performed. The Macedonian conquest broke down a thousand barriers of government and speech, and invited the East and the West to fuller economic exchange. The result was a brilliant resurrection of Greek Asia. While division and strife, the poverty of the soil, and the migrations of trade routes ruined the mainland, the comparative unity and peace preserved by the Seleucids encouraged agriculture, commerce, and industry. The Greek cities of Asia were no longer free to make revolutions or experiments; homonoia, Harmony, was enforced by the kings, and was literally worshiped by the people as a god.⁶ Old cities like Miletus, Ephesus, and Smyrna had a second blooming.

The valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Jordan, the Orontes, the Maeander, the Halys, and the Oxus were fertile then beyond the conception of present imagination, obsessed with the vision of the deserts and rocky wastes that cover so much of the Near East after two thousand years of erosion, deforestation, and neglectful tenant tillage.⁷ The soil was irrigated by a system of canals maintained under the supervision of the state. The land was owned by the king, or his nobles, or the cities, or the temples, or private individuals; in all cases the labor was performed by serfs transmitted with the soil in bequest or sale. The government considered as national property all the riches contained in the earth,⁸ but did little to exploit them. Trades, and even cities, were now highly specialized. Miletus was a busy textile center; Antioch imported raw materials and turned them into finished goods. Some large factories, manned with slaves, achieved a modest degree of mass production for the general market.⁹ But domestic consumption lagged behind production; the people were so poor that no adequate home market encouraged large-scale industry.

Commerce was the life of Hellenistic economy. It made the great fortunes, built the great cities, and employed a growing proportion of the expanding population. Money transactions now almost completely replaced the barter that had survived for four centuries the coinage of Croesus. Egypt, Rhodes, Seleucia, Pergamum, and other governments issued currencies sufficiently stable and similar to facilitate international trade. Bankers provided public and private credit. Ships were larger, made four to six knots per hour, and shortened voyages by crossing the open sea. On land the Seleucids developed and extended the great highways left as part of Persia’s legacy to the East. Caravan routes converged from inner Asia upon Seleucia, and opened out thence to Damascus, Berytus (Beirut), and Antioch. Enriched by trade, and enriching it in turn, populous centers rose there and at Babylon, Tyre, Tarsus, Xanthus, Rhodes, Halicarnassus, Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Byzantium, Cyzicus, Apamea, Heracleia, Amisus, Sinope, Panticapaeum, Olbia, Lysimacheia, Abydos, Thessalonica (Salonika), Chalcis, Delos, Corinth, Ambracia, Epidamnus (Durazzo), Taras, Neapolis (Naples), Rome, Massalia, Emporium, Panormus (Palermo), Syracuse, Utica, Carthage, Cyrene, and Alexandria. One busy web of trade bound together Spain under Carthage and Rome, Carthage under Hamilcar, Syracuse under Hieron II, Rome under the Scipios, Macedonia under the Antigonids, Greece under the Leagues, Egypt under the Ptolemies, the Near East under the Seleucids, India under the Mauryas, and China under the Hans. The routes from China passed through Turkestan, Bactria, and Persia, or over the Aral, Caspian, and Black Seas. The routes from India passed through Afghanistan and Persia to Seleucia, or through Arabia and Petra to Jerusalem and Damascus, or across the Indian Ocean to Adana (Aden), then through the Red Sea to Arsinoë (Suez), and thence to Alexandria. It was for control of the last two routes that the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties fought those “Syrian Wars” that finally weakened them both to the point of falling vassal to Rome.

The Seleucid monarchy, inheriting the Asiatic tradition, was absolute; no assembly limited its power. The court was planned on the Oriental style, with chamberlains and lace, eunuchs and uniforms, incense and music; only the speech and the inner dress remained Greek. The nobles were not half-independent chieftains as in Macedonia or medieval Europe, but administrative or military appointees of the king. It was this structure of monarchy that passed down from Persia through the Seleucids and Sassanids to the Rome of Diocletian and the Byzantium of Constantine. Knowing that their power, in an alien scene, rested upon the loyalty of the Greek population, the Seleucid kings labored to restore the old Greek cities and to establish new ones. Seleucus I founded nine Seleucias, six Antiochs, five Laodiceas, three Apameas, one Stratonice; and his successors imitated him to the best of their lesser ability. Cities grew and multiplied as in nineteenth-century America.

Through them the Hellenization of western Asia proceeded, on the surface, at a rapid pace. The process, of course, was old; it had begun with the Great Migration, and the Hellenistic Dispersion was in part the Renaissance of Ionia, a return of Greek civilization to its early Asiatic homes. Even before Alexander Greeks had held high offices in the Persian Empire, and Greek merchants had dominated the trade routes of the nearer East. Now the opening of political, commercial, and artistic opportunities drew from old Greece, Magna Graecia, and Sicily an emigrant flow of adventurers, settlers, scribes, soldiers, traders, doctors, scholars, and courtesans. Greek sculptors and engravers made statues and coins for Phoenician, Lycian, Carian, Cilician, Bactrian kings. Greek dancing girls became the rage of Asiatic ports.¹⁰ Sexual immorality took on a Greek grace, and Greek palaestras and gymnasiums aroused in some Orientals an unwonted devotion to athletics and baths. Cities secured new water supplies and drainage systems; avenues were paved and cleaned. Schools, libraries, and theaters stimulated reading and literature; collegians (epheboi) and university students roamed the streets and played their ancient pranks upon one another and the populace. No one was counted cultured unless he understood Greek and could enjoy the plays of Menander and Euripides. This imposition of Greek civilization upon the Near East is one of the startling phenomena of ancient history; no change so swift and far-reaching had ever been seen in Asia. We know too little of its details and its results. We are poorly informed about the literature, philosophy, and science of Seleucid Asia; if we find in it few figures of prime magnitude—Zeno the Stoic, Seleucus the astronomer, and, in the Roman period, Meleager the poet and Poseidippus the polymath—we cannot be sure that there were not many more. It was a flourishing culture, full of variety, refinement, and verve, and as fertile in art as any preceding age. Never before, so far as our knowledge goes, had a civilization achieved so wide a spread and such complex unity amid so many diverse environments. For a century western Asia belonged to Europe. The way was prepared for the Pax Romana, and the embracing synthesis of Christendom.

But the East was not conquered. It was too deepiy and anciently itself to yield its soul. The masses of the people continued to speak their native tongues, to pursue their long-accustomed ways, and to worship their ancestral gods. Beyond the Mediterranean coasts the Greek veneer grew thin, and such Hellenic centers as Seleucia on the Tigris were Greek islands in an Oriental sea. There was no such fusion of races and cultures as Alexander had dreamed of; there were Greeks and Greek civilization on the top, and a medley of Asiatic peoples and cultures underneath. The qualities of the Greek intellect made no entry into the Oriental mind; the energy and love of novelty, the zest for worldliness and the passion for perfection, the expressiveness and individualism of the Greek effected no change in the Oriental character. On the contrary, as time moved on, Eastern ways of thought and feeling surged up from below into the ruling Greeks, and through them flowed westward to transform the “pagan” world. In Babylon the patient Semitic merchant and the temple banker regained ascendancy over the volatile Hellene, preserved the cuneiform writing, and forced back the Greek language into second place in the business world. Astrology and alchemy corrupted Greek astronomy and physics; Oriental monarchy proved more powerful than Greek democracy, and finally impressed its form upon the West; Greek kings and Roman emperors became gods in the manner of the East, and the Asiatic theory of the divine right of kings passed down through Rome and Constantinople into modern Europe. Through Zeno the East insinuated its quietism and fatalism into Greek philosophy; through a hundred channels it poured its mysticism and its piety into the vacuum left by the decay of the orthodox Greek faith. The Greek readily accepted the gods of the Orient as essentially identical with his own; but as the Greek did not really believe, and the Asiatic did, the Oriental god survived while the Greek god died. Artemis of the Ephesians became again an Eastern maternity goddess, with a dozen breasts. Babylonian, Phoenician, and Syrian cults captured great numbers of the invading Hellenes. The Greeks offered the East philosophy, the East offered Greece religion; religion won because philosophy was a luxury for the few, religion was a consolation for the many. In the rhythmic historic alternation of belief and unbelief, mysticism and naturalism, religion and science, religion returned to power because it recognized the secret helplessness and loneliness of man, and gave him inspiration and poetry; a disillusioned, exploited, war-wearied world was glad to believe and hope again. The least expected and most profound effect of Alexander’s conquest was the Orientalization of the European soul.

III. PERGAMUM

The gradual absorption of the Greeks by Asia weakened the Seleucid power, and generated independent kingdoms on the edge of the Hellenistic world. As early as 280 Armenia, Cappadocia, Pontus, and Bithynia set up their own monarchies; and soon the Greek cities of the Black Sea fell subject to Asiatic rule. Bactria and Sogdiana broke away about 250. In 247 Arsaces, chief of the Parni—an Iranian nomad tribe—killed the Seleucid governor of Persia and set up the kingdom of Parthia, destined to plague Rome for centuries. In 282 Philataerus, entrusted by Lysimachus with the care of nine thousand talents and the fortified hill of Pergamum in Asia Minor, appropriated the money and declared his independence. His nephew Eumenes I absorbed Pitane and Atarneus, and made Pergamum a sovereign monarchy (262). Attalus I earned the gratitude of Greek Asia by driving back the Gauls who had penetrated to his city walls (230); his eldest son, Eumenes II, continued his competent rule, but shocked Greece by calling in the aid of Rome against Antiochus III. After their defeat of Antiochus at Magnesia the Romans gave Eumenes nearly all of Asia Minor. His brother and successor, Attalus II, distrusted the power of his sons to keep Pergamum free, and at his death (139) bequeathed his kingdom to Rome.

The little state did what it could to redeem the treachery of its birth and growth by making itself the rival of Alexandria as a center of art and learning. The wealth that came from the mines, vines, and cornfields, from the manufacture of woolens, parchments, and perfumes, from the making of bricks and tiles, and the mastery of north Aegean trade went not only to maintain a strong army and navy, but to encourage literature and art. The Pergamene kings believed that government and private business could fruitfully compete, supplying a mutual check on inefficiency and greed. The king cultivated large tracts of land with slaves, and operated, though not as monopolies, many factories, quarries, and mines. Under this unique system wealth increased and multiplied. Pergamum became an ornate capital, famous for its altar to Zeus, its luxurious palaces, its library and theater, its palaestras and baths; even its public lavatories upheld the municipal pride.¹¹ The library was second only to Alexandria’s in the number of its volumes and the repute of its scholars; and the pinakotheka housed, for the public enjoyment, a great collection of paintings. For half a century Pergamum was the finest flower of Hellenic civilization.

Meanwhile the House of Seleucus had fallen into decay. The rise of independent kingdoms almost confined its power to Mesopotamia and Syria. Parthia, Pergamum, Egypt, and Rome patiently labored to weaken the dynasty by supporting pretenders at every succession, and fomenting faction and civil war. In 153, just as Demetrius I was restoring vigor to the Seleucid government, Rome collected mercenaries from every quarter to bolster up the false claims of a Smyrnean adventurer to the throne. Pergamum and Egypt joined in the attack; Demetrius fought and died heroically, and the Seleucid power fell into the hands of the worthless Alexander Balas, the puppet of his mistresses and of Rome.

IV. HELLENISM AND THE JEWS

The history of Judea in the Hellenistic age turns on two conflicts: the external struggle between Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt for Palestine, and the internal struggle between the Hellenic and the Hebraic ways of life. The first conflict is dead history, and may be briefly dismissed; Matthew Arnold believed the second conflict to be one of the lasting cleavages of human feeling and thought. In the original division of Alexander’s empire Judea (i.e., Palestine south of Samaria) had been awarded to Ptolemy. The Seleucids never accepted this decision; they saw themselves separated from the Mediterranean, and coveted the wealth that might come from the trade that passed through Damascus and Jerusalem. In the resultant wars Ptolemy I won, and Judea remained subject to the Ptolemies for more than a century (312-198). It paid an annual tribute of eight thousand talents, but despite this burden the land prospered. Judea was left a large measure of self-government under the hereditary high priest of Jerusalem and the Great Assembly. This gerousia, or Council of Elders, which Ezra and Nehemiah had formed two centuries back, became both a senate and a supreme court. Its seventy or more members were chosen from the heads of the leading families, and from the most learned scholars (Soferim) of the land. Its regulations—the Dibre Soferim—set the pattern of orthodox Judaism from the Hellenistic age to our own.

The basis of Judaism was religion: the idea of a surveillant and upholding deity entered into every phase and moment of Jewish life. Morals and manners were ordained by the gerousia in strictness and detail. Entertainments and games were few and restrained. Intermarriage with non-Jews was forbidden; so were celibacy and infanticide. Hence the Jews bred abundantly, and reared all their children; despite war and famine their numbers grew throughout antiquity, until in the time of Caesar there were some seven million Jews in the Roman Empire. The bulk of the population, before the Maccabean era, was agricultural. The Jews were not yet a nation of traders; even as late as the first century A.D. Josephus wrote: “We are not a commercial people“;¹³ the great trading peoples of the age were the Phoenicians, the Arabs, and the Greeks. Slavery existed in Judea as elsewhere, but the class war was relatively mild. Art was undeveloped; only music flourished. The flute, the drum, the cymbal, the “ram’s horn” or trumpet, the lyre, and the harp were used to accompany the single voice, the folk song, or the solemn religious antiphons. Jewish religion scorned the concessions of Greek ritual to popular imagination; it would have nothing to do with images, oracles, or birds’ entrails; it was less anthropomorphic and superstitious, less colorful and joyful, than the religion of the Greeks. Face to face with the naïve polytheism of Hellenic cults, the rabbis chanted the sonorous refrain still heard in every Jewish synagogue: Shammai Israel, Adonai eleënu, Adonai echod—”Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”

Into this simple and puritan life the invading Greeks brought all the distractions and temptations of a refined and epicurean civilization. Around Judea was a ring of Greek settlements and cities: Samaria, Neapolis (Shechem), Gaza, Ascalon, Azotus (Ashdod), Joppa (Jaffa), Apollonia, Doris, Sycamina, Polis (Haifa), and Acco (Acre). Just across the Jordan was a leagued decapolis of Greek cities: Damascus, Gadara, Gerasa, Dium, Philadelphia, Pella, Raphia, Hippo, Scythopolis, and Canetha. Each of these had Greek institutions and establishments—temples to Greek gods and goddesses, schools and academies, gymnasiums and palaestras, and nude games. From such cities, and from Alexandria, Antioch, Delos, and Rhodes, Greeks and Jews came to Jerusalem, bringing the infection of a Hellenism devoted to science and philosophy, art and literature, beauty and pleasure, song and dance, drinking and feasting, athletics and courtesans and handsome boys, along with a gay sophistication that questioned all morals, and an urbane skepticism that undermined all supernatural belief. How could Jewish youth resist these invitations to delight, this easy liberation from a thousand irksome restraints? Young wits among the Jews began to laugh at the priests as moneygrubbers, and at their pious followers as fools who allowed old age to come upon them without having ever known the pleasures, luxuries, and subtleties of life. Rich Jews were also won over, for they could afford to yield to temptation. Jews who sought appointment from Greek officials felt it the part of policy to speak the Greek language, to live in the Greek way, even to say a few kind words to the Greek gods.

Against this powerful assault upon both the intellect and the senses three forces defended the Jews: the persecution under Antiochus IV, the protection of Rome, and the power and prestige of a Law believed to be divinely revealed. Like antibodies gathering to attack an infection, the more religious among the Jews formed themselves into a sect called Chasidim—the Pious. They began (about 300 B.C.) with a simple pledge to avoid wine for a given period; later, by the inevitable psychology of war, they went to the extremes of Puritanism, and frowned upon all physical pleasure as a surrender to Satan and the Greeks. The Greeks marveled at them, and classified them with the strange “gymnosophists,” or nude ascetic philosophers, whom Alexander’s army had come upon in India. Even the common Jew deprecated the severe religiosity of the Chasidim, and sought for some middle way. Perhaps a compromise would have been reached had it not been for the attempt of Antiochus Epiphanes to force Hellenism upon Judea by persuasion of the sword.

In 198 Antiochus III defeated Ptolemy V, and made Judea a part of the Seleucid Empire. Tired of the Egyptian yoke, the Jews supported Antiochus, and welcomed his capture of Jerusalem as a liberation. But his successor, Antiochus IV, thought of Judea as a source of revenue; he was planning great campaigns, and needed funds. He ordered the Jews to pay in taxes one third of their grain crops and one half of the fruit of their trees.¹⁴ Ignoring the usual inheritance of the office, he appointed as high priest the sycophantic Jason, who represented the Hellenizing party in Jerusalem and sought permission to establish Greek institutions in Judea. Antiochus heard him gladly, for he was disturbed by the diversity and persistence of Oriental cults in Greek Asia, and dreamed of unifying his polyglot empire through one law and one faith. When Jason went about these matters with insufficient haste Antiochus replaced him with Menelaus, who gave him larger promises and a fatter bribe.¹⁵ Under Menelaus Yahweh was identified with Zeus, Temple vessels were sold to raise funds, and in some Jewish communities sacrifices were offered to Hellenic deities. A gymnasium was opened in Jerusalem, and Jewish youths, even priests, took part, naked, in athletic games; some young Jews, in the ardor of their Hellenism, underwent operations to remedy the physiological shortcomings that might reveal their race.¹⁶

Shocked by these developments, and feeling their religion challenged in its very existence, the majority of the Jewish people went over to the side and view of the Chasidim. When Antiochus IV was expelled from Egypt by Popilius (168), the news reached Jerusalem in the form of a report that he had been killed. The rejoicing Jews deposed his appointees, massacred the leaders of the Hellenizing party, and cleansed the Temple of what they felt to be pagan abominations. Antiochus, not dead but humiliated, moneyless, and convinced that the Jews had obstructed his campaign against Egypt and were conspiring to return Judea to the Ptolemies,¹⁷ marched up to Jerusalem, slaughtered Jews of either sex by the thousand, desecrated and looted the Temple, appropriated for the royal coffers its golden altar, its vessels, and its treasuries, restored Menelaus to supreme power, and gave orders for the compulsory Hellenization of all Jews (167). He commanded that the Temple be rededicated as a shrine to Zeus, that a Greek altar be built over the old one, and that the usual sacrifices be replaced with a sacrifice of swine. He forbade the keeping of the Sabbath or the Jewish festivals, and made circumcision a capital crime. Throughout Judea the old religion and its rites were interdicted, and the Greek ritual was made compulsory on pain of death. Every Jew who refused to eat pork, or who was found possessing the Book of the Law, was to be jailed or killed, and the Book wherever found was to be burned.¹⁸ Jerusalem itself was put to the flames, its walls were destroyed, and its Jewish population was sold into slavery. Foreign peoples were brought in to resettle the site, a new fortress was built upon Mt. Zion, and a garrison of troops was left in it to rule the city in the name of the King.¹⁹ At times, it seems, Antiochus thought of establishing and requiring the worship of himself as a god.”²⁰

The orgy of persecution became intensified as its proceeded. There is always, in any society, a minority whose instincts rejoice in the permission to persecute; it is a release from civilization. The agents of Antiochus, having put an end to all visible expression of Judaism in Jerusalem, passed like a searching fire into the towns and villages. Everywhere they gave the people a choice between death and participation in Hellenic worship, which included the eating of sacrificial swine.²¹ All synagogues and Jewish schools were closed. Those who refused to work on the Sabbath were outlawed as rebels. On the day of the Bacchanalia the Jews were compelled to deck themselves with ivy like the Greeks, to take part in the processions, and to sing wild songs in honor of Dionysus. Many Jews conformed to the demands, waiting for the storm to pass. Many others fled into caves or mountain retreats, lived on clandestine gleanings from the fields, and resolutely carried on the ordinances of Jewish life. The Chasidim circulated among them, preaching courage and resistance. A detachment of royal troops, coming upon some caves in which thousands of Jews—men, women, and children—were hiding, ordered them to come forth. The Jews refused; and because it was the Sabbath, they would not move the stones that might have blocked the entrance to the caves. The soldiers attacked with fire and sword, killing many of the refugees and asphyxiating the remainder with smoke.²² Women who had circumcized their newborn sons were cast with their infants over the city walls to death.²³ The Greeks were surprised to find the strength of the old faith; not for centuries had they seen such loyalty to an idea. The stories of martyrdom went from mouth to mouth, filled books like the First and Second Maccabees, and gave to Christianity the prototypes of its martyrs and its martyrology. Judaism, which had been near assimilation, became intensified in religious and national consciousness, and withdrew into a protective isolation.

Among the Jews who in those days fled from Jerusalem were Mattathias—of the family of Hasmonai, of the tribe of Aaron—and his five sons—Johannan Caddis, Simon, Judas, Eleazar, and Jonathan. When Apelles, an agent of Antiochus, came to Modin, where these six had sought refuge, he summoned the inhabitants to repudiate the Law and sacrifice to Zeus. The aged Mattathias came forward with his sons and said: “Even should all the people in the kingdom obey the order to depart from the faith of their fathers, I and my sons will abide by the Covenant of our ancestors.” As one of the Jews approached the altar to make the required sacrifice Mattathias slew him, and slew also the King’s commissioner. Then he said to the people: “Whoever is zealous for the Law, and wishes to support the Covenant, let him follow me.”²⁴ Many of the villagers retired with him and his sons to the mountains of Ephraim; and there they were joined by a small band of young rebels, and by such of the Chasidim as were still alive.

Soon afterward Mattathias died, having designated as captain of his band his son Judas, called Maccabee.* Judas was a warrior whose courage equaled his piety; before every battle he prayed like a saint, but in the hour of battle “he was like a lion in his rage.” The little army “lived in the mountains after the manner of beasts, feeding on herbs.” Every now and then it descended upon a neighboring village, killed backsliders, pulled down pagan altars, and “what children soever they found uncircumcized, those they circumcized valiantly.”²⁵ These things being reported to Antiochus, he sent an army of Syrian Greeks to destroy the Maccabean force. Judas met them in the pass of Emmaus; and though the Greeks were trained mercenaries fully armed, and Judas’ band was poorly armed and clad, the Jews won a complete victory (166). Antiochus sent a larger force, whose general was so confident that he brought slave merchants with him to buy the Jews whom he expected to capture, and posted in the towns the prices that he would ask.²⁶ Judas defeated these troops at Mizpah, and so decisively that Jerusalem fell into his hands without resistance. He removed all pagan altars and ornaments from the Temple, cleansed and rededicated it, and restored the ancient service amid the acclaim of the returning orthodox Jews (164).†

As the regent Lysias advanced with a new army to recapture the capital, the news came—this time true—that Antiochus was dead (163). Desiring to be free for action elsewhere, Lysias offered the Jews full religious freedom on condition that they lay down their arms. The Chasidim consented, the Maccabeans refused; Judas announced that Judea, to be safe from further persecutions, must achieve political as well as religious liberty. Intoxicated with power, the Maccabeans now took their turn at persecution, pursuing the Hellenizing faction vengefully not only in Jerusalem but in the cities that bordered the frontier.²⁷ In 161 Judas defeated Nicanor at Adasa, and strengthened himself by making an alliance with Rome; but in the same year, fighting against great odds at Elasa, he was slain. His brother Jonathan carried on the war bravely, but was himself killed at Acco (143). The only surviving brother, Simon, supported by Rome, won from Demetrius II, in 142, an acknowledgment of Judean independence. By popular decree Simon was appointed both high priest and general; and as these offices were made hereditary in his family, he became the founder of the Hasmonean dynasty. The first year of his reign was counted as the beginning of a new era, and an issue of coinage proclaimed the heroic rebirth of the Jewish state.

CHAPTER XXV

Egypt and the West

I. THE KINGS’ REGISTER

THE smallest but richest morsel of Alexander’s legacy was allotted to the ablest and wisest of his generals. With characteristic loyalty—perhaps as a visible sanction of his authority—Ptolemy, son of Lagus, brought the body of the dead king to Memphis, and had it entombed in a sarcophagus of gold.* He brought with him also Alexander’s occasional mistress Thais, married her, and had by her two sons. He was a plain, blunt soldier, capable both of generous feeling and of realistic thinking. While other inheritors of Alexander’s realm spent half their lives in war, and dreamed of undivided sovereignty, Ptolemy devoted himself to consolidating his position in an alien country, and to promoting Egyptian agriculture, commerce, and industry. He built a great fleet, and made Egypt as secure against naval attack as nature had made it almost unassailable by land. He helped Rhodes and the Leagues to preserve their independence of Macedon, and so won the title of Soter. Only when, after eighteen years of labor, he had firmly organized the political and economic life of his new realm did he call himself king (305). Through him and his successor Greek Egypt established its rule over Cyrene, Crete, the Cyclades, Cyprus, Syria, Palestine, Phoenicia, Samos, Lesbos, Samothrace, and the Hellespont. In his old age he found time to write astonishingly truthful commentaries on his campaigns, and to establish, about 290, the Museum and Library that were to make the fame of Alexandria. In 285, feeling his eighty-two years, he appointed his second son, Ptolemy Philadelphus, to the throne, yielded the government to him, and took his place as a subject in the young king’s court. Two years later he died.

Already the fertile valley and delta had poured great wealth into the royal treasury. Ptolemy I, to give a dinner to his friends, had had to borrow their silver and rugs; Ptolemy II spent $2,500,000 on the feast that climaxed his coronation.² The new Pharaoh was a convert to the philosophy of Cyrene, and was resolved to enjoy each monochronos hedone—every pleasure that the moment gave. He ate himself into obesity, tried a variety of mistresses, repudiated his wife, and finally married his sister Arsinoë.³ The new queen ruled the Empire and managed its wars while Ptolemy II reigned among the chefs and scholars of his court. Following and improving upon the example of his father, he invited to Alexandria as his guests famous poets, savants, critics, scientists, philosophers, and artists, and made his capital beautiful with architecture in the Greek style. During his long reign Alexandria became the literary and scientific capital of the Mediterranean, and Alexandrian literature flourished as it would never do again. Nevertheless Philadelphus was unhappy in his old age; his gout and his cares increased with the extent of his wealth and his power. Looking out from his palace window he saw and envied a beggar who lay at ease in the sun on the harbor dunes, and he mourned, “Alas, that I was not born one of these!”⁴ Haunted by the fear of death, he sought in the lore of Egyptian priests the magic elixir of eternal life.⁵

He had so enlarged and lavishly financed the Museum and Library that later history named him as their founder. In 307 Demetrius of Phalerum, expelled from Athens, had taken refuge in Egypt. Ten years later we find him at the court of Ptolemy I. It was he, apparently, who suggested to Ptolemy Soter that the capital and the dynasty might be made illustrious by establishing a Museum—i.e., a House of the Muses—i.e., of the arts and sciences—which would rival the universities of Athens. Inspired, probably, by Aristotle’s industry in collecting and classifying books, knowledge, animals, plants, and constitutions, Demetrius appears to have recommended the erection of a group of buildings capable not only of sheltering a great collection of books, but also of housing scholars who would devote their lives to research. The plan appealed to the first two Ptolemies; funds were provided, and the new university slowly took form near the royal palaces. There was a general mess hall, where the scholars seem to have had their meals; there was an exedra, or lecture hall, a court, a cloister, a garden, an astronomical observatory, and the great Library. The head of the entire institution was technically a priest, since it was formally dedicated to the Muses as actual goddesses. Living in the Museum were four groups of scholars: astronomers, writers, mathematicians, and physicians. All of these men were Greeks, and all received a salary from the royal treasury. Their function was not to teach, but to make researches, studies, and experiments. In later decades, as students multiplied about the Museum, its members undertook to give lectures, but the Museum remained to the end an Institute for Advanced Studies rather than a university. It was, so far as we know, the first establishment ever set up by a state for the promotion of literature and science. It was the distinctive contribution of the Ptolemies and Alexandria to the history of civilization.

Ptolemy Philadelphus died in 246, after a long and largely beneficent reign. Ptolemy III Euergetes (Well-Doer) was another Thothmes III, intent on conquering the Near East; he took Sardis and Babylon, marched as far as India, and so effectually disorganized the Seleucid Empire that it crumbled at the touch of Rome. We shall not follow the record of his wars, for though there is drama in the details of strife, there is a dreary eternity in its causes and results; such history becomes a menial attendance upon the vicissitudes of power, in which victories and defeats cancel one another into a resounding zero. Euergetes’ young wife Berenice gave thanks for his successes by dedicating a lock of her hair to the gods; the poets celebrated the story, and the astronomers lauded her to the skies by naming one of the constellations Coma Berenices—Berenice’s Hair.

Ptolemy IV Philopator so loved his father that he imitated his wars and his triumphs. But his victory over Antiochus III at Raphia (217) had been won with native troops—their first use by any Ptolemy; and the Egyptians, now armed and conscious of their strength, began from this time onward to break down the authority of the Greeks on the Nile. Philopator gave himself to amusement, spent much time on his spacious pleasure boat, introduced the Bacchanalia into Egypt, and half persuaded himself that he was descended from Dionysus. In 205 his wife was killed by his mistress; and shortly afterward Philopator himself passed away. In the ensuing chaos Philip V of Macedon and Antiochus III of Seleucia were about to dismember and absorb Egypt when Rome—with which the second Ptolemy had made a treaty of friendship—entered upon the scene, defeated Philip, sent Antiochus packing, and made Egypt a Roman protectorate (205).

II. SOCIALISM UNDER THE PTOLEMIES

By far the most interesting aspect of Ptolemaic Egypt is its extensive experiment in state socialism. Royal ownership of the land had long been a sacred custom in Egypt; the Pharaoh, as king and god, had full right to the soil and all that it produced. The fellah was not a slave, but he could not leave his place without the permission of the government, and he was required to turn over the larger part of his crops to the state.⁶ The Ptolemies accepted this system, and extended it by appropriating the great tracts which, under previous dynasties, had belonged to the Egyptian nobles or priests. A great bureaucracy of governmental overseers, supported by armed guards, managed all Egypt as a vast state farm.⁷ Nearly every peasant in Egypt was told by these officials what soil to till and what crops to grow; his labor and his animals could at any time be requisitioned by the state for mining, building, hunting, and the making of canals or roads; his harvest was gauged by state measurers, registered by the scribes, threshed on the royal threshing floor, and conveyed by a living chain of fellahs into the granaries of the king.⁸ There were exceptions to the system: the Ptolemies allowed the farmer to own his house and garden; they resigned the cities to private property; and they gave a right of leasehold to soldiers whose services were rewarded with land. But this leasehold was usually confined to areas which the owner agreed to devote to vineyards, orchards, or olive groves; it excluded the power of bequest, and might at any time be canceled by the king. As Greek energy and skill improved these cleruchic (shareholders’) lands, a demand arose for the right to transmit the property from father to son. In the second century such bequest was permitted by custom, but not by law; in the last century before Christ it was recognized by law,⁹ and the usual evolution from common property to private property was complete.

Doubtless this system of socialism had been evolved because the conditions of tillage in Egypt required more co-operation, more unison of action in time and space, than individual ownership could be expected to provide. The amount and character of the crops to be sown depended upon the extent of the annual inundation, and the efficiency of irrigation and drainage; these matters naturally made for central control. Greek engineers in the employ of the government improved the ancient processes, and applied a more scientific and intensive agriculture to the land. The ancient shaduf was replaced by the noria, a large wheel sometimes forty feet in diameter, equipped with buckets hanging freely on the interior rim; at the top of the revolution each bucket was tilted by an obstructing bar, and emptied its contents into an irrigation reservoir; better still, the “screw of Archimedes” and the pump of Ctesibius* raised water with a speed unknown before the Ptolemies.¹⁰ The centralization of economic management in the hands of the government, and the institution of forced labor, made possible great public works of flood control, road construction, irrigation, and building, and prepared the way for the engineering feats of Rome. Ptolemy II drained Lake Moeris, and turned its bed into a great tract of fertile land for distribution among the soldiers. In 285 he began to restore the canal from the Nile near Heliopolis to the Red Sea near Suez;¹¹ Pharaoh Necho and Darius I had built and rebuilt this, but twice the shifting sands had choked it up, as in a century they would do again.

Industry operated under similar conditions. The government not only owned the mines, but either worked them itself, or appropriated the ore.¹² The Ptolemies opened up valuable gold deposits in Nubia, and had a stable gold coinage. They controlled the copper mines of Cyprus and Sinai. They had a monopoly of oil—derived not from the soil but from plants like linseed, croton, and sesame. The government fixed, each year, the amount of land to be sown to such plants; it took the whole produce at its own price; it extracted the oil in state factories through great beam presses worked by serfs; it sold the oil to retailers at its own price, and excluded foreign competition by a heavy tariff; its profit ranged from seventy to three hundred per cent.¹³ Apparently there were similar governmental subsidies in salt, natron (carbonate of soda used as soap), incense, papyrus, and textiles; there were some private textile factories, but they had to sell all their product to the state.¹⁴ Minor industries were left in private hands; the state merely licensed and supervised them, bought a large share of their output at fixed prices, and taxed a good part of the profits into the royal treasury. Handicrafts were carried on by ancient guilds, whose members were by tradition bound to their trade, their village, even to their domicile.¹⁵ Industry was well developed; chariots, furniture, terra cotta, carpets, cosmetics were produced in abundance; glass blowing and the weaving of linen were Alexandrian specialties. Invention was more advanced in Ptolemaic Egypt than in any economy before imperial Rome’s; the screw chain, the wheel chain, the cam chain, the ratchet chain, the pulley chain, and the screw press were all in use;¹⁶ and the chemistry of dyes had progressed to the point of treating cloths with diverse reagents which brought forth, from immersion in one dye, a variety of fast colors.¹⁷ In general the factories of Alexandria were worked by slaves, whose low cost of maintenance enabled the Ptolemies to undersell in foreign trade the products of Greek handicraft.¹⁸

All commerce was controlled and regulated by the government; retail traders were usually state agents distributing state goods.¹⁹ All caravan routes and waterways were owned by the state. Ptolemy II introduced the camel into Egypt, and organized a camel post to the south; this carried only governmental communications, but these included nearly all the commercial correspondence of the country. The Nile was busy with passenger and freight traffic, apparently under private management subject to state regulation.²⁰ For the Mediterranean trade the Ptolemies built the largest commercial fleet of the time, with vessels of three hundred tons burden.²¹ The warehouses of Alexandria invited world trade; its double harbor was the envy of other cities; its lighthouse was one of the Seven Wonders.* The fields, factories, and workshops of Egypt supplied a great surplus, which found markets as far east as China, as far south as central Africa, as far north as Russia and the British Isles. Egyptian explorers sailed down to Zanzibar and Somaliland, and told the world about the Troglodytes who lived along the east African coast on sea food, ostriches, carrots, and roots.²⁴ To break the Arab hold on Indian trade with the Near East, Egyptian ships sailed directly from the Nile to India. Under the wise encouragement of the Ptolemies Alexandria became the leading port of reshipment for Eastern merchandise destined for the markets of the Mediterranean.

This flowering of commerce and industry was quickened by excellent banking conveniences. Payment in kind survived to some degree, as a legacy from ancient Egypt; and the grain of the royal treasuries was used as part of the bank reserve; but deposits, withdrawals, and transfers of grain might be made on paper instead of being physically performed²⁵ Beside this modified barter rose a complex money economy. Banking was a government monopoly, but its operations might be delegated to private firms.²⁶ Bills were paid by drafts on bank balances; banks lent money at interest, and paid the accounts of the royal treasury. The central bank, at Alexandria, had branches in all the important towns. Never in known history had agriculture, industry, commerce, and finance reached so rich, so unified, and so brutal a development.

The masters and beneficiaries of this system were the free Greeks of the capital. At the head of all was the Pharaoh-god-king. From the viewpoint of the Greek population the Ptolemy was truly a Soter or Savior, a Euergetes or Benefactor; he gave them a hundred thousand places in the bureaucracy, endless economic opportunities, unprecedented facilities for the life of the mind, and a wealthy court as the source and center of a luxurious social life. Nor was the king an incalculable despot. Egyptian tradition combined with Greek law to build up a system of legislation which borrowed from, and improved upon, the Athenian code in every respect except freedom. The edicts of the king had full legal force; but the cities enjoyed considerable self-government, and the Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish population lived each under its own system of law, chose its own magistrates, and pled before its own courts.²⁷ A Turin papyrus gives us the record of an Alexandrian lawsuit; the issues are precisely defined, the evidence is carefully presented, precedents are summarized, and the final judgment is given with judicial impartiality. Other papyri preserve Alexandrian wills, and reveal the antiquity of legal forms: “This is the will of Peisias the Lycian, son of X, of sound mind and deliberate intention.”²⁸

The Ptolemaic was the most efficiently organized government in the Hellenistic world. It took its national form from Egypt and Persia, its municipal form from Greece, and passed them on to Imperial Rome. The country was divided into nomes or provinces, each administered by appointees of the king. Nearly all these officials were Greek. The idea of Alexander, that Greek and Oriental or Egyptian should live and mingle on equal terms, was forgotten as unlucrative; the valley of the Nile became frankly a conquered land. The Greek overseers brought an advanced technology and management to the economic life of Egypt, and enormously expanded the wealth of the nation; but they took the increase. The state charged high prices for the products which it controlled, and barred competition with a tariff wall; hence olive oil that cost twenty-one drachmas in Delos cost fifty-two in Alexandria. Everywhere the government took rentals, taxes, customs, and tolls, sometimes labor and life itself. The peasant paid a fee to the state for the right to keep cattle, for the fodder that he fed them, and for the privilege of grazing them on the common pasture land. The private owner of gardens, vineyards, or orchards paid a sixth—under Ptolemy II a half—of his produce to the state.²⁹ All persons except soldiers, priests, and government officials paid a poll tax. There were taxes on salt, legal documents, and bequests; a five per cent tax on rentals, a ten per cent tax on sales, a twenty-five per cent levy on all fish caught in Egyptian waters, a toll on goods passing from village to town, or along the Nile; there were high export as well as import duties at all Egyptian ports; there were special taxes to maintain the fleet and the lighthouse, to keep the municipal physicians and police in good humor, and to buy a gold crown for every new king;³⁰ nothing was overlooked that could fatten the state. To keep track of all taxable products, income, and transactions the government maintained a swarm of scribes, and a vast system of personal and property registration; to collect the taxes it farmed them out to specialists, supervised their operations, and held their possessions as security till the returns were in. The total revenue of the Ptolemies, in money and kind, was probably the greatest gathered by any government between the fall of Persia and the ascendancy of Rome.

III. ALEXANDRIA

Most of this wealth came to Alexandria. The nome capitals and a few other towns were also prosperous, with paved and lighted streets, police protection, and a good water supply; but nothing quite so “modern” as Alexandria had ever been seen before. Strabo describes it in the first century A.D. as over three miles long and a mile wide; Pliny reckons the city wall as fifteen miles in length.³¹ Dinocrates of Rhodes and Sostratus of Cnidus laid out the city on the rectangular plan, with a central avenue one hundred feet wide running from east to west, crossed by an equally wide avenue from north to south. Each of these thoroughfares, and probably some others, was well lighted at night, and was kept cool during the day by mile after mile of shaded colonnades. Of the four quarters into which the main arteries divided the city the westernmost, Rhacotis, was occupied chiefly by Egyptians; the northeast portion formed the Jewish quarter; the southeast corner, or Brucheum, contained the royal palace, the Museum, the Library, the tombs of the Ptolemies, the sarcophagus of Alexander (the Hotel des Invalides of the age), the arsenal, the chief Greek temples, and many spacious parks. One park had-a portico six hundred feet in length; another contained the royal zoological collection. In the center of the city were the administrative buildings, the government storehouses, the courthouse, the main gymnasium, and a thousand shops and bazaars. Outside the gates were a stadium, a hippodrome or race track, an amphitheater, and a vast cemetery known as the Necropolis, or City of the Dead.³² Along the beach ran a succession of bathing establishments and resorts. A dike or mole, called Heptastadium because it was seven stadia long, connected the city with the island of Pharos, and made two harbors out of one. Behind the city lay Lake Mareotis, which provided ports and outlets for the traffic on the Nile; here the Ptolemies kept their pleasure boats and took their royal ease.*

The population of Alexandria about 200 B.C. was as varied as in a modern metropolis: from four to five hundred thousand Macedonians, Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Persians, Anatolians, Syrians, Arabs, and negroes.*³³ The growth of commerce had swelled the lower middle class, and filled the cosmopolitan capital with a busy, talkative, litigious crowd of shopkeepers and traders, always on the alert for a bargain, and with no prejudice in favor of honesty. At the top were the Macedonians and the Greeks, living in such luxury as astonished the Roman ambassadors who were appointed to the court in 273. Athenaeus recounts the delicacies that burdened the tables and digestions of the master class,³⁴ and Herodas writes: “Alexandria is the house of Aphrodite, and everything is to be found there—wealth, playgrounds, a large army, a serene sky, public displays, philosophers, precious metals, fine young men, a good royal house, an academy of science, exquisite wines, and beautiful women.”³⁵ Alexandria’s poets were discovering the literary value of virginity, and its novelists would soon make it the theme and final casualty of many a tale; but the city was notorious for the generosity of its women and the number of its stepdaughters of joy; Polybius complained that the finest private homes in Alexandria belonged to courtesans.³⁶ Women of all classes moved freely through the streets, shopped in the stores, and mingled with the men. Some of them made a name for themselves in literature and scholarship.³⁷ The Macedonian queens and ladies of the court, from Ptolemy II’s Arsinoe to Antony’s Cleopatra, took an active part in politics, and served policy rather than love with their crimes; but they retained sufficient charm to arouse the men to unprecedented gallantry, at least in poetry and prose, and brought into Alexandrian society an element of feminine influence and grace unknown in classic Greece.

Probably a fifth of Alexandria’s population was Jewish. As far back as the seventh century there had been Hebrew settlements in Egypt; many Jewish traders had entered in the wake of the Persian conquest. Alexander had urged Jews to emigrate to Alexandria, and had, according to Josephus, offered them equal political and economic rights with the Greeks.³⁸ Ptolemy I, after taking Jerusalem, carried with him into Egypt thousands of Jewish captives, who were freed by his successor;³⁹ at the same time he invited well-to-do Hebrews to establish their homes and businesses in Alexandria⁴⁰ By the beginning of the Christian era there were a million Jews in Egypt.⁴¹ A large number of these lived in the Jewish quarter of the capital. It was no ghetto, for the Jews were free to live in any quarter but the Brucheum, which was restricted to official families and their servitors. They chose their own gerousia or senate, and followed their own worship. In 169 the high priest Onias III built a great temple at Leontopolis, a suburb of Alexandria, and Ptolemy VI, his personal friend, assigned the revenues of Heliopolis for its maintenance. Such temples served as schools and meeting places as well as for religious services; hence they were called by the Greek-speaking Jews synagogai, i.e., places of assembly. Since few Egyptian Jews after the second or third generation in Egypt knew Hebrew, the reading of the Law was followed by an interpretation in Greek. Out of these explanations and applications rose the custom of preaching a sermon on a text; and out of the ritual came the first forms of the Catholic Mass.⁴²

This religious and racial separation combined with economic rivalries to arouse, towards the end of this period, an anti-Semitic movement in Alexandria. The Greeks and Egyptians alike were habituated to the union of church and state, and frowned upon the cultural independence of the Jews; furthermore, they felt the competition of the Jewish artisan or businessman, and resented his energy, tenacity, and skill. When Rome began to import Egyptian grain it was the Jewish merchants of Alexandria who carried the cargoes in their fleets.^42a The Greeks, perceiving their failure to Hellenize the Jews, feared for their own future in a state where the majority remained persistently Oriental, and bred so vigorously. Forgetting the legislation of Pericles, they complained that the Jewish law forbade mixed marriages, and that the Jews for the most part kept to themselves. AntiSemitic literature multiplied. Manetho, the Egyptian historian, gave currency to the story that the Jews had been expelled from Egypt, centuries back, because they had been afflicted with scrofula or leprosy.⁴³ Feeling mounted on both sides until, in the first century of the Christian era, it broke out into destructive violence.

The Jews did what they could to allay the resentment against their amixia—their social separation—and their success. Though they clung to their religion they spoke Greek, studied and wrote about Greek literature, and translated their sacred books and their histories into Greek. To acquaint the Greeks with the Jewish religious tradition, and to enable the Jew who knew no Hebrew to read his own scriptures, a group of Alexandrian Jewish scholars began, probably under Ptolemy II, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The kings favored the undertaking in the hope that it would make the Jews of Egypt more independent of Jerusalem, and would lessen the flow of Jewish-Egyptian funds to Palestine. Legend told how Ptolemy Philadelphus, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum, had invited some seventy Jewish scholars to come from Judea about 250 to translate the scriptures of their people; how the King had lodged each of them in a separate room on Pharos, and had kept them without intercommunication until each had made his own rendering of the Pentateuch; how all the seventy versions, when finished, agreed word for word, proving the divine inspiration of the text and of the translators; how the King rewarded the scholars with costly presents of gold; and how from these circumstances the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible came to be known as the hermeneia kata tous hebdomekonta—the Interpretation according to the Seventy—in Latin, Interpretatio Septuaginta (sc. Seniorum)—in a word, the “Septuagint.”*⁴⁴ Whatever the process of translation, the Pentateuch seems to have appeared in Greek before the close of the third century, and the Prophetic books in the second.⁴⁶ This was the Bible used by Philo and St. Paul.

The process of Hellenization in Egypt failed as completely with the natives as with the Jews. Outside of Alexandria the Egyptians sullenly maintained their own religion, their own dress or nudity, their own immemorial ways. The Greeks thought of themselves as conquerors, not as fellow men; they did not bother to build Greek cities south of the Delta, or to learn the language of the people; and their laws did not recognize the marriage of an Egyptian with a Greek. Ptolemy I tried to unite the Greek and native faiths by identifying Serapis and Zeus; later Ptolemies encouraged the cult of themselves as gods to offer a common and convenient object of worship to their heterogeneous population; but those Egyptians who were not courting office paid little attention to these artificial cults. The Egyptian priests, shorn of their wealth and power, and dependent for their sustenance upon grants of money from the state, waited patiently for the Greek wave to recede. In the end it was not Hellenism that won in Alexandria, but mysticism; now were laid the foundations of Neo-Platonism and the medley of promissory cults that competed for the Alexandrian soul in the centuries that surrounded the birth of Christ. Osiris as Serapis became the favorite god of the later Egyptians, and of many Egyptian Greeks; Isis regained popularity as the goddess of women and motherhood. When Christianity came neither the clergy nor the people found it impossible to change Isis into Mary, and Serapis into Christ.

IV. REVOLT

The lesson of Ptolemaic socialism is that even a government may exploit. Under the first two Ptolemies the system worked reasonably well: great engineering enterprises were completed, agriculture was improved, marketing was brought into order, the overseers behaved with a modest measure of injustice and partiality, and though the exploitation of materials and men was thorough, its profits went in large degree to develop and adorn the country, and to finance its cultural life. Three factors ruined the experiment. The Ptolemies went to war, and spent more and more of the people’s earnings upon armies, navies, and campaigns. After Philadelphus there was a rapid deterioration in the quality of the kings; they ate and drank and mated, and allowed the administration of the system to fall into the hands of rascals who ground every possible penny out of the poor. The fact that the exploiters were foreigners was never forgotten by the Egyptians, nor by the priests who dreamed of the fleshpots of Egypt that their class had enjoyed before the Persian and Greek domination.

The Ptolemaic conception of socialism was essentially one of intensified production rather than of wide distribution. The fellah received enough of his product to keep him alive, but not enough to encourage him in his work or in the business of rearing a family. Generation after generation the government’s exactions grew. The system of detailed national control became intolerable, like the relentlessly watchful eye of a despotic parent. The state lent seed-corn to the peasant to plant his crop, and then bound him to the farm until the harvest was in. No peasant might use any of his own product until all his debts had been paid to the state. The fellah was patient, but even he began to grumble. By the second century a substantial part of the soil had been abandoned for lack of peasants to work it; the cleruchs or lessees of royal land could get no tenants to till it for them; they tried to do it themselves, but were not up to the task; gradually the desert crept back upon civilization. In the gold mines of Nubia the slaves worked naked in dark and narrow galleries, in cramping positions, loaded with chains, and encouraged by the whip of the overseer; their food was poor, not even enough to keep them alive; thousands of them succumbed from malnutrition and fatigue; and the only welcome event in their lives was death⁴⁷ The common laborer in the factories received one obol (nine cents) a day, the skilled worker two or three. Every tenth day was a day of rest.

Complaints multiplied, and strikes grew more frequent: strikes among the miners, the quarrymen, the boatmen, the peasants, the artisans, the tradesmen, even the overseers and the police; strikes seldom for better pay, since the toilers had ceased to hope for this, but of simple exhaustion and despair. “We are worn out,” says a papyrus record of one strike; “we will run away”—i.e., seek sanctuary in a temple.⁴⁸ Nearly all the exploiters were Greeks, nearly all the exploited were Egyptians or Jews. The priests clandestinely appealed to the religious feelings of the natives, while the Greeks resented any concession made to Jews or Egyptians by the government. In the capital the populace was bribed by state bounties and spectacles, but it was excluded from the royal quarter, was watched by a large military force, and was allowed no voice in national affairs; in the end it became an irresponsible and violent mob.⁴⁹ In 216 the Egyptians revolted, but were put down; in 189 they revolted again, and the mutiny continued for five years. The Ptolemies won for a time by the force of their army, and by raising their contributions to the priests; but the situation had become impossible. The country had been milked to depletion, and even the exploiters felt that nothing remained.

Disintegration set in on every side. The Ptolemies passed from natural to unnatural vice, from intelligence to stupidity; they married with a freedom and haste that forfeited the esteem of their people; luxury unfitted them for war or government, at last even for thought. Lawlessness and dishonesty, incompetence and hopelessness, the absence of competition and of the stimulus that comes from ownership, lowered year by year the productivity of the land. Literature waned, creative art died; after the third century Alexandria added little to either. The Egyptians lost respect for the Greeks; the Greeks, if such a thing can be believed, lost respect for themselves. Year by year they forgot their own language, and spoke a corrupt mixture of Greek and Egyptian; more and more of them married their sisters, after native custom, or married into Egyptian families and were absorbed; thousands of them worshiped Egyptian gods. By the second century the Greeks had ceased to be the dominant race even politically; the Ptolemies, to preserve their authority, had adopted the Egyptian faith and ritual, and had increased the power of the priests. As the kings sank into epicurean ease the clergy reasserted its leadership, and won back year by year the lands and privileges which the earlier Ptolemies had taken away.⁵⁰ The Rosetta Stone, dated 196 B.C., describes the coronation ceremonies of Ptolemy V as following almost completely the Egyptian forms. Under Ptolemy V (203-181) and Ptolemy VI (181-145) dynastic feuds absorbed the energies of the royal house, while Egyptian agriculture and industry decayed. Order and peace were not restored until Caesar, as a mere incident in his career, took Egypt with hardly a blow, and Augustus made it a province of Rome (30 B.C.).