 Chapter 25 The Splendour of Greece The century and a half that followed, the defeat of Persia, was one of a very great splendour for the Greek civilization, true that Greece was torn by a desperate struggle for ascendancy between Athens, Sparta and other states, the Peloponnesian War, 431 to 404 BC, and that in 338 BC the Macedonians became virtually masters of Greece. Nevertheless, during this period the thought and the creative and artistic impulse of the Greeks rose to levels that made their achievement a lamp to mankind for all the rest of history. The head and center of this mental activity was Athens. For over 30 years, 466 to 428 BC, Athens was dominated by a man of great vigor and liberality of mind, Pericles, who set himself to rebuild the city from the ashes to which the Persians had reduced it. The beautiful ruins that still glorify Athens today are chiefly the remains of this great effort. And he did not simply rebuild a material Athens, he rebuilt Athens intellectually. He gathered about him not only architects and sculptures, but poets, dramatists, philosophers and teachers. Herodotus came to Athens to recite his history, 438 BC. Anaxagoras came with the beginnings of a scientific description of the sun and stars. Iosculus, Sophocles and Oripides, one after the other, carried the Greek drama to its highest levels of beauty and nobility. The impetus Pericles gave to the intellectual life of Athens, lived on after his death, and in spite of the fact that the peace of Greece was now broken by the Peloponnesian War and a long, unwaistful struggle for ascendancy, was beginning. Indeed, the darkling of the political horizon seems for a time to have quickened rather than discourage man's minds. Already long before the time of Pericles, the peculiar freedom of Greek institutions had given great importance to skill in discussion. Decision rested neither with king nor with priest, but in the assemblies of the people or of leading men. Elegance and able argument became very desirable accomplishments therefore, and a class of teachers arose, the Sophists, who undertook to strengthen young men in these arts. But one cannot reason without matter and knowledge followed in the wake of speech. The activities and rivalries of these Sophists led very naturally to an acute examination of style, of methods of thought and of the validity of arguments. When Pericles died, a certain Socrates was becoming prominent as an able and destructive critic of bad argument, and much of the teaching of the Sophists was bad argument. A group of brilliant young men gathered about Socrates. In the end, Socrates was executed for disturbing people's minds, 399 BC. He was condemned after the dignified fashion of the Athens of those days. To drink in his own house and among his own friends, a poisonous draught made from hemlock. But the disturbance of people's minds went on in spite of his condemnation. His young men carried on his teaching. Chief among these young men was Plato, 427-347 BC, who presently began to teach philosophy in the Grove of the Academy. His teaching fell into two main divisions, an examination of the foundations and methods of human thinking, and an examination of political institutions. He was the first man to write Utopia, that is to say, the plan of a community different from and better than any existing community. This shows an altogether unprecedented boldness in the human mind, which had hitherto accepted social traditions and usages was scarcely a question. Plato said plainly to mankind, Most of the social and political ills from which you suffer are under your control, given only the will and courage to change them. You can live in another and a visor fashion if you choose to think it out and work it out. You are not awake to your own power. That is a high adventurous teaching that has still to soak in to the common intelligence of our race. One of his earliest works was The Republic, a dream of a communist aristocracy. His last unfinished work was the Laws, a scheme of regulation for another such utopian state. The criticism of methods of thinking and methods of government was carried on after Plato's death by Aristotle, who had been his pupil and who taught in the Lycaeum. Aristotle came from the city of Stagera in Macedonia, and his father was court physician to the Macedonian king. For a time, Aristotle was tutor to Alexander, the king's son, who was destined to achieve very great things of which we shall soon be telling. Aristotle's work upon methods of thinking carried the science of logic to a level at which it remained for 1500 years or more until the medieval schoolmen took up the ancient questions again. He made no utopias. Before man could really control his destiny, as Plato taught, Aristotle perceived that he needed far more knowledge and far more accurate knowledge than he possessed. And so Aristotle began that systematic collection of knowledge, which nowadays we call science. He sent out explorers to collect facts. He was the father of natural history. He was the founder of political science. His students at the Lycaeum examined and compared the constitutions of 158 different states. Here, in the 4th century BC, we find men who are practically modern thinkers, the childlike, dreamlike methods of primitive thought had given way to a disciplined and critical attack upon the problems of life. The weird and monstrous symbolism and imagery of the gods and god monsters, and all the taboos and oars and restraints that have hitherto encumbered thinking are here completely set aside, free, exact, and systematic thinking has begun. The fresh and unencumbered mind of these newcomers out of the northern forest has thrust itself into the mysteries of the temple and led the daylight in. End of Chapter 25. Chapter 26 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 26 The Empire of Alexander the Great From 431 to 404 BC, the Peloponnesian War wasted Greece. Meanwhile, to the north of Greece, the kindred country of Macedonia was rising slowly to power and civilization. The Macedonians spoke a language closely akin to Greek, and on several occasions Macedonian competitors had taken part in the Olympic Games. In 359 BC, a man of very great abilities and ambition became king of this little country, Philip. Philip had previously been a hostage in Greece. He had had a thoroughly Greek education, and he was probably aware of the ideas of Herodotus, which had also been developed by the philosopher Isocrates of a possible conquest of Asia by a consolidated Greece. He set himself first to extend and organize his own realm and to remodel his army. For a thousand years now, the charging horse chariot had been the decisive factor in battles, that and the close fighting infantry. Mounted horsemen had also fought, but as a cloud of skirmishers, individually and without discipline. Philip made his infantry fight in a closely packed mass, the Macedonian phalanx, and he trained his mounted gentlemen, the knights or companions, to fight in formation and so invented cavalry. The master move in most of his battles and in the battles of his son Alexander was a cavalry charge. The phalanx held the enemy infantry in front while the cavalry swept away the enemy horse in his wings and poured in on the flank and rear of his infantry. Chariots were disabled by both men who shot the horses. With this new army Philip extended his frontiers through Thessaly to Greece and the battle of Chironia, 338 BC, fought against Athens and her allies, put all Greece at his feet. At last the dream of Herodotus was bearing fruit. A congress of all the Greek states appointed Philip, Captain General of the Greco-Macedonian Confederacy against Persia, and in 336 BC his advanced guard crossed into Asia upon this long premeditated adventure. But he never followed it. He was assassinated. It is believed at the instigation of his Queen Olympias, Alexander's mother. She was jealous because Philip had married a second wife. But Philip had taken unusual pains with his son's education. He had not only secured Aristotle, the greatest philosopher in the world, as this boy's tutor, but he had shared his ideas with him and thrust military experience upon him. At Chironia Alexander, who was then only 18 years old, had been in command of the cavalry. And so it was possible for this young man, who was still only 20 years old at the time of his accession, to take up his father's task at once and to proceed successfully with the Persian adventure. In 334 BC, for two years were needed to establish and confirm his position in Macedonia and Greece. He crossed into Asia, defeated a not very much bigger Persian army at the Battle of Lgranicus, and captured a number of cities in Asia Minor. He kept along the sea coast. It was necessary for him to reduce, and garrison, all the coast towns as he advanced, because the Persians had control of the fleets of Tyre and Sidon, and so had command of the sea. Had he left a hostile port in his rear, the Persians might have landed forces to raid his communications and cut him off. At Issus, 333 BC, he met and smashed a vast conglomerate host under Darius III. Like the host of Xerxes, that had crossed the Dardanelles a century and a half before, it was an incoherent accumulation of contingents, and it was encumbered with a multitude of court officials, the harem of Darius and many camp followers. Sidon surrendered to Alexander, but Tyre resisted obstinately. Finally, that great city was stormed and plundered and destroyed. Gaza also was stormed, and towards the end of 332 BC, the conqueror entered Egypt and took over its rule from the Persians. At Alexandreta, and at Alexandria in Egypt, he built great cities accessible from the land, and so incapable of revolt. To these, the trade of the Phoenician cities was diverted. The Phoenicians of the western Mediterranean suddenly disappear from history, and as immediately the Jews of Alexandria and the other new trading cities created by Alexander appear. In 331 BC, Alexander marched out of Egypt upon Babylon, as Totmes and Ramses and Nekoche had done before him. But he marched by way of Tyre, at Arbela near the ruins of Nineveh, which was already a forgotten city. He met Darius and fought the decisive battle of the war. The Persian chariot charge failed, a Macedonian cavalry charge broke up the great composite host, and the phalanx completed the victory. Darius led the retreat. He made no further attempt to resist the invader, but fled northward into the country of the Medes. Alexander marched on to Babylon, still prosperous and important, and then to Sousa and Percipolis. There, after a drunken festival, he burned down the palace of Darius, the king of kings. Thence, Alexander presently made a military parade of Central Asia, going to the atmost bounds of the Persian Empire. At first he turned northward. Darius was pursued, and he was overtaken at dawn, dying in his chariot, having been murdered by his own people. He was still living when the foremost Greeks reached him. Alexander came up to find him dead. Alexander skirted the Caspian Sea. He went up into the mountains of western Turkestan. He came down by Herat, which he founded, and Kabul, and the Kuber Pass into India. He fought a great battle on the Indus with an Indian king, Porus, and here the Macedonian troops met elephants for the first time and defeated them. Finally he built himself ships, sailed down to the mouth of the Indus, and marched back by the coast of Belukistan, reaching Sousa, again in 324 BC, after an absence of six years. He then prepared to consolidate and organize this vast empire he had won. He sought to win over his new subjects. He assumed the robes and tiara of a Persian monarch, and this rose the jealousy of his Macedonian commanders. He had much trouble with them. He arranged a number of marriages between these Macedonian officers and Persian and Babylonian women, the marriage of the East and West. He never lived to effect the consolidation he had planned. A fever seized him after a drinking bout in Babylon, and he died in 323 BC. Immediately this vast dominion fell to pieces. One of his generals, Siloikus, retained most of the old Persian empire from the Indus to Ephesus, another Ptolemy, seized Egypt, and Antigonus secured Macedonia. The rest of the empire remained unstable, passing under the control of a succession of local adventurers. Barbarian raids began from the North and grew in scope and intensity, until at last, as we shall tell, a new power. The power of the Roman Republic came out of the West to subjugate one fragment after another, and weld them together into a new and more enduring empire. Chapter 27 The Museum and Library at Alexandria Before the time of Alexander, Greeks had already been spreading as merchants, artists, officials, mercenary soldiers over most of the Persian dominions. In the dynastic disputes that followed the deaths of Xerxes, a band of 10,000 Greek mercenaries played a part under the leadership of Xenophon. Their return to Asiatic Greece from Babylon is described in his Retreat of the 10,000, one of the first war stories that was ever written by a general in command. But the conquest of Alexander and the division of his brief empire among his subordinate generals greatly stimulated this permeation of the ancient world by the Greeks and their language and fashions and culture. Traces of this Greek dissemination are to be found far away in Central Asia and in Northwest India. Their influence upon the development of Indian art was profound. For many centuries Athens retained her prestige as a center of art and culture. Her schools went on indeed to 529 AD, that is to say for nearly a thousand years. But the leadership in the intellectual activity of the world passed presently across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, the new trading city that Alexander had founded. Here the Macedonian general Ptolemy had become pharaoh with a court that spoke Greek. He had become an intimate of Alexander before he became king, and he was deeply saturated with the ideas of Aristotle. He set himself with great energy and capacity to organize knowledge and investigation. He also wrote a history of Alexander's campaigns, which unhappily is lost to the world. Alexander had already devoted considerable sums to finance the inquiries of Aristotle, but Ptolemy I was the first person to make a permanent endowment of science. He set up a foundation in Alexandria, which was formerly dedicated to the Muses, the Museum of Alexandria. For two or three generations the scientific work done at Alexandria was extraordinarily good. Euclid, Aristothenes, who measured the size of the earth and came within fifty miles of its true diameter, Apollonius, who wrote on conic sections, Hipparchus, who made the first star map and catalogue, and Harrow, who devised the first steam engine, are among the greatest stars of an extraordinary constellation of scientific pioneers. Archimedes came from Syracuse to Alexandria to study, and was a frequent correspondent of the Museum. Herophilus was one of the greatest of Greek anatomists, and is said to have practiced vivisection. For a generation or so, during the reigns of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II, there was such a blaze of knowledge and discovery at Alexandria, as the world was not to see again until the 16th century AD. But it did not continue. There may have been several causes of its decline. Chief amongst them, the late Professor Mahaffey suggests, was the fact that the Museum was a royal college, and all its professors and fellows were appointed and paid by Pharao. This was all very well when Pharao was Ptolemy I, the pupil and friend of Aristotle. But as the dynasty of the Ptolemy's went on, they became Egyptianized. They fell under the sway of Egyptian priests and Egyptian religious developments. They ceased to follow the work that was done, and their controls stifled the spirit of inquiry altogether. The Museum produced little good work after its first century of activity. Ptolemy I not only sought in the most modern spirit to organize the finding of fresh knowledge, he tried also to set up an encyclopedic storehouse of wisdom in the Library of Alexandria. It was not simply a storehouse, it was also a book-copying and book-selling organization. A great army of copies was set to work perpetually, multiplying copies of books. Here, then, we have the definite first opening up of the intellectual process in which we live today. Here, we have the systematic gathering and distribution of knowledge. The foundation of his Museum and Library marks one of the great epochs in the history of mankind. It is the true beginning of modern history. But the work of research and the work of dissemination went on under serious handicaps. One of these was the great social gap that separated the philosopher, who was a gentleman, from the trader and the artisan. There were glass workers and metal workers in abundance in those days, but they were not in mental contact with the thinkers. The glass worker was making the most beautifully colored beads and files and so forth, but he never made a florentine flask or a lens. Clear glass does not seem to have interested him. The metal worker made weapons and jewelry, but he never made a chemical balance. The philosopher speculated loftily about atoms and the nature of things, but he had no practical experience of animals and pigments and filters and so forth. He was not interested in substances. So, Alexandria and its brief day of opportunity produced no microscopes and no chemistry. And though Hero invented a steam engine, it was never set either to pump or drive a boat or do any useful thing. There were few practical applications of science, except in the realm of medicine, and the progress of science was not stimulated and sustained by the interest and excitement of practical applications. There was nothing to keep the work going, therefore, when the intellectual curiosity of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II was withdrawn. The discoveries of the museum went on record in obscure manuscripts and never, until the revival of scientific curiosity at the Renaissance, reached out to the mass of mankind. Nor did the library produce any improvements in bookmaking. That ancient world had no paper made in definite sizes from rag pulp. Paper was a Chinese invention, and it did not reach the western world until the 9th century AD. The only book materials were parchment and strips of the pepper of read joined edge to edge. These strips were kept on rolls which were very unwieldy to vine to and throw and read, and very inconvenient for reference. It was these things that prevented the development of paged and printed books. Printing itself was known in the world it would seem, as early as the old Stone Age. There were seals in ancient Shumeria, but without abundant paper there was little advantage in printing books. An improvement that may further have been resisted by trade's unionism on the part of the copyists employed. Alexandria produced abundant books, but not cheap books, and it never spread knowledge into the population of the ancient world below the level of a wealthy and influential class. So it was that this blaze of intellectual enterprise never reached beyond a small circle of people in touch with the group of philosophers collected by the first two Ptolemies. It was like the light in a dark lantern, which is shut off from the world at large. Within the blaze may be blindingly bright, but nevertheless it is unseen. The rest of the world went on its old ways unaware that the seed of scientific knowledge that was one day to revolutionize it altogether had been sown. Presently a darkness of bigotry fell even upon Alexandria. Thereafter for a thousand years of darkness the seed that Aristotle had sown lay hidden. Then it stirred and began to germinate. In a few centuries it had become that why it spread growth of knowledge and clear ideas that is now changing the whole of human life. Alexandria was not the only center of Greek intellectual activity in the third century BC. There were many other cities that displayed a brilliant intellectual life amidst the disintegrating fragments of the brief empire of Alexander. There was, for example, the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily, where thought and science flourished for two centuries. There was Pergamum in Asia Minor, which also had a great library. But this brilliant Hellenic world was now stricken by invasion from the north. New Nordic barbarians, the Gauls, were striking down along the tracks that had once been followed by the ancestors of the Greeks and Phrygians and Macedonians. They raided, shattered and destroyed. And in the wake of the Gauls came a new conquering people out of Italy, the Romans, who gradually subjugated all the western half of the vast realm of Darius and Alexander. They were unable but unimaginative people, preferring law and profit to either science or art. New invaders were also coming down out of Central Asia to shatter and subdue the soloichid empire and to cut off the western world again from India. These were the Partians, hosts of Mounted Bauman, who treated the Greco-Persian Empire of Persepolis and Sousa in the 3rd century BC in much the same fashion that the Medes and Persians had treated it in the 7th and 6th. And there were now other nomadic peoples also coming out of the northeast, peoples who were not fair and Nordic and Aryan speaking. But yellow-skinned and black-haired and with a Mongolian speech. But of these latter people we shall tell more in a subsequent chapter. End of chapter 27. Chapter 28 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 28. The Life of Gautama Buddha But now we must go back 3 centuries in our story to tell of a great teacher who came near to revolutionizing the religious thought and feeling of all Asia. This was Gautama Buddha, who taught his disciples at Benares in India, about the same time that Isaya was prophesying among the Jews in Babylon and Heraclitus was carrying on his speculative inquiries into the nature of things at Ephesus. All these men were in the world at the same time in the 6th century BC unaware of one another. This 6th century BC was indeed one of the most remarkable in all history. Everywhere, for as we shall tell it was also the case in China, men's minds were displaying a new boldness. Everywhere, they were waking up out of the traditions of kingships and priests and blood sacrifices and asking the most penetrating questions. It is as if the race had reached a stage of adolescence after a childhood of 20,000 years. The early history of India is still very obscure, some when perhaps about 2000 BC and Aryan speaking people came down from the northwest into India either in one invasion or in a series of invasions and was able to spread its language and traditions over most of north India. Its peculiar variety of Aryan speech was the Sanskrit. They found a brunette people with a more elaborate civilization and less vigor of will in possession of the country of the Indus and Ganges. But they do not seem to have mingled with their predecessors as freely as did the Greeks and Persians. They remained aloof. When the past of India becomes dimly visible to the historian, Indian society is already stratified into several layers with a variable number of subdivisions which do not eat together nor intermarry nor associate freely. And throughout history, this stratification into costs continues. This makes the Indian population something different from the simple freely interbreeding European or Mongolian communities. It is really a community of communities. Siddhata Gautama was the son of an aristocratic family which ruled a small district on the Himalayan slopes. He was married at 19 to a beautiful cousin. He hunted and played and went about in his sunny world of gardens and groves and irrigated rice fields. And it was amidst this life that the great discontent fell upon him. It was the unhappiness of a fine brain that seeks employment. He felt that the existence he was leading was not the reality of life but a holiday, a holiday that had gone on too long. The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the unsatisfactoriness of all happiness descended upon the mind of Gautama. While he was in this mood, he met one of those wandering ascetics who already existed in great numbers in India. These men lived under severe rules, spending much time in meditation and in religious discussion. They were supposed to be seeking some deeper reality in life, and a passionate desire to do likewise took possession of Gautama. He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when the news was brought to him that his wife had been delivered of his firstborn son. This is another tie to break, said Gautama. He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fellow clansmen. There was a great feast and a notch dance to celebrate the birth of this new tie, and in the night Gautama awoke in a great agony of spirit, quote, like a man who is told that his house is on fire, end quote. He resolved to leave his happy aimless life forthwith. He bent softly to the threshold of his wife's chamber, and saw her by the light of a little oil lamp, sleeping sweetly, surrounded by flowers, with his infant son in her arms. He felt a great craving to take up the child in one first and last embrace before he departed. But the fear of waking his wife prevented him, and at last he turned away, and went out into the bright Indian moonshine, and mounted his horse and rode off into the world. Very far he rode that night, and in the morning he stopped outside the lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a sandy river. There he cut off his flowing locks with his sword, removed all his ornaments, and sent them and his horse and sword back to his house. Going on, he presently met a ragged man and exchanged clothes with him, and so having divested himself of all worldly entanglements, he was free to pursue his search after wisdom. He made his way southward to a resort of hermits and teachers in a hilly spur of the Bhinja mountains. There lived a number of wise men in a variant of caves, going into the town for their simple supplies, and imparting their knowledge by word of mouth to such a scared to come to them. Gautama became versed in all the metaphysics of his age, but his acute intelligence was dissatisfied with the solutions offered him. The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that power and knowledge may be obtained by extreme eschatism, by fasting, sleeplessness, and self-torment, and these ideas Gautama now put to the test. He betook himself with five-disciple companions to the jungle, and there he gave himself up to fasting and terrible penances. His fame spread like the sound of a great bell hung in the canopy of the skies, but it brought him no sense of truth achieved. One day he was walking up and down, trying to think in spite of his enfeebled state. Suddenly he fell unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness of these semi-magical ways to wisdom was plain to him. He horrified his companions by demanding ordinary food and refusing to continue his mortifications. He had realized that whatever truth a man may reach is reached best by a nourished brain in a healthy body. Such a conception was absolutely foreign to the ideas of the land and age. His disciples deserted him and went off in a melancholy state to Benares. Gautama wondered alone. When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has made. Until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory. So it happened to Gautama. He had seated himself under a great tree by the side of a river to eat when this sense of clear vision came to him. It seemed to him that he saw life playing. He is said to have sat all day and all night in profound thought, and then he rose up to impart his vision to the world. He went on to Benares, and there he sought out and won back his lost disciples to his new teaching. In the king's deer park at Benares, they built themselves huts and set up a sort of school to which came many who were seeking after wisdom. The starting point of his teaching was his own question as a fortunate young man. Why am I not completely happy? It was an introspective question. It was a question very different in quality from the frank and self-forgetful externalized curiosity, with which tales and heraclitus were attacking the problems of the universe, or the equally self-forgetful birthing of moral obligation that the culminating prophets were imposing upon the Hebrew mind. The Indian teacher did not forget self. He concentrated upon self and sought to destroy it. All suffering, he thought, was due to the greedy desires of the individual. Until man has conquered his personal cravings, his life is trouble, and his end sorrow. There were three principle forms that the craving for life took, and they were all evil. The first was the desire of the appetites, greed, and all forms of sensuousness. The second was the desire for a personal and egoistic immortality. The third was the craving for personal success, boredliness, avarice, and the like. All these forms of desire had to be overcome to escape from the distresses and chagrines of life. When they were overcome, when self had vanished altogether, the serenity of soul, nirvana, the highest good, was attained. This was the gift of his teaching, a very supple and metaphysical teaching indeed, not nearly so easy to understand as the Greek injunction to see and know fearlessly and rightly, and the Hebrew command to fear God and accomplish righteousness. It was a teaching much beyond the understanding of even Galatama's immediate disciples, and it is no wonder that so soon as his personal influence was withdrawn, it became corrupted and coarsened. There was a widespread belief in India at that time that at long intervals wisdom came to earth and was incarnate in some chosen person who was known as the Buddha. Galatama's disciples declared that he was a Buddha, the lightest of Buddhas, though there is no evidence that he himself ever accepted the title. Before he was well dead, a cycle of fantastic legends began to be woven about him. The human heart has always preferred a wonder story to a moral effort, and Gautama Buddha became very wonderful. Yet there remained a substantial gain in the world. If nirvana was too high and subtle for most men's imaginations, if the myth-making impulse in the race was too strong for the simple facts of Gautama's life, they could at least grasp something of the intention of what Gautama called the Eightfold Way, the Aryan or Noble Path in life. In this there was an insistence upon mental uprightness, upon right aims and speech, right conduct and honest livelihood. There was a quickening of the conscience and an appeal to generous and self-forgetful ends. Chapter 29 King Ashoka For some generations after the death of Gautama, these high and noble Buddhist teachings, this first, plain teaching, that the highest good for man is the subjugation of self, made comparatively little headway in the world. Then they conquered the imagination of one of the greatest monarchs the world has ever seen. We have already mentioned how Alexander the Great came down into India and fought with porous upon the Indus. It is related by the Greek historians that a certain Shandragupta Mauria came into Alexander's camp and tried to persuade him to go on to the Ganges and conquer all India. Alexander could not do this because of the refusal of his Macedonians to go further into what was for them an unknown world and later on 303 BC. Shandragupta was able to secure the help of various hill tribes and realize his dream without Greek help. He built up an empire in North India and was presently 303 BC able to attack Siloikos I in the Punjab and drive the last vestige of Greek power out of India. His son extended this new empire. His grandson Ashoka, the monarch of whom we now have to tell, found himself in 264 BC ruling from Afghanistan to Madras. Ashoka was at first disposed to follow the example of his father and grandfather and complete the conquest of the Indian peninsula. He invaded Kalinga 255 BC, a country on the east coast of Madras. He was successful in his military operations and alone among conquerors. He was so disgusted by the cruelty and horror of war that he renounced it. He would have no more of it. He adopted the peaceful doctrines of Buddhism and declared that henceforth his conquest should be the conquest of religion. His reign for 8 and 20 years was one of the brightest interludes in the troubled history of mankind. He organized a great digging of wells in India and the planting of trees for shade. He founded hospitals and public gardens and gardens for the growing of medical herbs. He created a ministry for the care of the aborigines and subject races of India. He made provision for the education of women. He made vast benefactions to the Buddhist teaching orders and tried to stimulate them to a better and more energetic criticism of their own accumulated literature. For corruptions and superstitious accretions had accumulated very speedily upon the pure and simple teaching of the great Indian master. Missionaries went from Ashoka to Kashmir to Persia to Ceylon and Alexandria. Such was Ashoka, greatest of kings. He was far in advance of his age. He left no prince and no organization of men to carry on his work. And within a century of his death the great days of his reign had become a glorious memory in a shattered and decaying India. The priestly caste of the Brahmins, the highest and most privileged caste in the Indian social body, has always been opposed to the frank and open teaching of Buddha. Gradually they undermined the Buddhist influence in the land. The old monstrous gods, the innumerable cults of Hinduism resumed their sway. Caste became more rigorous and complicated. For long centuries Buddhism and Brahminism flourished side by side. And then, slowly, Buddhism decayed and Brahminism in multitude of forms replaced it. But beyond the confines of India and the realms of caste, Buddhism spread until it had won China and Siam and Burma and Japan, countries in which it is predominant to this day. End of chapter 29 Chapter 30 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This book evokes recording within the public domain. Chapter 30 Confucius and Lao Tse We have still to tell of two other great men, Confucius and Lao Tse, who lived in that wonderful century which began the adolescence of mankind, the 6th century BC. In this history thus far, we have told very little of the early story of China. At present, that early history is still very obscure, and we look to Chinese explorers and archeologists in the new China that is now arising to work out their past as thoroughly as the European past has been worked out during the last century. Very long ago, the first primitive Chinese civilizations arose in the Great River Wallis out of the primordial Heolithic culture. They had, like Egypt and Shumeria, the general characteristics of that culture, and they centered upon temples in which priests and priest kings offered the seasonal blood sacrifices. The life in those cities must have been very like the Egyptian and Shumerian life of six or seven thousand years ago, and very like the Maya life of Central America a thousand years ago. If there were human sacrifices, they had long a given way to animal sacrifices before the dawn of history, and a form of picture writing was growing up long before a thousand years BC. And just as the primitive civilizations of Europe and western Asia were in conflict with the nomads of the desert and the nomads of the north, so the primitive Chinese civilizations had a great cloud of nomadic peoples on their northern borders. There was a number of tribes akin in language and ways of living who are spoken of in history in succession as the Huns, the Mongols, the Turks and Tartars. They changed and divided and combined and recombined, just as the Nordic peoples in North Europe and Central Asia changed and varied in name rather than in nature. These Mongolian nomads had horses earlier than the Nordic peoples, and it may be that in the region of the Altai mountains they made an independent discovery of iron somewhere after 1000 BC. And just as in the western case, so ever and again these eastern nomads would achieve a sort of political unity and become the conquerors and masters and revivers of this or that settled and civilized region. It is quite possible that the earliest civilization of China was not Mongolian at all anymore, than the earliest civilization of Europe and western Asia was Nordic or Semitic. It is quite possible that the earliest civilization of China was a brunette civilization, and of a peace with the earliest Egyptian, Sumerian and Dravidian civilizations, and that when the first recorded history of China began, there had already been conquests and intermixture. At any rate, we find that by 1750 BC China was already a vast system of little kingdoms and city-states, all acknowledging a loose allegiance and paying more or less regularly, more or less definite feudal dues to one great priest-emperor, the Son of Heaven. The Shang dynasty came to an end in 1125 BC. A Zhou dynasty succeeded Shang and maintained China in a relaxing unity until the days of Ashoka in India under the Ptolemy in Egypt. Gradually China went to pieces during that long Zhou period. Hunnish peoples came down and set up principalities. Vocal rulers discontinued their tribute and became independent. There was in the 6th century BC, says one Chinese authority, five or six thousand practically independent states in China. It was what the Chinese call in their records an age of confusion. But this age of confusion was compatible with much intellectual activity and was the existence of many local centers of art and civilized living. When we now more of Chinese history, we shall find that China also had her militus and her athenes, her pergamum and her Macedonia. At present, we must be vague and brief about this period of Chinese division simply because our knowledge is not sufficient for us to frame a coherent and consecutive story. And just as in divided Greece there were philosophers and unshattered and captive jury prophets, so in disordered China there were philosophers and teachers at this time. In all these cases insecurity and uncertainty seem to have quickened the better sort of mind. Confucius, with a man of aristocratic origin and some official importance in a small state called Lu. Here, in a very parallel mood to the Greek impulse, he set up a sort of academy for discovering and teaching wisdom. The lawlessness and disorder of China distressed him profoundly. He conceived an ideal of a better government and a better life, and traveled from state to state seeking a prince who would carry out his legislative and educational ideas. He never found his prince. He found a prince, but court intrigues undermined the influence of the teacher and finally defeated his reforming proposals. It is interesting to note that the century and a half later the Greek philosopher Plato also sought a prince and was for a time advisors to the tyrant Dionysius who ruled Syracuse in Sicily. Confucius died a disappointed man. No intelligent ruler arises to take me as his master, he said, and my time has come to die. But his teaching had more vitality than he imagined in his declining and hopeless years, and it became a great formative influence with the Chinese people. It became one of what the Chinese call the three teachings, the other two being those of Buddha and of Lao Tse. The guest of the teaching of Confucius was the way of the noble or aristocratic man. He was concerned with personal conduct as much as Gautama was concerned with the peace of self-forgetfulness and the Greek with external knowledge and the Jew with righteousness. He was the most public minded of all great teachers. He was supremely concerned by the confusion and miseries of the world and he wanted to make men noble in order to bring about a noble world. He sought to regulate conduct to an extraordinary extent, to provide sound rules for every occasion in life. Appolite, public-spirited gentleman, rather sternly self-disciplined, was the ideal he found already developing in the northern Chinese world and one to which he gave a permanent form. The teaching of Lao Tse, who was for a long time in charge of the Imperial Library of the Zhou Dynasty, was much more mystical and vague and elusive than that of Confucius. He seems to have preached a stoical indifference to the pleasures and powers of the world and the return to an imaginary simple life of the past. He left writings very contracted in style and very obscure. He wrote in riddles. After his death his teachings, like the teachings of Gautama Buddha, were corrupted and overlaid by legends and had the most complex and extraordinary observances and superstitious ideas grafted upon them. In China just as in India primordial ideas of magic and monstrous legends out of the childish past of our race struggled against a new thinking in the world and succeeded in plastering it over with grotesque irrational and antiquated observances. Both Buddhism and Taoism, which ascribes itself largely to Lao Tse, as one finds them in China now, are religions of monk, temple, priest and offering of a type as ancient in form, if not in thought, as the sacrificial religions of ancient Shumeria and Egypt. But the teaching of Confucius was not so overlaid because it was limited and plain and straightforward and lent itself to no such distortions. North China, the China of the Huanghu River, became Confucian in thought and spirit. South China, Yangtzejiang China became Taoist. Since those days a conflict has always been traceable in Chinese affairs between these two spirits, the spirit of the North and the spirit of the South, between in later times Beijing and Nanking, between the official-minded, upright and conservative North, and the skeptical, artistic, lax and experimental South. The divisions of China of the Age of Confucian reached their worst stage in the 6th century BC. The Zhou Dynasty was so enfeebled and so discredited that Lao Tse left the unhappy court and retired into private life. Three nominally subordinate powers dominated the situation in those days, Tsis and Tsin, both northern powers and Chu, which was an aggressive military power in the Yangtze Valley. At last, Tsis and Tsin formed an alliance subdued Chu and imposed the general treaty of disarmament and peace in China. The power of Tsin became predominant. Finally, about the time of Ashoka in India, the Tsin monarch seized upon the sacrificial vessels of the Zhou Emperor and took over his sacrificial duties. His son, Shi Huangti, king in 246 BC, emperor in 220 BC, is called in the Chinese chronicles the first universal emperor. More fortunate than Alexander, Shi Huangti reigned for 36 years as king and emperor. His energetic reign marks the beginning of a new era of unity and prosperity for the Chinese people. He fought vigorously against the hundish invaders from the northern deserts and he began that immense work, the Great Wall of China, to set a limit to their incursions. End of Chapter 30. Chapter 31 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 31, Rome Comes into History The reader will note a general similarity in the history of all these civilizations, in spite of the effectual separation caused by the great barriers of the Indian northwest frontier and of the mountain masses of Central Asia and further India. First, for thousands of years, the heliolithic culture spread over all the warm and fertile river valleys of the old world and developed a temple system and priest rulers about its sacrificial traditions. Apparently, its first makers were always those brunette peoples we have spoken of as the central race of mankind. Then the nomads came in from the regions of seasonal grass and seasonal migrations and superposed their own characteristics and often their own language on the primitive civilization. They subjugated and stimulated it and were stimulated to fresh developments and made it hear one thing and hear another. In Mesopotamia it was the Elamite and then the Seamite and at last the Nordic Medes and Persians and the Greeks who supplied the ferment. Over the region of the Aegean peoples it was the Greeks, in India it was the Aryan speakers, in Egypt there was a thinner infusion of conquerors into a more intensely saturated priestly civilization. In China the hun conquered and was absorbed and was followed by fresh huns. China was Mongolized just as Greece and North India were Aryanized and Mesopotamia semitized and Aryanized. Every word the nomads destroyed much but everywhere they brought in a new spirit of free inquiry and moral innovation. They questioned the beliefs of immemorial ages. They led daylight into the temples. They set up kings who were neither priests nor gods but mere leaders among their captains and companions. In the centuries following the 6th century BC we find everywhere a great breaking down of ancient traditions and the new spirit of moral and intellectual inquiry awake, a spirit never more to be altogether stilled in the great progressive movement of mankind. We find reading and writing becoming common and accessible accomplishments among the ruling and prosperous minority. They were no longer the jealously guarded secret of the priests. Travel is increasing and transport growing easier by reason of horses and roads. A new and easy device to facilitate trade has been found in coined money. Let us now transfer our attention back from China in the extreme east of the old world to the western half of the Mediterranean. Here we have to note the appearance of a city which was destined to play at last a very great part indeed in human affairs, Rome. Here too we have told very little about Italy in our story. It was before 1000 BC a land of mountain and forest and thinly populated. Aryan speaking tribes had pressed down this peninsula and formed little towns and cities and the southern extremity was studded with Greek settlements. The noboruins of Paestum preserved for us to this day something of the dignity and splendor of these early Greek establishments. A non-Aryan people, probably akin to the Aegean peoples, the Etruscans, had established themselves in the central part of the peninsula. They had reversed the usual process by subjugating various Aryan tribes. Rome, when it comes into the light of history, is a little trading city at a Ford on the Tiber with a Latin speaking population ruled over by Etruscan kings. The old chronologies gave 753 BC as the date of the founding of Rome, half a century later than the founding of the great Phoenician city of Carthage and 23 years after the first Olympiad. A Truscant tomes of a much earlier date than 753 BC have, however, been excavated in the Roman Forum. In that red letter century, the 6th century BC, the Etruscan kings were expelled 510 BC and Rome became an aristocratic republic with a lordly class of patrician families dominating a commonality of plebeians. Except that it spoke Latin, it was not unlike many aristocratic Greek republics. For some centuries, the internal history of Rome was the story of a long and obstinate struggle for freedom and a share in the government on the part of the plebeians. It would not be difficult to find Greek parallels to this conflict, which the Greeks would have called a conflict of aristocracy with democracy. In the end, the plebeians broke down most of the exclusive barriers of the old families and established a working equality with them. They destroyed the old exclusiveness and made it possible and acceptable for Rome to extend her citizenship by the inclusion of more and more outsiders. For while she still struggled at home, she was extending her power abroad. The extension of Roman power began in the 5th century BC, until that time they had waged war and generally unsuccessful war with the Etruscans. There was an Etruscan fort, Veyi, only a few miles from Rome, which the Romans had never been able to capture. In 474 BC, however, a great misfortune came to the Etruscans. Their fleet was destroyed by the Greeks of Syracuse and Sicily. At the same time, a wave of Nordic invaders came down upon them from the north, the Gauls. Caught between Roman and Gaul, the Etruscans fell and disappeared from history. Veyi was captured by the Romans. The Gauls came through to Rome and sacked the city 390 BC, but could not capture the capital. An attempted night surprise was betrayed by the cackling of some geese, and finally the invaders were bought off and retired to the north of Italy again. The Gaulish raid seems to have invigorated rather than weakened Rome. The Romans conquered and assimilated the Etruscans and extended their power overall central Italy from the Arno to Naples. To this, they had reached within a few years of 300 BC. Their conquests in Italy were going on simultaneously with the growth of Philip's power in Macedonia and Greece and the tremendous raid of Alexander to Egypt and the Indus. The Romans had become notable people in the civilized world to the east of them by the breakup of Alexander's empire. To the north of the Roman power were the Gauls, to the south of them were the Greek settlements of Magna Graecia, that is to say of Sicily, and of the toe and heel of Italy. The Gauls were hardy warlike people, and the Romans held that boundary by a line of forts and fortified settlements. The Greek cities in the south, headed by Tarantum, now Taranto, and Basteracus in Sicily, did not so much threaten as fear the Romans. They looked about for some help against these new conquerors. We have already told how the empire of Alexander fell to pieces and was divided among his generals and companions. Among these adventurers was a kinsman of Alexander's named Pyrrhus, who established himself in Epirus, which is across the Adriatic Sea over against the heel of Italy. It was his ambition to play the part of Philip of Macedonia to Magna Graecia and to become protector and master general of Tarantum, Syracuse, and the rest of that part of the world. He had what was then a very efficient modern army. He had an infantry phalanx, cavalry from Sicily, which was now quite as good as the original Macedonian cavalry, and 20 fighting elephants. He invaded Italy and routed the Romans into considerable battles, Heraclea, 280 BC, and Osculum, 279 BC, and having driven them north, he turned his attention to the subjugation of Sicily. But this brought against him a more formidable enemy than were the Romans at that time, the Phoenician trading city of Carthage, which was probably then the greatest city in the world. Sicily was too near Carthage for a new Alexander to be welcome there, and Carthage was mindful of the fate that had befallen her mother city Tyre half a century before. So she sent a fleet to encourage or compel Rome to continue the struggle, and she cut the overseas communications of Perus. Perus found himself freshly assailed by the Romans, and suffered a disastrous repulse in an attack he had made upon their camp at Beneventum, between Naples and Rome, and suddenly came news that recalled him to Epirus. The Gauls were raiding south, but this time they were not raiding down into Italy. The Roman frontier, fortified and guarded, had become too formidable for them. They were raiding down through Illyria, which is now Serbia and Albania, to Macedonia and Epirus. Repulsed by the Romans, endangered at sea by the Carthagians, and threatened at home by the Gauls, Perus abandoned his dream of conquest and went home, 275 BC, and the power of Rome was extended to the Straits of Messina. On the Sicilian side of the Straits was the Greek city of Messina, and this presently fell into the hands of a gang of pirates, the Carthaginians, who were already practically overlords of Sicily and allies of Syracuse, suppressed these pirates 270 BC, and put in a Carthaginian garrison there. The pirates appealed to Rome, and Rome listened to their complaint. And so, across the Straits of Messina, the great trading power of Carthage, and these new conquering people, the Romans, found themselves in antagonism, face to face. Chapter 32 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This Librivox recording isn't a public domain. Chapter 32 Rome and Carthage It was in 264 BC that the great struggle between Rome and Carthage, the Punic Wars, began. In that year Ashoka was beginning his reign in Bihar and Shihwangti was a little child. The museum in Alexandria was still doing good scientific work, and the barbaric goals were now in Asia Minor and exacting a tribute from Pergamum. The different regions of the world were still separated by insurmountable distances, and probably the rest of mankind heard only vague and remote rumors of the mortal fight that went on for a century and a half in Spain, Italy, North Africa, and the Western Mediterranean, between the last stronghold of Semitic power and Rome, this newcomer among Aryan-speaking peoples. That war has left its traces upon issues that still stir the world. Rome triumphed over Carthage, but the rivalry of Aryan and Semite was to merge itself later on in the conflict of Gentile and Jew. Our history now is coming to events whose consequences and distorted traditions still maintain a lingering and expiring vitality, an exercise a complicating and confusing influence upon the conflicts and controversies of today. The First Punic War began in 264 BC about the Pirates of Messina. It developed into a struggle for the possession of all Sicily except the dominions of the Greek king of Syracuse. The advantage of the sea was at first with the Carthaginians. They had great fighting shapes of what was hitherto an unheard of size, queen keramis, galleys with five banks of ours and a huge ram. At the Battle of Salamis, two centuries before, the leading battleships had only been three ramis with three banks, but the Romans with extraordinary energy and in spite of the fact that they had little naval experience set themselves to outbuild the Carthaginians. They manned the new navy they created chiefly with Greek seamen and they invented grappling and boarding to make up for the superior seamanship of the enemy. When the Carthaginian came up to ram or shear the oars of the Roman, huge grappling irons seized him and the Roman soldiers swarmed aboard him. At Mille 260 BC and at Echnomus 256 BC, the Carthaginians were disastrously beaten. They repulsed a Roman landing near Carthage, but were badly beaten at Palermo, losing 104 elephants there. To grace such a triumphal procession through the Forum as Rome had never seen before. But after that came two Roman defeats and then a Roman recovery. The lost naval forces of Carthage were defeated by its last Roman effort at the Battle of the Aegean Isles 241 BC and Carthage sued for peace. All Sicily except the dominions of hero king of Syracuse was ceded to the Romans. For 22 years Roman Carthage kept the peace. Both had trouble enough at home. In Italy the Gauls came south again, threatened Rome, which in a state of panic offered human sacrifices to the gods and were rooted at Telemon. Rome pushed forward to the Alps and even extended her dominions down the Adriatic coast to Illyria. Carthage suffered from domestic insurrections and from revolts in Corsica and Sardinia and displayed far less recuperative power. Finally an act of intolerable aggression. Rome seized and annexed the two revolting islands. Spain at that time was Carthaginian as far north as the river Ibro. To that boundary the Romans restricted them. Any crossing of the Ibro by the Carthaginians was to be considered an act of war against the Romans. At last in 218 BC the Carthaginians provoked by new Roman aggressions did cross this river under a young general named Hannibal, one of the most brilliant commanders in the whole of history. He marched his army from Spain over the Alps into Italy, raised the Gauls against the Romans and carried on the Second Punic War in Italy itself for 15 years. He inflicted tremendous defeats upon the Romans at Lake Trassemere and at Cannae and throughout all his Italian campaigns no Roman army stood against him and escaped disaster. But a Roman army had landed at Marcel's and cut his communications with Spain. He had no siege train and he could never capture Rome. Finally the Carthaginians threatened by the revolt of the Numidians at home were forced back upon the defense of their own city in Africa. A Roman army crossed into Africa and Hannibal experienced his first defeat under its walls at the Battle of Zama, 202 BC, at the hands of Scipio Africanus the Elder. The Battle of Zama ended the Second Punic War. Carthage capitulated. She surrendered Spain and her war fleet. She paid an enormous indemnity and agreed to give up Hannibal to the vengeance of the Romans. But Hannibal escaped and fled to Asia, where later, being in danger of falling into the hands of his relentless enemies, he took poison and died. For 56 years Rome on the shorn city of Carthage were at peace. And meanwhile Rome spread her empire over confused and divided Greece, invaded Asia Minor and defeated Antiochus III the Soloikid Monarch at Magnesia in Lydia. She made Egypt still under the Ptolemy and Pergamum and most of the small states of Asia Minor into allies or, as we should call them now, protected states. Meanwhile Carthage, subjugated and enfeebled, had been slowly regaining something of her former prosperity. Her recovery revived the hate and suspicion of the Romans. She was attacked upon the most shallow and artificial of quarrels, 149 BC. She made an obstinate and bitter resistance, stood a long siege and was stormed, 146 BC. The street fighting or massacral lasted six days. It was extraordinarily bloody, and when the citadel capitulated only about 50,000 of the Carthaginian population remained alive out of a quarter of a million, they were sold into slavery and the city was burned and elaborately destroyed. The blackened ruins were ploughed and sown as a sort of ceremonial effacement. So ended the Third Punic War. Of all the Semitic states and cities that had flourished in the world five centuries before, only one little country remained free and their native rulers. This was Judea, which had liberated itself from the soloikids and was under the rule of the native Maccabean princes. By this time it had its Bible almost complete and was developing the distinctive traditions of the Jewish world as we know it now. It was natural that the Carthaginians, Phoenicians, and Kindred peoples dispersed about the world should find a common link in their practically identical language and in this literature of hope and courage. To a large extent there were still the traders and bankers of the world. The Semitic world had been submerged rather than replaced. Jerusalem, which has always been rather the symbol than the center of Judaism, was taken by the Romans in 65 BC and after various vicissitudes of quasi-independence and revolt was besieged by them in 70 AD and captured after a stubborn struggle, the temple was destroyed. A later rebellion in 132 AD completed its destruction and the Jerusalem we know today was rebuilt later under Roman auspices. A temple to the Roman god Jupiter Capitolinus stood in the place of the temple and Jews were forbidden to inhabit the city. End of Chapter 32 Chapter 33 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 33 The Growth of the Roman Empire Now this new Roman power which arose to dominate the western world in the second and first centuries BC was in several respects a different thing from any of the great empires that had hitherto prevailed in the civilized world. It was not at first a monarchy and it was not the creation of any one great conqueror. It was not indeed the first of republican empires. Athens had dominated a group of allies and dependents in the times of Pericles and Carthage when she entered upon her fatal struggle with Rome was mistress of Sardinia and Corsica, Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and most of Spain and Sicily. But it was the first republican empire that escaped extinction and went on to fresh developments. The center of this new system lay far to the west of the more ancient centers of empire which had hitherto been the river valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt. This westward position enabled Rome to bring into civilization quite fresh regions and peoples. The Roman power extended to Morocco and Spain and was presently able to thrust north westward over what is now France and Belgium to Britain and north eastward into Hungary and south Russia. But on the other hand it was never able to maintain itself in Central Asia or Persia because they were too far from its administrative centers. It included therefore great masses of fresh Nordic Aryan speaking peoples. It presently incorporated nearly all the Greek people in the world and its population was less strongly hemitic and Semitic than that of any preceding empire. For some centuries this Roman empire did not fall into the grooves of precedent that had so speedily swallowed up Persian and Greek and all that time it developed. The rulers of the Medes and Persians became entirely Babylonized in a generation or so. They took over the tiara of the king of kings and the temples and priesthoods of his gods. Alexander and his successors followed in the same easy path of assimilation. The Siloikid Mornarchs had much the same court and administrative methods as Nebuchadnezzar. The Ptolemies became pharaohs and altogether Egyptian. They were assimilated just as before them the Semitic conquerors of the Shamirians had been assimilated. But the Romans ruled in their own city and for some centuries kept to the laws of their own nature. The only people who exercised any great mental influence upon them before the 2nd or 3rd century AD were the Kindred and similar Greeks. So that the Roman Empire was essentially a first attempt to rule a great dominion upon mainly Aryan lines. It was so far a new pattern in history. It was an expanded Aryan Republic. The old pattern of a personal conqueror ruling over a capital city that had grown up around the temple of a harvest god did not apply to it. The Romans had gods and temples, but like the gods of the Greeks their gods were quasi-human immortals, divine patricians. The Romans also had blood sacrifices and even made human ones in times of stress, things they may have learned to do from their dusky Etruscan teachers. But until Rome was long past its zenith, neither priests nor temple played a large part in Roman history. The Roman Empire was a growth, an unplanned novel growth. The Roman people found themselves engaged, almost unaware, in a vast administrative experiment. It cannot be called a successful experiment. In the end their empire collapsed altogether, and it changed enormously in form and method from century to century. It changed more in a hundred years than Bengal or Mesopotamia or Egypt changed in a southern. It was always changing. It never attained to any fixity. In a sense, the experiment failed. In a sense, the experiment remains unfinished, and Europe and America today are still working out the riddles of worldwide statescraft first confronted by the Roman people. It is well for the student of history to bear in mind the very great changes not only in political, but in social and moral matters that went on throughout the period of Roman dominion. There is much too strong a tendency in people's minds to think of the Roman rule as something finished and stable, firm, rounded, noble and decisive. Macaulay's Lace of Ancient Rome, C.P.Q.R., the Elder Cato, the Scipios, Julius Caesar, Dioclete Dion, Constantine the Great, triumphs, orations, gladiatorial combats and Christian martyrs are all mixed up together in a picture of something high and cruel and dignified. The items of that picture have to be disentangled. They are collected at different points from a process of change, profounder than that which separates the London of William the Conqueror from the London of today. We may very conveniently divide the expansion of Rome into four stages. The first stage began after the sack of Rome by the Goth in 390 BC and went on until the end of the First Punic War, 240 BC. We may call this stage the stage of the Assimilative Republic. It was, perhaps, the finest, most characteristic stage in Roman history. The age-long dissensions of patrician aplebeum were drawing to it close. The intruscan threat had come to an end. No one was very rich, yet nor very poor, and most men were public-spirited. It was a republic, like the Republic of the South African Boers before 1900, or like northern states of the American Union between 1800 and 1850, a free farmers' republic. At the outset of this stage, Rome was a little state scarcely 20 miles square. She fought the sturdy but kindred states about her and sought not their destruction but coalescence. Her centuries of civil dissension had trained her people in compromise and concessions. Some of the defeated cities became altogether Roman, with a voting share in the government. Some became self-governing with the right to trade and marry in Rome. Garrison's full of citizens were set up at strategic points and colonies of varied privileges founded among the freshly conquered people. Great roads were made. The rapid Latinization of all Italy was an inevitable consequence of such a policy. In 89 BC, all the free inhabitants of Italy became citizens of the city of Rome. Formally, the whole Roman Empire became at last an extended city. In 212 AD, every free man in the entire extent of the Empire was given citizenship, the right, if he could get there, to vote in the town meeting in Rome. This extension of citizenship to tractable cities and whole countries was the distinctive device of Roman expansion. It reversed the old process of conquest and assimilation altogether. By the Roman method, the conquerors assimilated the conquered. But after the First Punic War and the annexation of Sicily, though the old process of assimilation still went on, another process arose by its side. Sicily, for instance, was treated as a conquered prey. It was declared an estate of the Roman people. Its rich soil and industrious population was exploited to make Rome rich. The patricians and the more influential among the plebeians secured the major share of that wealth. And the war also brought in a large supply of slaves. Before the First Punic War, the population of the Republic had been largely a population of citizen farmers. Military service was their privilege and liability. While they were on active service, their farms fell into debt, and a new large-scale slave agriculture grew up. When they returned, they found their produce in competition, with slave-grown produce from Sicily and from the new estates at home. Times had changed. The Republic had altered its character. Not only was Sicily in the hands of Rome, the common man was in the hands of the rich creditor and the rich competitor. Rome had entered upon its second stage the Republic of Adventurous Rich Men. For 200 years, the Roman soldier farmers had struggled for freedom and a share in the government of their state. For 100 years, they had enjoyed their privileges. The First Punic War wasted them and robbed them of all they had won. The value of their electoral privileges had also evaporated. The governing bodies of the Roman Republic were two in number. The first, and more important, was the Senate. This was a body originally of patricians, and then of prominent men of all sorts, who were summoned to it, first by certain powerful officials, the consuls and censors. Like the British House of Lords, it became a gathering of great landowners, prominent politicians, big businessmen and the like. It was much more like the British House of Lords than it was like the American Senate. For three centuries, from the Punic Wars onward, it was the center of Roman political thought and purpose. The second body was the popular assembly. This was supposed to be an assembly of all the citizens of Rome. When Rome was a little state, 20 miles square, this was a possible gathering. When the citizenship of Rome had spread beyond the confines in Italy, it was an altogether impossible one. Its meetings, proclaimed by hornblowing from the capital and the city walls, became more and more a gathering of political hacks and city refrafts. In the 4th century BC, the popular assembly was a considerable check upon the Senate, a competent representation of the claims and rights of the common man. By the end of the Punic Wars, it was an impotent relic of a languished popular control. No effectual legal check remained upon the big man. Nothing of the nature of representative government was ever introduced into the Roman Republic. No one thought of electing delegates to represent the will of the citizens. This is a very important point for the student to grasp. The popular assembly never became the equivalent of the American House of Representatives or the British House of Commons. In theory, it was all the citizens. In practice, it ceased to be anything at all worth consideration. The common citizen of the Roman Empire was therefore in a very poor case after the Second Punic War. He was impoverished. He had often lost his farm. He was hosted from profitable production by slaves, and he had no political power left to him to remedy these things. The only methods of popular expression left to a people without any form of political expression are the strike and the revolt. The story of the second and first centuries BC, so far as internal politics go, is a story of futile revolutionary upheaval. The scale of this history will not permit us to tell of the intricate struggles at that time, of the attempts to break up estates and restore the land to the free farmer, of proposals to abolish debts in whole or in part. There was revolt and civil war. In 73 BC, the distresses of Italy were enhanced by a great insurrection of the slaves under Spartacus. The slaves of Italy revolted with some effect, for among them were the trained fighters of the gladiatorial shows. For two years, Spartacus held out in the crater of Vesuvius, which seemed at that time to be an extinct volcano. This insurrection was defeated at last and suppressed with frantic cruelty. Six thousand captured Spartacists were crucified along the Appian Way, the Great Highway that ran southward out of Rome, 71 BC. The common man never made head against the forces that were subjugating and degrading him. But the big rich men who were overcoming him were even in his defeat, preparing a new power in the Roman world over themselves and him, the power of the army. Before the Second Punic War, the army of Rome was a levy of free farmers, who, according to their quality, rode or marched a foot to battle. This was a very good force for wars close at hand, but not the sort of army that will go abroad and bear long campaigns with patients. And moreover, as the slaves multiplied and the estates grew, the supply of free-spirited fighting farmers declined. It was a popular leader named Marius who introduced a new factor. North Africa, after the overthrow of the Carthaginian civilization, had become a semi-barbaric kingdom, the kingdom of Numidia. The Roman power fell into conflict with Jucurtha, king of this state, and experienced enormous difficulties in subjugating him. Marius was made consul in a phase of public indignation to end this discreditable war. This he did by raising paid troops and drilling them hard. Jucurtha was brought in chains to Rome 106 BC, and Marius, when his time of office had expired, held on to his consulship illegally with his newly created legions. There was no power in Rome to restrain him. With Marius began the third phase in the development of the Roman power, the Republic of the Military Commanders. For now began a period in which the leaders of the paid legions fought for the mastery of the Roman world. Against Marius was pitted the aristocratic Sulla who had served under him in Africa, each in turn made a great massacre of his political opponents. Men were proscribed and executed by the Thousand and their estates were sold. After the bloody rivalry of these two and the horror of the revolt of Spartacus came a phase in which Luculus and Pompeii the Great and Grassus and Julius Caesar were the masters of armies and dominated affairs. It was Crassus who defeated Spartacus. Luculus conquered Asia Minor and penetrated to Armenia and retired with great wealth into private life. Crassus thrusting further invaded Persia and was defeated and slain by the Parthians. After a long rivalry Pompeii was defeated by Julius Caesar, 48 BC and murdered in Egypt, leaving Julius Caesar sole master of the Roman world. The figure of Julius Caesar is one that has stirred the human imagination out of all proportion to its merit or true importance. He has become a legend and a symbol. For us he is chiefly important as marking the transition from the phase of military adventurers to the beginning of the fourth stage in Roman expansion, the early empire. For in spite of the profoundest economic and political convulsions, in spite of civil war and social degeneration, throughout all this time the boundaries of the Roman state crept outward and continued to creep outward to their maximum about 100 AD. There had been something like an ebb during the doubtful phases of the Second Punic War and again a manifest loss of vigor before the reconstruction of the army by Marius. The revolt of Spartacus marked a third phase. Julius Caesar made his reputation as a military leader in Gaul, which is now France and Belgium. The chief tribes inhabiting this country belonged to the same Celtic people as the Gauls who had occupied North Italy for a time and who had afterwards raided into Asia Minor and settled down as the Galatians. Caesar drew back a German invasion of Gaul and added all that country to the empire and he twice crossed the Straits of Dover into Britain, 55 and 54 BC. Where have ever he made no permanent conquest? Meanwhile Pompey the Great was consolidating Roman conquest that reached in the east to the Caspian Sea. At this time, the middle of the first century BC, the Roman senate was still the nominal center of the Roman government appointing consuls and other officials granting powers and alike and a number of politicians among whom Cicero was an outstanding figure were struggling to preserve the great traditions of the republican realm and to maintain respect for its laws. But the spirit of citizenship had gone from Italy with the vasting away of the three farmers. It was a land now of slaves and impoverished men with neither the understanding nor the desire for freedom. There was nothing whatever behind these republican leaders in the senate while behind the great adventurers they feared and desired to control were the legions. Over the heads of the senate, Crassus and Pompey and Caesar divided the rule of the empire between them. The first three were it. When presently Crassus was killed at distant Carhee by the Parthians, Pompey and Caesar fell out. Pompey took up the republican side and laws were passed to bring Caesar to trial for his breaches of law and his disobedience to the decrees of the senate. It was illegal for a general to bring his troops out of the boundary of his command and the boundary between Caesar's command and Italy was the Rubicon. In 49 BC he crossed the Rubicon saying the die is cast and marched upon Pompey and Rome. It had been the custom in Rome in the past in periods of military extremity to elect a dictator with practically unlimited powers to rule through the crisis. After his overthrow of Pompey, Caesar was made dictator first for 10 years and then in 45 BC for life. In effect he was made monarch of the empire for life. There was talk of a king award abhorrent to Rome since the expulsion of the Etruscans five centuries before. Caesar refused to be king but adopted throne and scepter. After his defeat of Pompey, Caesar had gone on into Egypt and had made love to Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemy's, the goddess queen of Egypt. She seems to have turned his head very completely. He had brought back to Rome the Egyptian idea of a god king. His statue was set up in a temple with an inscription to the unconquerable god. The expiring republicanism of Rome flared up in a last protest and Caesar was stabbed to death in the senate at the foot of the statue of his murdered rival Pompey the Great. 13 years more of this conflict of ambitious personalities followed. There was the second triumvirate of Lepidus, Mark Antony and Octavian Caesar, the latter the nephew of Julius Caesar. Octavian like his uncle took the poor, hardier western provinces where the best legions were recruited. In 31 BC he defeated Mark Antony his only serious rival at the naval battle of Actium and made himself sole master of the Roman world. But Octavian was a man of different quality altogether from Julius Caesar. He had no foolish craving to be god or king. He had no queen lover that he wished to dazzle. He restored freedom to the senate and people of Rome. He declined to be dictator. The grateful senate in return gave him the reality instead of the forms of power. He was to be called not king indeed but princeps and Augustus. He became Augustus Caesar the first of the Roman emperors. 27 BC to 14 AD. He was followed by Tiberius Caesar 14 to 37 AD and he by others Caligula, Claudius, Nero and so on up to Trajan 98 AD, Hadrian 117 AD, Antonius Pius 138 AD and Marcus Aurelius 161 to 180 AD. All these emperors were emperors of the legions. The soldiers made them and some the soldiers destroyed. Gradually the senate fades out of Roman history and the emperor and his administrative officials replace it. The boundaries of the empire crept forward now to their utmost limits. Most of Britain was added to the empire. Transylvania was brought in as a new province, Dachia. Trajan crossed the Eufrates. Hadrian had an idea that reminds us at once of what had happened at the other end of the old world. Like Xihuangti he built walls against the northern barbarians. One across Britain and a palisade between the Rhine and the Danube. He abandoned some of the acquisitions of Trajan. The expansion of the Roman empire was at an end. Chapter 34 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells The second and first centuries BC mark a new phase in the history of mankind. Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean are no longer the centre of interest. Both Mesopotamia and Egypt were still fertile, populace and fairly prosperous, but they were no longer the dominant regions of the world. Power had drifted to the west and to the east. Two great empires now dominated the world, this new Roman empire and the renaissance empire of China. Rome extended its power to the Eufrates, but it was never able to get beyond that boundary. It was too remote. Beyond the Eufrates the former Persian and Indian dominions of the Saloi kids fell under a number of new masters. China, now under the Han dynasty which had replaced the Xin dynasty at the death of Xihuangti, had extended its power across Tibet and over the high mountain passes of the Pamirs into western Turkestan. But there too it reached its extremes, beyond was too far. China at this time was the greatest, best organised and most civilised political system in the world. It was superior in area and population to the Roman empire at its zenith. It was possible then for these two vast systems to flourish in the same world at the same time in almost complete ignorance of each other. The means of communication both by sea and land was not yet sufficiently developed and organised for them to come to a direct clash. Yet they reacted upon each other in a very remarkable way and their influence upon the fate of the regions that lie between them upon Central Asia and India was profound. A certain amount of trade trickled through by camel caravans across Persia for example and by coasting ships by way of India and the Red Sea. In 66 BC, Roman troops under Pompeii followed in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and marched up the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. In 102 AD, a Chinese expeditionary force under Panchao reached the Caspian and sent emissaries to report upon the power of Rome. But many centuries were still to pass before definite knowledge and direct intercourse were to link the great parallel worlds of Europe and eastern Asia. To the north of both these great empires were barbaric wildernesses. What is now Germany was largely forest lands. The forests extended far into Russia and made a home for the gigantic Oirochs, a bull of almost elephantine size. Then to the north of the great mountain masses of Asia stretched a band of deserts, steppes and the forests and frozen lands. In the eastward lap of the elevated part of Asia was the great triangle of Manjuria. Large parts of these regions stretching between south Russia and Tarkistan into Manjuria where and are regions of exceptional climatic insecurity. Their rainfall has varied greatly in the course of a few centuries. They are lands treacherous to man. For years they will carry pasture and sustained cultivation and then will come an age of decline in humidity and a cycle of killing droughts. The western part of this barbaric north from the German forest to south Russia and Tarkistan and from Gothland to the Alps was the region of origin of the Nordic peoples and of the Aryan speech. The eastern steppes and deserts of Mongolia was the region of origin of the Hanish or Mongolian or Tartar or Turkish peoples. For all these several peoples were akin in language, race and way of life and as the Nordic peoples seem to have been continually overflowing their own borders and pressing south upon the developing civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean coast. So the Hanish tribes sense their surplus as wanderers, raiders and conquerors into the settled origins of China. Periods of plenty in the north would mean an increase in population there. A shortage of grass, a spell of cattle disease would drive the hungry warlike tribesmen south. For a time there were simultaneously two fairly effective empires in the world capable of holding back the barbarians and even forcing forward the frontiers of the imperial peace. The thrust of the Han Empire from the north China into Mongolia was strong and continuous. The Chinese population wailed up over the barrier of the Great Wall. Behind the imperial frontier guards came the Chinese farmer with horse and plough, ploughing up the grasslands and enclosing the winter pasture. The Hanish peoples raided and murdered the settlers but the Chinese punitive expeditions were too much for them. The nomads were faced with the choice of settling down to the plough and becoming Chinese taxpayers or shifting in search of fresh summer pastures. Some took the former course and were absorbed. Some drifted north eastward and eastward over the mountain passes down into the western Turkestan. This westward drive of the Mongolian horsemen was going on from 200 BC on board. It was producing a westward pressure upon the Aryan tribes and these again were pressing upon the Roman frontiers ready to break through directly there was any weakness apparent. The Parthians who were apparently Ascythian people with some Mongolian admixture came down to the Euphrates by the first century BC. They fought against Pompey the Great in his eastern raid. They defeated and killed Crassus. They replaced the Sulwakid monarchy in Persia by a dynasty of Parthian kings the Arsakid dynasty. But for a time the line of least resistance for hungry nomads lay neither to the west nor the east but through central Asia and then southeastward through the Kiber Pass into India. It was India which received the Mongolian drive in these centuries of Roman and Chinese strength. A series of raiding conquerors poured down through the Punjab into the Great Plains to loot and destroy. The empire of Ashoka was broken up and for a time the history of India passes into darkness. A certain Kushan dynasty founded by the Indoskithians one of the raiding peoples ruled for a time over north India and maintained a certain order. These invasions went on for several centuries. For a large part of the 5th century AD India was afflicted by the Eftalites or White Huns who levied tribute on the small Indian princes and held India in terror. Every summer these Eftalites pastured in western Turkestan. Every autumn they came down through the passes to terrorize India. In the second century AD a great misfortune came upon the Roman and Chinese empires that probably weakened the resistance of both to barbarian pressure. This was a pestilence of unexampled virulence. It raged for 11 years in China and disorganized the social framework profoundly. The Han dynasty fell and a new age of division and confusion began from which China did not fairly recover until the 7th century AD was the coming of the Great Tang dynasty. The infection spread through Asia to Europe. It raged throughout the Roman Empire from 164 to 180 AD. It evidently weakened the Roman imperial fabric very seriously. We begin to hear of depopulation in the Roman provinces after this and there was a marked deterioration in the vigor and efficiency of government. At any rate we presently find the frontier no longer invulnerable but giving way first in this place and then in that. A new Nordic people, the Goth, coming originally from Gothland in Sweden, had migrated across Russia to the Volga region and the shores of the Black Sea and taken to the Sea and Piracy. By the end of the second century they may have begun to feel the westwards rust of the Huns. In 247 they crossed the Danube in a great land raid and defeated and killed the emperor Dysius in a battle in what is now Serbia. In 236 another Germanic people, the Franks, had broken bounds upon their lower Rhine and the Alemani had poured into Alzac. The legions in Gaul beat back their invaders, but the Goth in the Balkan peninsula raided again and again. The province of Dachia vanished from Roman history. A chill had come to the pride and confidence of Rome. In 270-275 Rome, which had been an open and secure city for three centuries, was fortified by the Emperor Aurelian. End of chapter 34