 CHAPTER 35 THE COMMON MAN'S LIFE UNDER THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE Before we tell of how this Roman Empire which was built up in the two centuries BC and which flourished in peace and security from the days of Augustus Caesar onward for two centuries fell into disorder and was broken up. It may be as well to devote some attention to the life of the ordinary people throughout this great realm. Our history has come down now to within 2,000 years of our own time, and the life of the civilized people, both under the Peace of Rome and the Peace of the Han Dynasty, was beginning to resemble more and more clearly the life of their civilized successors today. In the western world coined money was now in common use. Outside the priestly world there were many people of independent means who were neither officials of the government nor priests. People traveled about more freely than they had ever done before, and there were high roads and inns for them. Compared with the past, with the time before 500 BC, life had become much more loose. Before that date civilized men had been bound to a district or country, had been bound to a tradition, and lived within a very limited horizon, only the nomads traded and traveled. But neither the Roman peace nor the Peace of the Han Dynasty meant a uniform civilization over the large areas they controlled. There were very great local differences and great contrasts and inequalities of culture between one district and another, just as there are today, under the British Peace in India. The Roman garrisons and colonies were dotted here and there over this great space, worshiping Roman gods and speaking the Latin language. But where there had been towns and cities before the coming of the Romans, they went on, subordinated indeed, but managing their own affairs, and for a time at least, worshiping their own gods in their own fashion. Over Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt and the Hellenized East generally, the Latin language never prevailed. Greek ruled there invincibly. Saul of Tarsus, who became the Apostle Paul, was a Jew and a Roman citizen, but he spoke and wrote Greek, and not Hebrew. Even at the court of the Parthian dynasty, which had overthrown the Greek solokids in Persia, and was quite outside the Roman imperial boundaries, Greek was the fashionable language. In some parts of Spain and in North Africa, the Carthaginian language also held on for a long time in spite of the destruction of Carthage. Such a town as Saveli, which had been a prosperous city long before the Roman name had been heard of, kept its Semitic goddess and preserved its Semitic speech for generations, in spite of a colony of Roman veterans at Italica a few miles away. Septimus Severus, who was emperor, from 193 to 211 AD, spoke Carthaginian as his mother's speech. He learned Latin later as a foreign tongue, and it is recorded that his sister never learned Latin and conducted her Roman household in the Punic language. In such countries as Gaul and Britain, and in provinces like Decchia, now roughly Romania, and Pannonia, Hungary south of the Danube, where there were no pre-existing great cities and temples and cultures, the Roman Empire did however Latinize. It civilized these countries for the first time. It created cities and towns where Latin was from the first, the dominant speech, and where Roman gods were served, and Roman customs and fashions followed. The Romanian, Italian, French and Spanish languages, all variations and modifications of Latin remain to remind us of this extension of Latin speech and customs. Northwest Africa also became at last largely Latin speaking. Egypt, Greece and the rest of the empire to the east were never Latinized. They remained Egyptian and Greek in culture and spirit, and even in Rome among educated men, Greek was learned as the language of a gentleman, and Greek literature and learning were very properly preferred to Latin. In this miscellaneous empire, the ways of doing work and business were naturally also very miscellaneous. The chief industry of the settled world was still largely agriculture. We have told how in Italy, the 33 farmers who were the backbone of the early Roman Republic were replaced by estates worked by slave labor after the Punic wars. The Greek world had had very various methods of cultivation from the Arcadian plan, wherein every free citizen toiled with his own hands to Sparta, wherein it was a dishonor to work, and where agricultural work was done by a special slave class, the Helots. But that was ancient history now, and over most of the Hellenized world, the estate system and slave gangs had spread. The agricultural slaves were captives who spoke many different languages, so that they could not understand each other, or they were born slaves. They had no solidarity to resist oppression, no tradition of rights, no knowledge, for they could not read or nor write. Although they came, too, from a majority of the country population, they never made a successful insurrection. The insurrection of Spartacus in the 1st century BC was an insurrection of the special slaves, who were trained for the gladiatorial combats. The agricultural workers in Italy in the later days of the Republic and the early Empire suffered frightful indignities. They would be chained at night to prevent escape, or have half the head shaved to make it difficult. They had no wives of their own. They could be outraged, mutilated and killed by their masters. A master could sell his slave to fight beasts in the arena. If a slave slew his master, all the slaves in his household and not merely the murderer were crucified. In some parts of Greece, in Athens notably, the lot of the slave was never quite so frightful as this, but it was still detestable. To such a population, the barbarian invaders who presently broke through the defensive line of the legions came not as enemies, but as liberators. The slave system had spread to most industries and to every sort of work that could be done by gangs. Mines and metallurgical operations, the rowing of galleys, road making and big building operations, were all largely slave occupations. And almost all domestic service was performed by slaves. There were poor free men, and there were freed men in the cities and upon the countryside, working for themselves or even working for wages. They were artisans, supervisors and so forth, workers of a new money-paid class, working in competition with slave workers. But we do not know what proportion they made of the general population. It probably varied vitally in different places and at different periods. And there were also many modifications of slavery, from the slavery that was chained at night and driven with whips to the farm or quarry, to the slave, whose master found it advantageous to leave him to cultivate his patch or work his craft, and own his wife like a free man, provided he paid in a satisfactory acquittance to his owner. There were armed slaves. At the opening of the period of the Punic Wars in 264 BC, the Etruscan sport of setting slaves to fight for their lives was revived in Rome. It grew rapidly fashionable, and soon every great Roman rich man kept a retinue of gladiators, who sometimes fought in the arena, but whose real business it was to act as his bodyguard of bullies. And also there were learned slaves. The conquests of the later republic were among the highly civilized cities of Greece, North Africa and Asia Minor, and they brought in many highly educated captives. The tutor of a young Roman of good family was usually a slave. A rich man would have a Greek slave as librarian, and slave secretaries and learned men. He would keep his poet as he would keep a performing dog. In this atmosphere of slavery, the traditions of modern literary criticism were evolved. The slaves still boast and quarrel in our reviews. There were enterprising people who bought intelligent boy slaves and had them educated for sale. Slaves were trained as book copyists, as jewelers, and for endless skilled callings. But there were very considerable changes in the position of a slave during the 400 years between the opening days of conquest under the republic of rich man, and the days of disintegration that followed the great pestilence. In the second century BC war captives were abundant, manners gross and brutal. The slave had no rights, and there was scarcely an outrage the reader can imagine that was not practiced upon slaves in those days. But already in the first century AD there was a perceptible improvement in the attitude of the Roman civilization towards slavery. Captives were not so abundant for one thing, and slaves were dearer, and slave owners began to realize that the profit and comfort they got from their slaves increased with the self-respect of these unfortunate. But also the moral tone of the community was rising, and a sense of justice was becoming effective. The higher mentality of Greece was qualifying the old Roman harshness. Restrictions upon cruelty were made. A master might no longer sell his slave to fight beasts. A slave was given property rights in what was called his peculium. Slaves were paid wages as an encouragement and stimulus. A form of slave marriage was recognized. Very many forms of agriculture do not lend themselves to gang working, or require gang workers only at certain seasons. In regions where such conditions prevailed, the slave presently became a serf, paying his owner part of his produce, or working for him at certain seasons. When we begin to realize how essentially this great Latin and Greek-speaking Roman Empire of the first two centuries AD was a slave state, and how small was the minority who had any pride or freedom in their lives, we lay our hands on the clues to its decay and collapse. There was little of what we should call family life, few homes of temperate living, and active thought and study. Schools and colleges were few and far between. The free will and the free mind were nowhere to be found. The great roads, the ruins of splendid buildings, the tradition of law and power it left for the astonishment of succeeding generations must not conceal from us that all its outer splendor was built upon sported wills, stifled intelligence, uncripled and perverted desires, and even the minority who lorded it over, that wide realm of subjugation and of restrained and forced labor were uneasy and unhappy in their souls. Art and literature, science and philosophy, which are the fruits of free and happy minds, waned in that atmosphere. There was much copying and imitation and abundance of artistic artificers, much slavish pedantry amongst the servile men of learning, but the whole Roman Empire in four centuries produced nothing to set beside the bold and noble intellectual activities of the comparatively little city of Athens during its one century of greatness. Athens decayed under the Roman scepter, the science of Alexandria decayed. The spirit of man it seemed was decaying in those days. End of chapter 35. Chapter 36 of A Short History of the World by H. J. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 36 Religious Developments Under the Roman Empire The soul of man, under the Latin and Greek Empire of the first two centuries of the Christian era, was a worried and frustrated soul. Compulsion and cruelty reigned. There were pride and display, but little honour, little serenity, or steadfast happiness. The unfortunate were despised and wretched. The fortunate were insecure and feverishly eager for gratifications. In a great number of cities life centered on the red excitement of the arena, where men and beasts fought and were tormented and slain. Amphitheaters are the most characteristic of Roman ruins. Life went on in that key. The uneasiness of man's hearts manifested itself in profound religious unrest. From the days when the Aryan hordes first broke in upon the ancient civilizations, it was inevitable that the old gods of the temples and priesthoods should suffer great adaptations, or disappear. In the course of hundreds of generations, the agricultural peoples of the brunette civilizations had shaped their lives and souls to the temple-centered life. Observances and the fear of disturbed routines, sacrifices and mysteries, dominated their minds. Their gods seemed monstrous and illogical to our modern minds, because we belong to an Aryanized world. But to these older peoples, these deities had the immediate conviction and vividness of things seen in an intense dream. The conquest of one city-state by another in Shumeria or early Egypt meant a change, or a renaming of gods and goddesses, but left the shape and spirit of the worship intact. There was no change in its general character. The figures in the dream changed, but the dream went on and it was the same sort of dream. And the early Semitic conquerors were sufficiently akin in spirit to the Shumerians to take over the religion of the Mesopotamian civilization they subjugated without any profound alteration. Egypt was never indeed subjugated to the extent of a religious revolution. Under the Ptolemies and under the Caesars, her temples and altars and priesthoods remained essentially Egyptian. So long as conquests went on between people of similar social and religious habits, it was possible to get over the clash between the god of this temple and region and the god of that by a process of grouping or assimilation. If the two gods were alike in character, they were identified. It was really the same god under another name, said the priests and the people. This fusion of gods is called Theocracy, and the age of the great conquests of the thousand years BC was an age of Theocracy. Over wide areas the local gods were displaced by, or rather they were swallowed up in, a general god. So that when at last Hebrew prophets in Babylon proclaimed one god of righteousness in all the earth, men's minds were fully prepared for that idea. But often the gods were too dissimilar for such an assimilation, and then they were grouped together in some plausible relationship. A female god and the Aegean world before the coming of the Greek was much addicted to mother gods, would be married to a male god, and an animal god or a star god would be humanized under animal or astronomical aspect. The serpent under the sun or the star made into an ornament or a symbol, or the god of a defeated people would become a malignant antagonist to the brighter gods. The history of theology is full of such adaptations, compromises and rationalizations of one's local gods. As Egypt developed from city-states into one united kingdom, there was much of this theocracy. The chief god so to speak was Osiris, a sacrificial harvest god of whom Pharaoh was supposed to be the earthly incarnation. Osiris was represented as repeatedly dying and rising again. He was not only the seed and the harvest, but also by a natural extension of thought, the means of human immortality. Among his symbols was the wide-winged scarabius beetle which buries its eggs to rise again, and also the effulgent sun which sets to rise. Later on he was to be identified with apis, the sacred bull. Associated with him was the goddess Isis. Isis was also Hathor, a cow goddess, and the crescent moon, and the star of the sea. Osiris dies and she bears a child, Horus, who is also a hawk god, and the dawn, and who grows to become Osiris again. The effigies of Isis represents her as bearing the infant Horus in her arms and standing on the crescent moon. These are not logical relationships, but they are devised by the human mind before the development of hard and systematic thinking, and they have a dreamlike coherence. Beneath this triple group there are other and darker Egyptian gods, bad gods, the dog-headed Anubis, Black Knight and the like, devourers, tempters, enemies of God and man. Every religious system does in the course of time fit itself to the shape of the human soul, and there can be no doubt that out of these illogical and even uncouth symbols, Egyptian people were able to fashion for themselves ways of genuine devotion and consolation. The desire for immortality was very strong in the Egyptian mind, and the religious life of Egypt turned on that desire. The Egyptian religion was an immortality religion, as no other religion had ever been. As Egypt went down under foreign conquerors and the Egyptian gods ceased to have any satisfactory political significance, the scraving for a life of compensations hereafter intensified. After the Greek conquest, the new city of Alexandria became the center of Egyptian religious life, and indeed of the religious life of the whole Hellenic world. A great temple, the Serapium, was set up by Ptolemy I, at which a sort of trinity of gods was worshiped. These were therapies who was Osiris apis recristened, Isis and Horus. These were not regarded as separate gods, but as three aspects of one god, and therapies was identified with the Greek Zoys, the Roman Jupiter, and the person's sun god. This worship spread wherever the Hellenic influence extended, even into North India and Western China. The idea of immortality, an immortality of compensations and consolation, was eagerly received by a world in which the common life was hopelessly wretched. Therapies was called the savior of souls. After death said the hymns of that time, we are still in the care of his providence. Isis attracted many devotees. Her images stood in her temples as queen of heaven, bearing the infant Horus in her arms. Candles were burnt before her. Votive offerings were made to her. Shavened priests consecrated to celibacy waited on her altar. The rise of the Roman Empire opened the western European world to this growing cult. The temples of Serapius Isis, the chanting of the priests and the hope of immortal life, followed the Roman standards to Scotland and Holland. But there were many rivals to the Serapius Isis religion. Prominent among these was Mitraison. This was a religion of Persian origin, and it centered upon some now forgotten mysteries about Mithras, sacrificing a sacred and benevolent bull. Here we seem to have something more primordial than the complicated and sophisticated Serapius Isis beliefs. We are carried back directly to the blood sacrifices of the Heliolithic stage in human culture. The bull upon the Mitraic monuments always bleeds copiously from a wound in its side, and from this blood springs new life. Devotery to Mithraison actually based in the blood of the sacrificial bull. At his initiation he went beneath a scaffolding upon which a bull was killed so that the blood could actually run down on him. Both these religions, and the same is true of many other of the numerous parallel cults that sought the allegiance of the slaves and citizens under the earlier Roman emperors, are personal religions. They aim at personal salvation and personal immortality. The older religions were not personal like that, they were social. The older fashion of divinity was God or Goddess of the city, first or of the state, and only secondarily of the individual. The sacrifices were a public and not a private function. They concerned collective practical needs in this world in which we live. But the Greeks first and now the Romans had pushed religion out of politics. Guided by the Egyptian tradition, religion had retreated to the other world. Those new private immortality religions took all the heart and emotion out of the old state religions, but they did not actually replace them. A typical city under the earlier Roman emperors would have a number of temples to all sorts of gods. There might be a temple to Jupiter of the capital, the great god of Rome, and there would be probably one to the reigning Caesar. For the Caesars had learned from the pharaohs the possibility of being gods. In such temples a cold and stately political worship went on. One would go and make an offering and burn a pinch of incense to show one's loyalty. But it would be to the temple of Isis, the dear Queen of Heaven, one would go with the burden of one's private troubles for advice and relief. There might be local and eccentric gods. Seville, for example, long affected the worship of the old Carthaginian Venus. In a cave or an underground temple there would certainly be an altar to Mithras, attended by legionaries and slaves. And probably also there would be a synagogue where the Jews gathered to read their Bible and uphold their faith in the unseen god of all the earth. Sometimes there would be trouble with the Jews about the political side of the state religion. They held that their god was a jealous god intolerant of idolatry and they would refuse to take part in the public sacrifices to Caesar. They would not even salute the Roman standards for fear of idolatry. In the East, long before the time of Buddha, there had been ascetics, men and women who gave up most of the delights of life, who repudiated marriage and property, and sought spiritual powers and an escape from the stresses and modifications of the world in abstinence, pain and solitude. Buddha himself set his face against ascetic extravagances, but many of his disciples followed a monkish life of great severity. Obscure Greek cults practiced similar disciplines even to the extent of self-mutilation. Asceticism appeared in the Jewish communities of Judea and Alexandria also in the first century BC. Communities of men abandoned the world and gave themselves to austerities and mystical contemplation. Such was the sect of the Essenes. Throughout the first and second centuries AD, there was an almost world-wide resort to such repudiation of life, a universal search for salvation from the distresses of the time. The old sense of an established order, the old confidence in priest and temple, and law and custom had gone. Amidst the prevailing slavery, cruelty, fear, anxiety, waste, display and hectic self-indulgence, went this epidemic of self-discussed and mental insecurity, this agonized search for peace, even at the price of renunciation and voluntary suffering. This it was that filled the Serpium with weeping penitents and brought the converts into the gloom and gore of the Mithraic Cave. End of Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells The Slippery Vox Recording is in the Public Domain. Chapter 37 The Teaching of Jesus It was while August Caesar, the first of the emperors, was reigning in Rome that Jesus, who is the Christ of Christianity, was born in Judea. In his name a religion was to arise, which was destined to become the official religion of the entire Roman Empire. Now it is, on the whole, more convenient to keep history and theology apart. A large proportion of the Christian world believes that Jesus was an incarnation of that God of all the earth whom the Jews first recognized. The historian, if he is to remain historian, can neither accept nor deny that interpretation. Materially Jesus appeared in the likeness of a man, and it is as a man that the historian must deal with him. He appeared in Judea in the reign of Tiberius Caesar. He was a prophet. He preached after the fashion of the preceding Jewish prophets. He was a man of about thirty, and we are in the profoundest ignorance of his manner of life before his preaching began. Our only direct sources of information about the life and teachings of Jesus are the four gospels. All four agree in giving us a picture of a very definite personality. One is obliged to say, her was a man, this could not have been invented. But just as the personality of Gautama Buddha has been distorted and obscured by the stiff squatting figure, the gilded idol of later Buddhism, so one feels that the lean and strenuous personality of Jesus is much wronged by the unreality and conventionality that a mistaken reverence has imposed upon his figure in modern Christian art. Jesus was a penniless teacher who wondered about the dusty, sun-lit country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food, yet he is always represented clean, calmed and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect and with something motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and unwise additions of the unintelligently devout. We are left, if we do strip this record of these difficult accessories, with a figure of a being very human, very earnest and passionate, capable of swift anger and preaching a new and simple and profound doctrine, namely the universal loving fatherhood of God and the coming of the kingdom of heaven. He was clearly a person, to use a common phrase, of intense personal magnetism. He attracted followers and filled them with love and courage. Weak and ailing people were heartened and healed by his presence. Yet he was probably of a delicate physique because of the swiftness with which he died under the pains of crucifixion. There is a tradition that he fainted, when, according to the custom, he was made to bear his cross to the place of execution. He went about the country for three years, spreading his doctrine, and then he came to Jerusalem, and was accused of trying to set up a strange kingdom in Judea. He was tried upon discharged, and crucified together with two thieves. Long before these two were dead, his sufferings were over. The doctrine of the kingdom of heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought. It is small wonder if the world of that time failed to grasp its full significance, and recoiled in dismay, from even a half-uprecension of its tremendous challenges to the established habits and institutions of mankind. For the doctrine of the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus seems to have preached it, was no less than a bold and uncompromising demand for a complete change and cleansing of the life of our struggling race, and utter cleansing without and within. To the gospels the reader must go for all that is preserved of this tremendous teaching. Here we are only concerned with the jar of its impact upon established ideas. The Jews were persuaded that God, the one God of the whole world, was a righteous God. But they also thought of him as a trading God, who had made a bargain with their father Abraham about them, a very good bargain indeed for them, to bring them at last to predominance in the earth. With dismay and anger, they heard Jesus sweeping away their dear securities. God, he thought, was no bargainer. There were no chosen people and no favorites in the kingdom of heaven. God was the loving father of all life, as incapable of showing favor as the universal son. And all men were brothers, sinners alike and beloved sons alike, of this divine father. In the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus cast scorn upon the natural tendency we all obey, to glorify our own people, and to minimize the righteousness of other creeds and other races. In the parable of the laborers, he thrust aside the obstinate claim of the Jews to have a special claim upon God. All whom God takes into the kingdom, he taught, God serves alike. There is no distinction in his treatment, because there is no measure to his bounty. From all, moreover, as the parable of the buried talent witnesses, and as the incident of the widows might enforces, he demands the utmost. There are no privileges, no rebats, and no excuses in the kingdom of heaven. But it is not only the intense tribal patriotism of the Jews that Jesus outraged. They were a people of intense family loyalty, and he would have swept away all the narrow and restrictive family affections in the great flood of the love of God. The whole kingdom of heaven was to be the family of his followers. We are told that, while he had talked to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him. Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother, and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hands towards his disciples, and said, Behold, my mother and my brethren, for whosoever shall do the will of my father, which is in the heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother. And not only did Jesus strike at patriotism and the bonds of family loyalty in the name of God's universal fatherhood and brotherhood of all mankind, but it is clear that his teaching condemned all the gradations of the economic system, all private wealth, and personal advantages. All men belonged to the kingdom, all their possessions belonged to the kingdom. The righteous life for all men, the only righteous life, was the service of God's will with all that we had, was all that we were. And again and again, he denounced private riches and the reservation of any private life. And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one that is God. Though knowest the commandments, do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, defraud not, honor thy father and mother. And he answered and said unto him, Master, all these things have I observed from my youth. Then Jesus beholding him loved him and said unto him, One thing though lackest, go thy way, sell whatsoever though haste, and give to the poor, and though shalt have treasure in heaven, and come take up the cross and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved, for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked round about and said unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter the kingdom of God? And the disciples were astonished at his words, but Jesus answered again and said unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God? It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Moreover, in his tremendous prophecy for this kingdom, which was to make all men one together in God, Jesus had small patients for the bargaining righteousness of formal religion. Another large part of his recorded utterances is aimed against the meticulous observance of the rules of the pious career. Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashed hands? He answered them and said unto them, Well, has Isaiah prophesied of you hypocrites as it is written? Thus people honoured me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. How bade in vain do they worship me, teaching from doctrines the commandments of men? For laying aside the commandment of God ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups and many others such things ye do. And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God that ye may keep your own tradition. It was not merely a moral and a social revolution that Jesus proclaimed. It is clear from a score of indications that his teaching had a political bent of the plainest sort. It is true that he said his kingdom was not of this world, that it was in the hearts of men and not upon a throne. But it is equally clear that wherever and in what measure his kingdom was set up in the hearts of men, the outer world would be in that measure revolutionised and made anew. Whatever else the deafness and blindness of his hearers may have missed in his utterances, it is plain they did not miss his resolve to revolutionise the world. The whole tenor of the opposition to him and the circumstances of his trial and execution show clearly that to his contemporaries he seemed to propose plainly and did propose plainly to change and fuse and enlarge all human life. In view of what he plainly said, is it any wonder that all who were rich and prosperous felt a horror of strange things, a swimming of their world at his teaching? He was dragging out all the little private reservations they had made from social service into the light of a universal religious life. He was like some terrible moral huntsman digging mankind out of the snug burrows in which they had lived hitherto. In the white blaze of this kingdom of his there was to be no property, no privilege, no pride and precedence, no motive indeed and no reward with love. Is it any wonder that man were dazzled and blinded and cried out against him? Even his disciples cried out when he would not spare them the light. Is it any wonder that the priests realised that between this man and themselves there was no choice but that he or priestcraft should perish? Is it any wonder that the Roman soldiers confronted and amazed by something soaring over their comprehension and threatening all their disciplines should take refuge in wild laughter and crown him with thorns and robe human purple and make a mock seether of him? For to take him seriously was to enter upon a strange and alarming life, to abandon habits, to control instincts and impulses, to essay an incredible happiness. End of Chapter 37 Chapter 38 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 38 The Development of Doctrinal Christianity In the four gospels we find the personality and teachings of Jesus but very little of the dogmas of the Christian Church. It is in the epistles, a series of writings by the immediate followers of Jesus, that the broad lines of Christian belief are laid down. Chief among the makers of Christian doctrine was Saint Paul. He had never seen Jesus nor heard him preach. Paul's name was originally Saul and he was conspicuous at first as an active persecutor of the little band of disciples after the crucifixion. Then he was suddenly converted to Christianity and he changed his name to Paul. He was a man of great intellectual vigor and deeply and passionately interested in the religious movements of the time. He was well versed in Judaism and in the Mithraism and Alexandrian religion of the day. He carried over many of their ideas and terms of expression into Christianity. He did very little to enlarge or develop the original teaching of Jesus, the teaching of the kingdom of heaven. But he taught that Jesus was not only the promised Christ, the promised leader of the Jews, but also that his death was a sacrifice, like the death of the ancient sacrificial victims of the primordial civilizations for the redemption of mankind. When religions flourish side by side, they tend to pick up each other's ceremonial and other outward peculiarities. Buddhism, for example, in China, has now almost the same sort of temples and priests and uses as Taoism, which follows in the teachings of Lao Tse. Yet, the original teachings of Buddhism and Taoism were almost flatly opposed. And it reflects, no doubt, or discredit upon the essentials of Christian teaching, that it took over not merely such formal things as the Shavened Priest, the votive offering, the altars, candles, chanting, and images of the Alexandrian and Mithraic face, but adopted even their devotional phrases and their theological ideas. All these religions were flourishing side by side, with many less prominent cults. Each was seeking atherans, and there must have been a constant going and coming of converts between them. Sometimes one or other would be in favor with the government. But Christianity was regarded with more suspicion than its rivals, because, like the Jews, its atherans would not perform acts of worship to the gods Caesar. This made it a seditious religion, quite apart from the revolutionary spirit of the teachings of Jesus himself. St. Paul familiarized his disciples with the idea that Jesus, like Osiris, was a god who died to rise again and give men immortality. And presently the spreading Christian community was greatly torn by complicated theological disputes about the relationship of this God Jesus. About the relationship of this God Jesus to God the Father of Mankind. The atherans told that Jesus was divine, but distant from an inferior to the Father. The sableans told that Jesus was merely an aspect of the Father, and that God was Jesus and Father at the same time. Just as a man may be a Father and an Artificer at the same time. And the Trinitarians taught a more subtle doctrine that God was both one and three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For a time it seemed that Arianism would prevail over its rivals. And then, after disputes, violence and wars, the Trinitarian formula became the accepted formula of all Christendom. It may be found in its completest expression in the Athanasian Creed. We offer no comment on these controversies here. They do not sway history as the personal teaching of Jesus sways history. The personal teaching of Jesus does seem to mark a new phase in the moral and spiritual life of our race. Its insistence upon the universal Fatherhood of God, and the implicit Brotherhood of all men, its insistence upon the sacredness of every human personality as a living temple of God, was to have the profoundest effect upon all the subsequent social and political life of mankind. With Christianity was the spreading teachings of Jesus, and new respect appears in the world for man as man. It may be true, as hostile critics of Christianity have urged, that St. Paul preached obedience to slaves. But it is equally true that the whole spirit of the teachings of Jesus, preserved in the gospels, was against the subjugation of man by man. And still more distinctly was Christianity opposed to such outrages upon human dignity as the gladiatorial combats in the arena. Throughout the first two centuries after Christ, the Christian religion spread throughout the Roman Empire, weaving together an ever-growing multitude of converts, into a new community of ideas and will. The attitude of the emperors varied between hostility and toleration. There were attempts to suppress this new faith in both the second and third centuries. And finally in 30003, and the following years, a great persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. The considerable accumulations of church property were seized. All Bibles and religious writings were confiscated and destroyed. Christians were put out of the protection of the law, and many executed. The destruction of the books is particularly notable. It shows how the power of the written word in holding together the new faith was appreciated by the authorities. These book religions, Christianity and Judaism, were religions that educated. Their continued existence depended very largely on people being able to read and understand their doctrinal ideas. The older religions had made no such appeal to the personal intelligence. In the ages of barbaric confusion that were now at hand in Western Europe, it was the Christian church that was mainly instrumental in preserving the tradition of learning. The persecution of Diocletian failed completely to suppress the growing Christian community. In many provinces it was ineffective because the bulk of the population and many of the officials were Christian. In 317, an addict of toleration was issued by the associated Emperor Gallerius, and in 324 Constantine the Great, a friend, and on his deathbed a baptized convert to Christianity became sole ruler of the Roman world. He abandoned all divine pretensions and put Christian symbols on the shields and banners of his troops. In a few years Christianity was securely established as the official religion of the empire. The competing religions disappeared, or were absorbed with extraordinary celerity, and in 300 theodosius the Great caused the great statue of Jupiter's therapies at Alexandria to be destroyed. From the outset of the 5th century onward, the only priests or temples in the Roman Empire were Christian priests and temples. End of Chapter 38 Chapter 39 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 39 The Barbarians Break the Empire into East and West Throughout the 3rd century the Roman Empire, decaying socially and disintegrating morally, faced the barbarians. The emperors of this period were fighting military autocrats and the capital of the empire shifted with the necessities of their military policy. Now the imperial headquarters would be at Milan, in North Italy, now in what is now Serbia at Sirmum or Misch, now in Nicomedia in Asia Minor. Rome, half way down Italy, was too far from the center of interest to be a convenient imperial seat. It was a declining city. Over most of the empire peace still prevailed and men went without arms. The armies continued to be the sole repositories of power. The emperors dependent on their legions became more and more autocratic to the rest of the empire and their state more and more like that of the Persian and other Oriental monarchs. Diocletian assumed a royal dioden and Oriental robes. All along the imperial frontier which ran roughly along the Rhine and Danube, enemies were now pressing. The Franks and other German tribes had come up to the Rhine. In North Hungary were the Vandals, in what was once Daikia and is now Romania, the Wysigos or Westgos. Behind these in South Russia were the Eastgos or Ostrogos and beyond these again in the Volga region the Elans. But now Mongolian peoples were forcing their way towards Europe. The Huns were already exact in tribute from the Elans and Ostrogos and pushing them to the West. In Asia the Roman frontiers were crumpling back under the push of a renaissance Persia. This new Persia, the Persia of the Sassanid Kings, was to be a vigorous and on the whole a successful rival of the Roman Empire in Asia for the next three centuries. A glance at the map of Europe will show the reader the peculiar weakness of the empire. The river Danube comes down to within a couple of hundred miles of the Adriatic sea in the region of what is now Bosnia and Serbia. It makes a square re-entrant angle there. The Romans never kept their sea communication in good order and this 200 miles strip of land was their line of communication between the Western, Latin speaking part of the empire and the Eastern, Greek speaking portion. Against this square angle of the Danube the barbarian pressure was greatest. When they broke through there it was inevitable that the empire should fall into two parts. A more vigorous empire might have thrust forward and re-conquered Teikia but the Roman Empire lacked any such vigour. Constantine the Great was certainly a monarch of great devotion and intelligence. He beat back a raid of the Goths from just these vital Balkan regions but he had no force to carry the frontier across the Danube. He was too preoccupied with the internal weaknesses of the empire. He brought the solidarity and moral force of Christianity to revive the spirit of the declining empire and he decided to create a new permanent capital at Byzantium upon the Hellespond. This new-made Byzantium which was re-christianed Constantinople in his honor was still building when he died. Towards the end of his reign occurred a remarkable transaction. The Vandals being pressed by the Goths asked to be received into the Roman Empire. They were assigned lands in Panonia which is now that part of Hungary west of the Danube and their fighting men became nominally legendaries but these new legendaries remained under their own chiefs. Rome failed to digest them. Constantine died working to reorganize his great realm and soon the frontiers were ruptured again and the Visigoths came almost to Constantinople. They defeated the emperor Valens at Adrianople and made a settlement in what is now Bulgaria similar to the settlement of the Vandals in Panonia. Nominally they were subjects of the emperor. Practically they were conquerors. From 379 to 395 AD reigns the emperor Theodosius the Great and while he reigned the empire was still formally intact. Over the armies of Italy and Panonia presided Stilico, a Vandal, over the armies in the Balkan peninsula Alaric a Goth. When Theodosius died at the close of the fourth century he left two sons. Alaric supported one of these Arcadius in Constantinople and Stilico the other Honorius in Italy. In other words Alaric and Stilico fought for the empire with the princes as puppets. In the course of their struggle Alaric marched into Italy and after a short siege took Rome 410 AD. The opening half of the fifth century saw the whole of the Roman Empire in Europe the prey of rubber armies of barbarians. It is difficult to visualize the state of affairs in the world at that time. Over France, Spain, Italy and the Balkan peninsula the great cities that had flourished under the early empire still stood impoverished partly depopulated and falling into decay. Life in them must have been shallow, mean and full of uncertainty. Local officials asserted their authority and went on with their work with such conscience as they had now dubbed in the name of the now remote and inaccessible empire. The churches went on but usually with illiterate priests. There was little reading and much superstition and fear but everywhere except where looters had destroyed them books and pictures and statuary and such life works of art were still to be found. The life of the countryside had also degenerated. Everywhere this Roman world was much more veedy and untidy than it had been. In some regions war and pestilence had brought the land down to a level of a waste. Roads and forests were infested with robbers. Into such regions barbarians marched with little or no opposition and set up their chiefs as rulers often with Roman official titles. If they were half civilized barbarians they would give the conquered districts tolerable terms. They would take possession of the towns, associate an intermarry and acquire with an accent the Latin speech. But the Jews, the Angles and Saxons who submerged the Roman province of Britain were agriculturalists and had no use for towns. They seemed to have swept South Britain clear of the Romanized population and they replaced the language by their own teutonic dialects which became at last English. It is impossible in the space at our disposal to trace the movements of all the various German and Slavonic tribes as they went to and fro in the disorganized empire in search of plunder and a pleasant home. But let the Vandals serve as an example. They came into history in East Germany. They settled as we have told in Pannonia. Then they moved someone about 425 AD through the intervening provinces to Spain. There they found viscicles from South Russia and other German tribes setting up dukes and kings. From Spain the Vandals under Jenzeric sailed for North Africa. 429 captured Carthage 439 and built a fleet. They secured the mastery of the sea and captured and pillaged Rome 455 which had recovered very imperfectly from her capture and looting by Alaric half a century earlier. Then the Vandals made themselves masters of Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and most of the other islands of the western Mediterranean. They made in fact a sea empire very similar in its extent to the sea empire of Carthage 700 odd years before. They were at the climax of their power about 477. They were a mere handful of conquerors holding all this country. In the next century almost all their territory had been reconquered for the empire of Constantinople during a transitory blaze of energy under Justinian I. The story of the Vandals is but one sample of a host of similar adventures. But now there is coming into the European world the least kindred and most redoubtable of all these devastators. The Mongolian Hunts or Tartars a yellow people active unable such as the western world had never before encountered. End of Chapter 39 Chapter 40 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 40 The Hunts and the End of the Western Empire This appearance of a conquering Mongolian people in Europe may be taken to mark a new stage in human history. Until the last century or so before the Christian era the Mongol and the Nordic peoples had not been in close touch. Far away in the frozen lands beyond the northern forests the leps a Mongolian people had drifted westward as far as Leblende but they played no part in the main current of history. For thousands of years the western world carried on the dramatic interplay of the Aryan, Semitic and fundamental Brunet peoples with very little interference except for an Ethiopian invasion of Egypt or so either from the black peoples to the south or from the Mongolian world in the far east. It is probable that there were two chief causes for the new westward drift of the nomadic Mongolians. One was the consolidation of the Great Empire of China its extension northward and the increase of its population during the prosperous period of the Han dynasty. The other was some process of climatic change a lesser rainfall that abolished swamps and forests perhaps or a greater rainfall that extended grazing over desert steps or even perhaps both these processes going on in different regions but which anyhow facilitated a westward migration. A third contributory cause was the economic wretchedness internal decay and falling population of the Roman Empire. The rich men of the later Roman Republic and then the tax gatherers of the military emperors had utterly consumed its vitality. So we have the factors of thrust, means and opportunity. There was pressure from the east wrought in the west and an open road. The Han had reached the eastern boundaries of European Russia by the first century AD but it was not until the fourth and fifth centuries AD that these horsemen rose to predominance upon the steps. The fifth century was the Han's century. The first Han's to come into Italy were mercenary bands in the pay of Stiliho the Vandal the master of honorius. Presently they were in possession of Panonia with the emptiness of the Vandals. By the second quarter of the fifth century a great war chief had arisen among the Han's Attila. We have only vague and tantalizing glimpses of his power. He ruled not only over the Han's but over a conglomerate of tributary Germanic tribes. His empire extended from the Rhine, crossed the plains into Central Asia. He exchanged ambassadors with China. His head camp was in the plain of Hungary east of the Danube. There he was visited by an envoy from Constantinople Priscus who has left as an account of his state. The way of living of these Mongols was very like the way of living of the primitive Aryans they had replaced. The common folk were in huts and tents. The chiefs lived in great stockaded timber halls. There were feasts and drinking and singing by the bards. The Homeric heroes and even the Macedonian companions of Alexander would probably have felt more at home in the camp capital of Attila than they would have done in the cultivated and decadent court of Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius, who was then reigning in Constantinople. For a time it seemed as though the nomads under the leadership of the Han's and Attila would place the same part towards the Greek or Roman civilization of the Mediterranean countries that the barbaric Greeks had played long ago to the Aegean civilization. It looked like history repeating itself upon a larger stage, but the Han's were much more vetted to cinematic life than the early Greeks who were rather migratory cattle farmers than true nomads. The Han's raided and blundered but did not settle. For some years Attila bullied Theodosius as he chose. His armies devastated and looted right down to the walls of Constantinople. Gibbon says that he totally destroyed no less than 70 cities in the Balkan peninsula and Theodosius bought him off by payments of tribute and tried to get rid of him for good by sending secret agents to assassinate him. In 451 Attila turned his attention to the remains of the Latin-speaking half of the empire and invaded Gaul. Nearly every town in northern Gaul was sacked. Franks, Visigoth and the imperial forces united against him and he was defeated at Troy's in a vast dispersed battle in which a multitude of men variously estimated as between 150,000 and 300,000 were killed. This checked him in Gaul but it did not exhaust his enormous military resources. Next year he came into Italy by way of Venetia, burned Aquileia and Padua and looted Milan. Numbers of fugitives from these north Italian towns and particularly from Padua fled to islands in the lagoons at the head of the Adriatic and laid there the foundations of the city-state of Venice which was to become one of the greatest of the trading centers in the Middle Ages. In 453 Attila died suddenly after a great feast to celebrate his marriage to a young woman and at his death this plunder confederation of his fell to pieces. The actual hunts disappear from history mixed into the surrounding more numerous Aryan-speaking populations but these great hunn raids practically consummated the end of the Latin Roman Empire. After his death 10 different emperors ruled in Rome in 20 years set up by Vandal and other mercenary troops. The Vandals from Carthage took and sacked Rome in 455. Finally in 476 Otto Eiker the chief of the barbarian troops suppressed a Pannonian who was figuring his emperor under the impressive name of Romulus Augustulus and informed the court of Constantinople that there was no longer an emperor in the west. So ingloriously the Latin Roman Empire came to an end. In 493 Theodoric the Goth became king of Rome. All over western and central Europe now barbarian chiefs were reigning as kings, dukes and the like practically independent but for the most part professing some sort of shadowy allegiance to the emperor. There were hundreds and perhaps thousands of such practically independent brigand rulers in Gaul, Spain and Italy and in Dacia the Latin speech still prevailed in locally distorted forms but in Britain and east of the Rhine languages of the German group or in Bohemia a Slavonic language Czech were the common speech. The superior clergy and a small remnant of other educated men read and wrote Latin. Everywhere life was insecure and property was held by the strong arm. Castles multiplied and roads fell into decay. The dawn of the sixth century was an age of division and of intellectual darkness throughout the western world. Had it not been for the monks and Christian missionaries Latin learning might have perished altogether. Why had the Roman Empire grown and why had it so completely decayed? It grew because at first the idea of citizenship held it together. Throughout the days of the expanding republic and even into the days of the early empire there remained a great number of men conscious of Roman citizenship feeling it a privilege and an obligation to be a Roman citizen. Confident of the rights under the Roman law and willing to make sacrifices in the name of Rome. The prestige of Rome as of something just and great and law upholding spread far beyond the Roman boundaries. But even as early as the Punic Wars the sense of citizenship was being undermined by the growth of wealth and slavery. Citizenship spread indeed but not the idea of citizenship. The Roman Empire was after all a very primitive organization. It did not educate, did not explain itself to its increasing multitudes of citizens, did not invite their cooperation in its decisions. There was no network of schools to ensure a common understanding. No distribution of news to sustain collective activity. The adventurers who struggled for power from the days of Marius and Sulla onward had no idea of creating and calling in public opinion upon the imperial affairs. The spirit of citizenship died of starvation and no one observed it die. All empires, all states, all organizations of human society are in the ultimate things of understanding and will. There remained no will for the Roman Empire in the world and so it came to an end. But though the Latin speaking Roman Empire died in the 5th century, something else had been born within it that was to avail itself enormously of its prestige and tradition and that was the Latin speaking half of the Catholic Church. This lived while the Empire died because it appealed to the minds and wills of men because it had books and a great system of teachers and missionaries to hold it together. Things stronger than any law or legions. Throughout the 4th and 5th centuries AD, while the Empire was decaying, Christianity was spreading to a universal dominion in Europe. It conquered its conquerors, the barbarians. When Attila seemed disposed to march on Rome, the patriarch of Rome intercepted him and did what no armies could do, turning him back by sheer moral force. The patriarch or pope of Rome claimed to be the head of the entire Christian Church. Now that there were no more emperors, he began to annex imperial titles and claims. He took the title of Pontifex Maximus, head sacrificial priest of the Roman dominion, the most ancient of all the titles that the emperors had enjoyed. Chapter 41 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 41 The Byzantine and Sassanid Empires The Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire showed much more political tenacity than the western half. It weathered the disasters of the 5th century AD, which saw a complete and final breaking up of the original Latin-Roman power. Attila bullied the emperor Teodosius II and sacked and raided almost to the walls of Constantinople, but that city remained intact. The Nubians came down the Nile and looted upper Egypt, but lower Egypt and Alexandria were left still fairly prosperous. Most of Asia Minor was held against the Sassanid Persians. The 6th century, which was an age of complete darkness for the West, saw indeed a considerable revival of the Greek power. Justinian I, 527 to 565, was a ruler of very great ambition and energy, and he was married to the Empress Theodora, a woman of quite equal capacity who had begun life as an actress. Justinian reconquered North Africa from the Vandals and most of Italy from the Goths. He even regained the south of Spain. He did not limit his energies to naval and military enterprises. He founded a university, built great church of Santa Sofia in Constantinople and codified the Roman law. But in order to destroy a rival to his university foundation, he closed the schools of philosophy in Athens, which had been going on in unbroken continuity from the days of Plato, that is to say for nearly a thousand years. From the 3rd century onwards, the Persian Empire had been the steadfast rival of the Byzantine. The two empires kept Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt in a state of perpetual unrest and waste. In the 1st century A.D., these lands were still at a high level of civilization, wealthy and with an abundant population, but the continued coming and going of armies, massacres, looting and war taxation wore them down steadily, until only shattered and ruinous cities remained upon a countryside of scattered peasants. In this melancholy process of empowerment and disorder, lower Egypt fared perhaps less badly than the rest of the world. Alexandria, like Constantinople, continued a dwindling trade between the east and the west. Science and political philosophy seemed dead now in both these warring and decaying empires. The lost philosophers of Athens, until their suppression, preserved the texts of the great literature of the past with an infinite reverence and want of understanding. But there remained no class of men in the world, no free gentleman with bold and independent habits of thought, to carry on the tradition of Frank's statement and inquiry embodied in these writings. The social and political chaos accounts largely for the disappearance of this class, but there was also another reason why the human intelligence was sterile and feverish during this age. In both Persia and Byzantium, it was all age of intolerance. Both empires were religious empires in a new way, in a way that greatly hampered the free activities of the human mind. Of course, the oldest empires in the world were religious empires, centering upon the worship of a god or of a god king. Alexander was treated as a divinity, and the Caesars were gods in so much as they had altars and temples devoted to them, and the offering of incense was made a test of loyalty to the Roman state. But these alter religions were essentially religions of act and fact. They did not invade the mind. If a man offered his sacrifice and bowed to the god, he was left not only to think, but to say practically whatever he liked about their affair. But the new sort of religions that had come into the world, and particularly Christianity, turned inward. These new faiths demanded not simply conformity, but understanding belief. Naturally fierce controversy ensued upon the exact meaning of the things believed. These new religions were creed religions. The world was confronted with a new word, orthodoxy, and with a stern resolve to keep not only acts, but speech and private sort, within the limits of a set teaching. For to hold a wrong opinion, much more to convey it to other people, was no longer regarded as an intellectual defect, but a moral fault, that might condemn a soul to everlasting destruction. Both Arthur Scheer I, who founded the Sassanid dynasty in the 3rd century AD, and Constantine the Great, who reconstructed the Roman Empire in the 4th, turned to religious organizations for help. Because in these organizations they saw a new means of using and controlling the wills of men. And already before the end of the 4th century, those empires were persecuting free talk and religious innovation. In Persia, Arthur Scheer found the ancient Persian religion of Zoroaster, or Zaratustra, with its priests and temples and a sacred fire that burned upon its altars, ready for his purpose as a state religion. Before the end of the 3rd century, Zoroastrianism was persecuting Christianity, and in 277 AD, Mani, the founder of a new faith, the Manicheans, was crucified and his body flayed. Constantineople on its side was busy hunting out Christian heresies. Manichean ideas infected Christianity and had to be fought with the fiercest methods. In return, ideas from Christianity affected the purity of the Zoroastrian doctrine. All ideas became suspect. Science, which demands before all things the free action of an untroubled mind, suffered a complete eclipse throughout this phase of intolerance. War, the bitterest theology and the usual vices of mankind, constituted Byzantine life of those days. It was picturesque, it was romantic, it had little sweetness or light. When Byzantium and Persia were not fighting the barbarians from the north, they wasted Asia Minor and Syria in dreary and destructive hostilities. Even in close alliance, these two empires would have found it a hard task to turn back the barbarians and recover their prosperity. The Turks or Tartars first come into history as the allies first of one power and then on of another. In the 6th century, the two chief antagonists were Justinian and Kothry is the first. In the opening of the 7th, the Emperor Heraclius was pitted against Kothry's the second, 580. At first and until after Heraclius had become Emperor 610, Kothry is the second carried all before him. He took Antioch Damascus in Jerusalem and his armies reached Calcidon, which is in Asia Minor over against Constantinople. In 619 he conquered Egypt. Then Heraclius pressed the counterattack home and rooted a Persian army at Nineveh, 627, although at that time there were still Persian troops at Calcidon. In 628, Kothry's the second was deposed and murdered by his son, Kabach and an inconclusive peace was made between the two exhausted empires. Byzantium and Persia had fought their last war with few peoples as yet dreamt of the storm that was even then gathering in the deserts to put an end forever to this aimless chronic struggle. While Heraclius was restoring order in Syria, a message reached him. It had been brought in to the imperial outpost at Bostra south of Damascus. It was in Arabic an obscure Semitic desert language, and it was read to the Emperor if it reached him at all by an interpreter. It was from someone who called himself Muhammad the Prophet of God. It called upon the Emperor to acknowledge the one true God and to serve him. What the Emperor said is not recorded. A similar message came to Kawat at Tzatzifon. He was annoyed, tore up the letter and bade the messenger begun. This Muhammad it appeared was a Bedouin leader whose headquarters were in the mean little desert town of Medina. He was preaching a new religion of faith in the one true God. Even so, O Lord, he said, rendow his kingdom from Kawat. End of chapter 41. Chapter 42 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wiles. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 42. The Dynasties of Sui and Tang in China. Throughout the 5th, 6th and 7th and 8th centuries, there was a steady drift of Mongolian peoples westward. The Huns of Attila were merely precursors of this advance, which led at last to the establishment of Mongolian peoples in Finland, Estonia, Hungary and Bulgaria, where their descendants, speaking languages akin to Turkish, survived to this day. The Mongolian nomads were in fact playing a role towards the Aryanized civilizations of Europe and Persia and India, that the Aryans had played to the Aegean and Semitic civilizations, 10 or 15 centuries before. In Central Asia, the Turkish peoples had taken root in what is now western Turkestan, and Persia already employed many Turkish officials and Turkish mercenaries. The Parthians had gone out of history, absorbed into the general population of Persia. There were no more Aryan nomads in the history of Central Asia. Mongolian people had replaced them. The Turks became masters of Asia from China to the Caspian. The same great pestilence at the end of the 2nd century AD, that had shattered the Roman Empire, had overthrown the Han dynasty in China. Then came a period of division and of Hanish conquests, from which China arose refreshed more rapidly and more completely than Europe was destined to do. Before the end of the 6th century, China was reunited under the Soi dynasty, and this by the time of Heraclius gave place to the Tang dynasty, whose reign marks another great period of prosperity for China. Throughout the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries, China was the most secure and civilized country in the world. The Han dynasty had extended her boundaries in the North. The Soi and Tang dynasties now spread her civilization to the south, and China began to assume the proportions she has today. In Central Asia, indeed, she reached much further, extending at last, through tributary Turkish tribes to Persia and the Caspian Sea. The new China that had arisen was a very different land from the old China of the Hans. A new and more vigorous literary school appeared. There was a great poetic revival. Buddhism had revolutionized, philosophical and religious thought. There were great advances in artistic work, in technical skill, and in all the amenities of life. Tea was first used, paper manufactured, and woodblock printing began. Millions of people, indeed, were leading orderly, graceful, and kindly lives in China during these centuries, when the attenuated populations of Europe and Western Asia were living either in hovels, small, old cities, or grim rubber fortresses. While the mind of the West was black, with theological obsessions, the mind of China was open and tolerant and inquiring. One of the earliest monarchs of the Tang dynasty was Tai Tsung, who began to reign in 627, the year of the victory of Heracles at Nineveh. He received an embassy from Heracles, who was probably seeking an ally in the rear of Persia. From Persia itself came a party of Christian missionaries, 635. They were allowed to explain their creed to Tai Tsung, and he examined the Chinese translation of their scriptures. He pronounced this strange religion acceptable, and gave permission to the foundation of a church and monastery. To this monarch also, in 628, came messengers from Muhammad. They came to canton on a trading ship. They had sailed the whole way from Arabia along the Indian coasts. Unlike Heracles and Kavad, Tai Tsung gave these envoys a courteous hearing. He expressed his interest in their theological ideas, and assisted them to build a mosque in canton, a mosque which survives this said to this day, the oldest mosque in the world. End of Chapter 42 Chapter 43 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 43 Muhammad and Islam A prophetic amateur of history surveying the world in the opening of the 7th century might have concluded very reasonably that it was only a question of a few centuries before the whole of Europe and Asia fell under Mongolian domination. There were no signs of order or union in western Europe, and the Byzantine and Persian empires were manifestly bent upon a mutual destruction. India was also divided and wasted. On the other hand, China was a steadily expanding empire which probably at that time exceeded all Europe in population, and the Turkish people who were growing to power in Central Asia were disposed to work in accord with China. And such a prophecy would not have been an altogether vain one. A time was to come in the 13th century when a Mongolian overlord would rule from the Danube to the Pacific, and Turkish dynasties were destined to reign over the entire Byzantine and Persian empires over Egypt and most of India, where our prophet would have been most likely to have erred, would have been in underestimating the recuperative power of the Latin end of Europe and in ignoring the latent forces of the Arabian desert. Arabia would have seemed what it had been for times immemorial, the refuge of small and bickering nomadic tribes. No Semitic people had founded an empire now for more than a thousand years. Then suddenly the Bedouin flared out for a brief century of splendor. They spread their rule and language from Spain to the boundaries of China. They gave the world a new culture. They created a religion that is still to this day one of the most vital forces in the world. The man who fired this Arab flame appears first in history as the young husband of the widow of a rich merchant of the town of Mecca named Muhammad. Until he was 40 he did very little to distinguish himself in the world. He seems to have taken considerable interest in religious discussion. Mecca was a pagan city at that time, worshipping in particular a black stone, the Kaaba, of great repute throughout all Arabia and the center of pilgrimages. But there were great numbers of Jews in the country, indeed, all the southern portion of Arabia professed the Jewish faith, and there were Christian churches in Syria. About 40 Muhammad began to develop prophetic characteristics like those of the Hebrew prophets 1200 years before him. He talked first to his wife of the one true God and of the rewards and punishments of virtue and wickedness. There can be no doubt that his thoughts were very strongly influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas. He gathered about him a small circle of believers and presently began to preach in the town against the prevalent idolatry. This made him extremely unpopular with his fellow townsmen because the pilgrimages to the Kaaba were the chief source of such prosperity as Mecca enjoyed. He became bolder and more definite in his teaching, declaring himself to be the last chosen prophet of God, interested with a mission to perfect religion. Abraham he declared and Jesus Christ were his forerunners. He had been chosen to complete and perfect the revelation of God's will. He produced verses which he said had been communicated to him by an angel and he had a strange vision in which he was taken up through the heavens to God and instructed in his mission. As his teaching increased in force, the hostility of his fellow townsmen increased also. At last a plot was made to kill him, but he escaped with his faithful friend and disciple Abu Bakr to the friendly town of Medina which adopted his doctrine. Hostilities followed between Mecca and Medina which ended at last in a treaty. Mecca was to adopt the worship of the one true God and accept Muhammad as his prophet, but the adherents of the new faith were still to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, just as they had done when they were pagans. So Muhammad established the one true God in Mecca without injuring its pilgrim traffic. In 629 Muhammad returned to Mecca as its master, a year after he had sent out these envoys of his to Heraclius, Taitzung, Kavath and all the rulers of the earth. Then for four years more until his death in 632, Muhammad spread his power over the rest of Arabia. He married a number of wives in his declining years and his life on the whole was by modern standards unedifying. He seems to have been a man compounded of very considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception and quite sincere religious passion. He dictated a book of injunctions and expositions, the Koran, which he declared was communicated to him from God. Regarded as literature of philosophy, the Koran is certainly unworthy of its alleged divine authorship. Yet when the manifest defects of Muhammad's life and writings have been allowed for, there remains in Islam this faith he imposed upon the Arabs much power and inspiration. One is its uncompromising monotheism, its simple and enthusiastic faith in the rule and fatherhood of God, and its freedom from theological complications. Another is its complete detachment from the sacrificial priest and the temple. It is an entirely prophetic religion, proof against any possibility of relapse towards blood sacrifices. In the Koran, the limited and ceremonial nature of the pilgrimage to Mecca is stated beyond the possibility of dispute, and every precaution was taken by Muhammad to prevent the deification of himself after his death. And a third element of strength lay in the insistence of Islam upon the perfect brotherhood and equality before God of all believers, whatever their color, origin or status. These are the things that made Islam a power in human affairs. It has been said that the true founder of the empire of Islam was not so much Muhammad as his friend and helper Abu Bakr. If Muhammad was his shifty character was the mind and imagination of primitive Islam, Abu Bakr was its conscience and its will. Whenever Muhammad's wayward, Abu Bakr sustained him. And when Muhammad died, Abu Bakr became Khalif, successor. And with that faith that moves mountains, he set himself simply and sanely to organize the subjugation of the whole world to Allah. With little armies of 3,000 or 4,000 Arabs, according to those letters the prophet had written from Medina in 628 to all the monarchs of the world. Chapter 44 There follows the most amazing story of conquest in the whole history of our race. The Byzantine army was smashed at the Battle of the Yarmouk, a tributary of the Jordan, in 634. And the Emperor Heraclius, his energy sapped by dropsy and his resources exhausted by the Persian war, saw his new conquests in Syria, Damascus, Palmyra, Antioch, Jerusalem and the rest fall almost without resistance to the Muslim. Large elements in the population went over to Islam. Then the Muslim turned east. The Persians had found an able general in Rustam. They had a great host with a force of elephants, and for three days they fought the Arabs at Qadessia, 637, and broke at last in Hadlong Root. The conquest of all Persia followed, and the Muslim Empire pushed far into western Turkestan and eastward until it met the Chinese. Egypt fell almost without resistance to the new conquerors, who, full of a fanatical belief in the sufficiency of the Koran, wiped out the vestiges of the book-copying industry of the Alexandria Library. The tide of conquest poured along the north coast of Africa to the straits of Gibraltar and Spain. Spain was invaded in 710, and the Pyrenees Mountains were reached in 720. In 732 the Arab advance had reached the center of France, but there it was stopped for good at the Battle of Poitiers and thrust back as far as the Pyrenees again. The conquest of Egypt had even the Muslim aflite, and for a time it looked as though they would take Constantinople. They made repeated sea attacks between 672 and 780, but the great city held out against them. The Arabs had little political aptitude and no political experience, and this great empire with its capital now at Damascus, which stretched from Spain to China, was destined to break up very speedily. From the very beginning doctrinal differences undermined its unity, but our interest here lies not with the story of its political disintegration, but with its effect upon the human mind and upon the general destinies of our race. The Arab intelligence had been flung across the world even more swiftly and dramatically, than had the Greek a thousand years before. The intellectual stimulation of the whole world west of China, the breakup of old ideas, and development of new ones was enormous. In Persia this fresh excited Arabic mind came into contact not only with Manichean, Zoroastrian and Christian doctrine, but with the scientific Greek literature preserved not only in Greek, but in Syrian translations. It found Greek learning in Egypt also, everywhere, and particularly in Spain. It discovered an active Jewish tradition of speculation and discussion. In Central Asia it met Buddhism and the material achievements of Chinese civilization. It learned the manufactured paper, which made printed books possible from the Chinese. And finally it came into touch with Indian mathematics and philosophy. Very speedily the intolerant self-sufficiency of the early days of faith, which made the Quran seem the only possible book, was dropped. Learning sprang up everywhere in the footsteps of the Arab conquerors. By the 8th century there was an educational organization throughout the whole Arabized world. In the 9th, learned men in the schools of Cordoba in Spain were corresponding with learned men in Cairo, Baghdad, Bokhara and Samarkand. The Jewish mind assimilated very readily with the Arab, and for a time the two Semitic races worked together through the medium of Arabic. Long after the political breakup and enfeeblement of the Arabs, this intellectual community of the Arab-speaking world endured. It was still producing very considerable results in the 13th century. So it was that the systematic accumulation and criticism of facts, which was first begun by the Greeks, was resumed in this astonishing renaissance of the Semitic world. The seed of Aristotle and the Museum of Alexandria that had lain so long inactive and neglected, now germinated and began to grow towards fruition. Very great advances were made in mathematical, medical and physical science. The clumsy Roman numerals were ousted by the Arabic figures we used to this day, and the zero sign was first employed. The very name algebra is Arabic. So is the word chemistry. The names of such stars as Algol, Aldebaran and Boates preserved the traces of Arab conquests in the sky. Their philosophy was destined to reanimate the medieval philosophy of France and Italy and the whole Christian world. The Arab experimental chemists were called Alchemists, and they were still sufficiently barbaric in spirit to keep their methods and results secret as far as possible. They realized from the very beginning what enormous advantages their possible discoveries might give them, and what far-reaching consequences they might have on human life. They came upon many metallurgical and technical devices of the utmost value, alloys and dyes, distilling, tinctures and essences, optical glass. But the two chief ends they sought, they sought in vain. One was the philosopher's stone, a means of changing the metallic elements one into another, and so getting control of artificial gold. And the other was the elixir vitae, a stimulant that would revify age and prolong life indefinitely. The corrupt patient experimenting of these Arab Alchemists spread into the Christian world. The fascination of their enquiries spread. Very gradually the activities of these Alchemists became more social and cooperative. They found it profitable to exchange and compare ideas. By insensible gradations the last of the Alchemists became the first of the experimental philosophers. The old Alchemists sought the philosopher's stone, which was to transmute base metals to gold, and an elixir of immortality. They found the methods of modern experimental science which promised in the end to give man illimitable power over the world and over his own destiny. End of chapter 44