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social life differed in many interesting points from the social life of the
aegean and river valley civilizations. They had splendid temples but the
priesthood was not the great traditional body it was in the cities of the
older world, the repository of all knowledge, the storehouse of ideas. They
had leaders and noble families, but no quasi-divine monarch surrounded by an
elaborately organized court. Rather their organization was aristocratic, with
leading families which kept each other in order. Even their so-called
"democracies" were aristocratic; every citizen had a share in public affairs
and came to the assembly in a democracy, but everybody was not a citizen. The
Greek democracies were not like our modern "democracies" in which everyone has
a vote. Many of the Greek democracies had a few hundred or a few thousand
citizens and then many thousands of slaves, freedmen and so forth, with no
share in public affairs. Generally in Greece affairs were in the hands of a
community of substantial men. Their kings and their tyrants alike were just
men set in front of other men or usurping a leadership; they were not
quasi-divine overmen like Pharaoh or Minos or the monarchs of Mesopotamia.
Both thought and government therefore had a freedom under Greek conditions
such as they had known in none of the older civilizations. The Greeks had
brought down into cities the individualism, the personal initiative of the
wandering life of the northern parklands. They were the first republicans of
importance in history.
And we find that as they emerge from a condition of barbaric warfare a new
thing becomes apparent in their intellectual life. We find men who are not
priests seeking and recording knowledge and enquiring into the mysteries of
life and being, in a way that has hitherto been the sublime privilege of
priesthood or the presumptuous amusement of kings. We find already in the
sixth century B.C. perhaps while Isaiah was still prophesying in Babylon such
men as Thales and Anaximander of Miletus and Heraclitus of Ephesus, who were
what we should now call independent gentlemen, giving their minds to shrewd
questionings of the world in which we live, asking what its real nature was,
whence it came and what its destiny might be, and refusing all ready-made or
evasive answers. Of these questionings of the universe by the Greek mind, we
shall have more to say a little later in this history. These Greek enquirers
who begin to be remarkable in the sixth century B.C. are the first
philosophers, the first "wisdom-lovers," in the world.
And it may be noted here how important a century this sixth century B.C. was
in the history of humanity. For not only were these Greek philosophers
beginning the research for clear ideas about this universe and man's place in
it and Isaiah carrying Jewish prophecy to its sublimest levels, but as we
shall tell later Gautama Buddha was then teaching in India and Confucius and
Lao Tse in China. From Athens to the Pacific the human mind was astir.
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XXIV. The Wars of the Greeks and Persians
WHILE the Greeks in the cities in Greece, South Italy and Asia Minor were
embarking upon free intellectual enquiry and while in Babylon and Jerusalem
the last of the Hebrew prophets were creating a free conscience for mankind,
two adventurous Aryan peoples, the Medes and the Persians, were in possession
of the civilization of the ancient world and were making a great empire, the
Persian empire, which was far larger in extent than any empire the world had
seen hitherto. Under Cyrus, Babylon and the rich and ancient civilization of
Lydia had been added to the Persian rule; the Phoenician cities of the Levant
and all the Greek cities in Asia Minor had been made tributary, Cambyses had
subjected Egypt, and Darius I, the Mede, the third of the Persian rulers (521
B.C.), found himself monarch as it seemed of all the world. His couriers rode
with his decrees from the Dardanelles to the Indus and from Upper Egypt to
Central Asia.
The Greeks in Europe, it is true, Italy, Carthage, Sicily and the Spanish
Phoenician settlements, were not under the Persian Peace; but they treated it
with respect and the only people who gave any serious trouble were the old
parent hordes of Nordic people in South Russia and Central Asia, the
Scythians, who raided the northern and north-eastern borders.
Of course the population of this great Persian empire was not a population of
Persians. The Persians were only the small conquering minority of this
enormous realm. The rest of the population was what it had been before the
Persians came from time immemorial, only that Persian was the administrative
language. Trade and finance were still largely Semitic, Tyre and Sidon as of
old were the great Mediterranean ports and Semitic shipping plied upon the
seas. But many of these Semitic merchants and business people as they went
from place to place already found a sympathetic and convenient common history
in the Hebrew tradition and the Hebrew scriptures. A new element which was
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