In the end the discontent in the army verged on open mutiny. When
the King announced that he would send back to Macedon the oldest of the soldiers, each richly paid for his services, t he was shocked to hear many
muttering that they wished he would dismiss them all, since, being a god, he had no need of men to realize his purposes. He ordered the leaders of the sedition executed, and then addressed to his troops an affecting (but probably apocryphal) speech"' in which he reminded them of all that they had done for him, and he for them, and asked which of them could show more scars than he, whose body bore the marks of every weapon used in war. Finally he gave them all permission to go home: "Go back and report
There are conflicting stories about his guilt and his death.IT He left three main works: Hellenica, a history of Greece from 387 to 337; a History of the Sacred War, and a History of Alexander.
t Each of them, Arrian assures us, received a talent in addition to his pay-which continued
till he reached his home.118
L"HAP. :xxn)	ALEXANDER	551
that you deserted your king and left him to the protection of conquered foreigners." Then he retired to his rooms, and refused to see anyone. His soldiers, stricken with remorse, came and lay down before the palace, say ing that they would not leave till he had forgiven them and reaccepted them into his army. When at last he appeared they broke into tears and insisted on kissing him; and after being reconciled with him they went back to their camp shouting a song of thanksgiving.
Deceived by this show of affection, Alexander dreamed now of further campaigns and victories; he planned the subjugation of hidden Arabia, sent a mission to explore the Caspian regions, and thought of conquering Europe to the Pillars of Hercules. But his strong frame had been weak ened by exposure and drink, and his spirit by the conspiracies of his officers and the mutinies of his men. While the army was in Ecbatana his dearest companion, Hephaestion, fell sick and died. Alexander had loved him so much that when Darius' queen, entering the conqueror's tent, bowed first to Hephaestion, thinking him Alexander, the young King said, graciously, "Hephaestion is also Alexander"'0-as if to say that he and Hephaestion were one. The two often shared one tent, and drank from one cup; in battle they fought side by side. Now the King, feeling that half of him had been torn away, broke down in uncontrolled grief. He lay for hours upon the corpse, weeping; he cut off his hair in mourning, and for days refused to take food. He sentenced to death the physician who had left the sick youth's side to attend the public games. He ordered a gigantic funeral pile to be erected in Hephaestion's memory, at a cost, we are told, of ten thousand talents ($60,000,000), and sent to inquire of the oracle of Ammon whether it was permitted to worship Hephaestion as a god. In his next campaign a whole tribe was slain, at his orders, as a sacrifice to Hephaestion's ghost. The thought that Achilles had not long survived Patroclus haunted him like a sentence of death.
Back in Babylon, he abandoned himself more and more to drink. One night, reveling with his officers, he proposed a drinking match. Promachus quaffed twelve quarts of wine, and won the prize, a talent; three days later he died. Shortly afterward, at another banquet, Alexander drained a goblet containing six quarts of wine. On the next night he drank heavily again; and cold weather suddenly setting in, he caught a fever, and took to his bed. The fever raged for ten days, during which Alexander continued to give orders to his army and his fleet. On the eleventh day he died, being in the thirty-third year of his age ( 32 3). When his generals asked him to whom he left his empire he answered, "To the strongest.""
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXll
Like most great men he had been unable to find a successor worthy of him, and his work fell unfinished from his hands. Even so his achievement was not only immense, but far more permanent than has usually been sup posed. Acting as the agent of historical necessity, he put an end to the era of city-states, and, by sacrificing a substantial measure of local freedom, created a larger system of stability and order than Europe had yet known. His conception of government as absolutism using religion to impose peace upon diverse nations dominated Europe until the rise of nationalism and democracy in modern times. He broke down the barriers between Greek and "barbaria°n," and prepared for the cosmopolitanism of the Hellenistic age; he opened Hither Asia to Greek colonization, and established Greek settlements as far east as Bactria; he united the eastern Mediterranean world into one great web of commerce, liberating and stimulating trade. He brought Greek literature, philosophy, and art to Asia, and died before he could realize that he had also made a pathway for the religious victory of the East over the West. His adoption of Oriental dress and ways was the beginning of Asia's revenge.
It was just as well that he died at his zenith; added years would almost surely have brought him disillusionment. Perhaps if he had lived he might have been deepened by defeat and suffering, and might have learned-as he was beginning-to love statesmanship more than war. But he had under taken too much; the strain of holding his swollen realm together, and watching all its parts, was probably disordering his brilliant mind. Energy is only half of genius; the other half is harness; and Alexander was all energy. We miss in him-though we have no right to expect-the calm maturity of Caesar, or the subtle wisdom of Augustus. We admire him as we admire Napoleon, because he stood alone against half the world, and because he encourages us with the thought of the incredible power that lies potential in the individual soul. And we feel a natural sympathy for him, despite his superstitions and his cruelties, because we know that he was at least a generous and affectionate youth, as well as incomparably able and brave; that he fought against a maddening heritage of barbarism in his blood; and that through all battles and all bloodshed he kept before his eyes the dream of bringing the light of Athens to a larger world.
IV. THE END OF AN AGE
When the news of his death reached Greece, revolts against the Mace donian authority broke out everywhere. Theban exiles in Athens organized
CHAP.XXII)	ALEXANDER	553
a force of patriots, and besieged the Macedonian garrison in the Cadmeia. In Athens itself, where many had prayed for an end to Alexander, the anti Macedonian party, feeling that its prayers had been heard, crowned them selves with garlands and feasted over the death of him whom they had courted as a god-singing, says Plutarch, "triumphant songs of victory, as if by their own valor they had vanquished him.""
For a moment Demosthenes was in his glory. He had not fared well dur ing Alexander's campaigns: he had been convicted of accepting a heavy bribe from Harpalus, and had been flung into jail; he had been allowed to escape, and had lived nine months of fretting exile in Troezen. Now he was recalled, and was sent as envoy to the Peloponnesus to raise allies for Athens in a war of liberation. A united force marched north, met Antipa ter at Crannon, and was destroyed. The old soldier, who lacked Alexan der's sensitivity to Athenian culture, laid the most arduous terms upon the city, requiring it to pay the cost of the war, to receive a Macedonian gar rison, to abandon its democratic constitution and courts, to disfranchise and deport to colonial settlements all citizens (12,000 out of 2 1 ,ooo) possessing less than two thousand drachmas' worth of property, and to surrender Demosthenes, Hypereides, and two other anti-Macedonian orators. De mosthenes fled to Calauria and took refuge in a temple sanctuary. Sur rounded by Macedonian pursuers, he drank a phial of poison, and died be fore he could drag himself out of the sacred court.
The same tragic year saw the end of Aristotle. He had long been un popular in Athens: the Academy and the school of Isocrates disliked him as a critic and a rival, while the patriots looked upon him as a leader of the pro-Macedonian party. Advantage was taken of Alexander's death to bring an accusation of impiety against Aristotle; heretical passages from his books were brought in as evidence; he was charged with having offered divine honors to the dictator Hermeias, who, being a slave, could not have been a god. Aristotle quietly left the city, saying that he would not give Athens a chance to sin a second time against philosophy."' He withdrew to the home of his mother's family in Chalcis, leaving the Lyceum in the care of Theophrastus. The Athenians passed sentence of death upon him, but had neither opportunity nor need to execute it. For either through a stomach illness aggravated by his flight, or, as some say," by taking poison, Aristotle died a few months after leaving Athens, in the sixty-third year of his age. His will was a model of kindly consideration for his second wife, his family, and his slaves.
554	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.:XXII
The death of Greek democracy was both a violent and a natural death, in which the fatal agents were the organic disorders of the system; the sword of Macedon merely added the final blow. The city-state had proved incapable of solving the problems of government: it had failed to preserve order within, and defense without; despite the appeals of Gorgias, Isocrates, and Plato for some Dorian discipline to tame Ionian freedom, it had dis covered no way of reconciling local autonomy with national stability and power; and its love of liberty had seldom interfered with its passion for empire. The class war had become bitter beyond control, and had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting. The Assembly, a noble body in its better days, had degenerated into a mob hating all superiority, rejecting all restraint, ruthless before weakness but cringing before power, voting itself every favor, and taxing property to the point of crushing initiative, industry, and thrift. Philip, Alexander, and Antipater did not destroy Greek freedom; it had destroyed itself; and the order that they forged preserved for centuries longer, and disseminated through Egypt and the East, a civilization that might otherwise have died of its own tyrannous anarchy.
And yet, had oligarchy or monarchy done any better? The Thirty had committed more atrocities against life and property in the few months of their power than the democracy in the preceding hundred years.'" And while democracy was producing chaos in Athens, monarchy was producing chaos in Macedonia-a dozen wars of succession, a hundred assassinations, and a thousand interferences with freedom-with no redeeming glory of literature, science, philosophy, or art. The weakness and smallness of the state in Greece had been a boon to the individual, if not in body, certainly in soul; that freedom, costly though it was, had generated the achieve ments of the Greek mind. Individualism in the end destroys the group, but in the interim it stimulates personality, mental exploration, and artistic creation. Greek democracy was corrupt and incompetent, and had to die. But when it was dead men realized how beautiful its heyday had been; and all later generations of antiquity looked back to the centuries of Pericles and Plato as the zenith of Greece, and of all history.
BOOK  V
THE	HELLENISTIC  DISPERSION
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK V


CHAP. XXIX)	THE	SUR RENDER  OF PHILOSOPHY
phy that acknowledged the necessity of faith, preached an ascetic doctrine of simplicity and self-restraint, and saw all_ things in God.
IV, THE RETURN TO RELIGION
The conflict between religion and philosophy had now seen three stages: the attack on religion, as in the pre-Socratics; the endeavor to replace re ligion with a natural ethic, as in Aristotle and Epicurus; and the return to religion in the Skeptics and the Stoics-a movement that culminated in Neo-Platonism and Christianity. A like sequence has occurred more than once in history, and may be taking place today. Thales corresponds to Galileo, Democritus to Hobbes, the Sophists to the Encyclopedists, Protag oras to Voltaire; Aristotle to Spencer, Epicurus to Anatole France; Pyrrho to Pascal, Arcesilaus to Hume, Carneades to Kant, Zeno to Schopenhauer, Plotinus to Bergson. The chronology resists the analogy, but the basic line of development is the same.
The age of the great systems gave way to doubt in the ability of reason either to understand the world or to control the impulses of men into order and civilization. The skeptics were such not in the Humian but in the Kantian sense: they doubted philosophy as well as dogma, sapped the foundations of materialism, and advised a quiet acceptance of the ancient cult; in Pyrrho, as in Pascal, skepticism led not from but to religion, and Pyrrho himself ended as the venerated high priest of his city. The Epi curean abandonment of politics for ethics, the flight from the state to the soul, could only represent a moment in the return of the pendulum; and the concentration on individual salvation paved the way for a religion that would appeal to the individual rather than to the state. There were many who could not find in life the consolations that had satisfied Epicurus; poverty, misfortune, disease, bereavement, revolution, or war overtook them, and all the counsels of the sage left them empty-souled. Hegesias of Cyrene, though he started like Epicurus from the standpoint of the Cyre naics, concluded that life has in it more pain than pleasure, more grief than joy, and that the only logical outcome of a naturalistic philosophy is suicide.• Philosophy, like a prodigal daughter, after bright adventures and dark disillusionments, gave up the pursuit of truth and the quest of happi ness, returned repentant to her mother, religion, and sought again in faith the foundations of hope and the sanctions of charity.
He argued the point so eloquently that a wave of suicides rose in Alexandria, and Ptole my II had to banish him from Egypt.08
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXIX
Stoicism, while seeking to construct a natural ethic for the intellectual classes, sought to preserve the old supernatural aids for the morality of the common man, and, as time went on, gave a more and more religious color to its own metaphysical and ethical thought. Zeno denied any real existence to the popular gods,.., but a generation later Cleanthes proposed to prosecute Aristarchus for heresy. Zeno offered no personal immortality, but Seneca spoke of heavenly bliss in terms almost identical with those of the Eleusinian and Christian faiths.1111After Zeno Stoicism became a theology rather than a philosophy, and nearly every proposition in it took a theological form. The greater part of the system was composed of arguments about the ex istence and nature of God, the emanation of the world from God, the real ity of Providence, the correspondence of virtue with the divine will, the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God, and the final return of the world to God. In this philosophy we find the sense of sin that was to play so stern a role in primitive and in Protestant Christianity, the lofty in clusiveness that as in the new religions welcomed all races and ranks, and a celibate asceticism that derived from the Cynics and culminated in a long line of Christian monks. From Zeno of Tarsus to Paul of Tarsus was but a step, which would be taken on the road to Damascus.
Many components of the Stoic creed were Asiatic in origin, some were
specifically Semitic. In essentials Stoicism was one elemental phase of the Oriental triumph over Hellenic civilization. Greece had ceased to be Greece before it was conquered by Rome.
CHAPTER  XXX
The Coming of Rome
I. PYRRHUS
"WHO is so worthless or indolent," Polybius demands to know, "as
not to wish to understand by what means and under what system of polity the Romans in less than fifty-three years have succeeded in sub jecting the whole inhabited world to their sole government-a thing unique in history? Who is so passionately devoted to other studies as to regard anything of greater moment than the acquisition of this knowledge?"' It is a permissible inquiry, which may engage us later; but there have been so many conquests since Polybius wrote that we cannot spend much time on any of them. We have tried to show that the essential cause of the Roman conquest of Greece was the disintegration of Greek civilization from within. No great nation is ever conquered until it has destroyed itself. Deforesta tion and the abuse of the soil, the depletion of precious metals, the migration of trade routes, the disturbance of economic life by political disorder, the corruption of democracy and the degeneration of dynasties, the decay of morals and patriotism, the decline or deterioration of the population, the replacement of citizen armies by mercenary troops, the human and physical wastage of fratricidal war, the guillotining of ability by murderous revo lutions and counterrevolutions-all these had exhausted the resources of Hellas at the v.ery time when the little state on the Tiber, ruled by a ruthless and farseeing aristocracy, was training hardy legions of landowners, con quering its neighbors and competitors, capturing the food and minerals of the western Mediterranean, and advancing year by year upon the Greek settlements in Italy. These ancient communities, once proud of their wealth, their sages, and their arts, had been impoverished by war, by the depredations of Dionysius I, and by the growth of Rome as a rival center
of trade. The native tribes that, centuries before, had been enslaved by the
Greeks or pushed back into the hinterland, increased and multiplied while their masters cultivated comfort through infanticide and abortion. Soon the native stocks were contesting the control of southern Italy. The Greek cities turned to Rome for help; they were helped, and absorbed.
659
660	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXX
Taras, frightened by the growth of Rome, called to its aid the dashing young king of Epirus. In that picturesque and mountainous country, known to us as southern Albania, Greek culture had kept a precarious fnoting ever since the Dorians had raised a shrine to Zeus at Dodona.• In 295 Pyrrhus, who traced his ancestry to Achilles, became king of the Molossians, the dominant Epirote tribe. He was handsome and brave, a despotic but popular ruler. His subjects thought that he could cure the spleen by pressing ·his right foot upon their prostrate backs; nor was anyone so poor as to be refused his ministrations.• When the Tarentines appealed to him he saw an alluring opportunity: he would conquer Rome, the danger in the West, as Alexander had conquered Persia, the danger in the East; and he would prove his genealogy by his courage. In 281 he crossed the Ionian (Adriatic) Sea with 25,000 infantry, three thousand horse, and twenty elephants; the Greeks had taken elephants as well as mysticism from India. He met the Romans at Heracleia, and won a "Pyrrhic victory": his losses were so great, and his resources in men and materials were now so small, that when an aide complimented him on his success he created an historic phrase by replying that another such triumph would ruin him.• The Romans sent Caius Fabricius to treat with him for an exchange of prisoners. At supper, says Plutarch,
amongst all sorts of things that were discoursed of, but more par ticularly Greece and its philosophers, Cineas [the Epirote diplomat] spoke of Epicurus, and explained the opinions his followers hold about the gods and the commonwealth, and the objects of life, plac ing the chief happiness of man in pleasure, and declining public affairs as an injury and disturbance of a happy life, removing the gods afar off both from kindness or anger, or any concern for us at all, to a life wholly without business and flowing in pleasures. Before he had done speaking, "O Hercules!" Fabricius cried out to Pyrrhus, "may Pyrrhus and the Samnitest entertain themselves with opinions as long as they are at war with us.'"
Impressed by the Romans, and despairing of adequate aid from the Greeks of Italy, Pyrrhus dispatched Cineas to Rome to negotiate peace. The Senate was about to agree when Appius Claudius, blind and dying, had himself carried into the senate house and protested against making peace with a foreign army on Italian soil. Frustrated, Pyrrhus fought again, won another suicidal victory at Asculum, and then, hopeless of success against Rome, sailed to Sicily with he generous resolve to free it from the Carthaginians. There he drove the Cartha ginians back with reckless heroism; but whether it was that the Sicilian Greeks
Italian archeologists in 1929 unearthed at Butrinto (the ancient Buthrotum) numerous architectural and sculptural remains of Greek and Roman civilization, including a Greek theater of the third century B.c.
t The strongest of Rome's enemies in Italy.
CHAP.XXX)	THE  COMING  OF ROME	661


Books having grown to such numbers, libraries became a necessity. These had existed before as the luxury of Egyptian or Mesopotamian
600
CHAP. XXVI)	BOOKS	601
potentates; but apparently Aristotle's library was the first extensive pri vate collection. We may conjecture its size and worth from the fact that he paid $18,000 for that part of it which he bought from Plato's successor Speusippus. Aristotle bequeathed his books to Theophrastus, who be queathed them (287) to Neleus, who took them to Scepsis in Asia Minor, where they were buried, says tradition, to escape the literary cupidity of the Pergamene kings. After almost a century of this damaging interment the volumes were sold about I oo n.c. to Apellicon of T eos, an Athenian philosopher. Apellicon found that many passages had been eaten away by the damp; he made new copies, filling in the gaps as intelligently as he could;" this may explain why Aristotle is not the most fascinating philoso pher in history. When Sylla captured Athens (86) he appropriated Apelli con's library and transported it to Rome. There the Rhodian scholar Andronicus reordered and published the texts of Aristotle's works'-an event almost as stimulating in the history of Roman thought as the redis covery of Aristotle was to prove in the awakening of medieval philosophy. The adventures of this collection suggest the debt that literature owes to the Ptolemies for establishing and maintaining, as part of the Museum, the famous Alexandrian Library. Ptolemy I began it, Ptolemy II com pleted it, and added a smaller library in the suburban sanctuary of Serapis. By the end of Philadelphus' reign the number of rolls had reached 532,000
-making probably 100,000 books in our sense of this word." For a time
the enlargement of this collection rivaled the strategy of power in the affections of the Egyptian kings. Ptolemy III ordered that every book brought to Alexandria should be deposited with the Library; that copies should be made, the owner to receive the copy, the Library to retain the original. The same autocrat asked Athens to lend him the manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and deposited $90,000 as security for their return; he kept the originals, sent back copies, and told the Athenians to keep his money as a forf eit.6 The ambition to possess old books became so widespread that men arose who specialized in dyeing and spoiling new manuscripts to sell them as antiquities to collectors of first editions.'
The Library soon eclipsed the rest of the Museum in importance and interest. The office of librarian was one of the highest in the king's gift, and included the obligation of tutoring the crown prince. The names of these librarians have been preserved, with variations, in different manu scripts; the latest list" gives, as the first six, Zenodotus of Ephesus, Apol lonius of Rhodes, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Apollonius of Alexandria, Aris tophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus of Samothrace; their diversity of
602	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXVI
origin suggests again the unity of Hellenistic culture. Quite as important as these was the poet and scholar Callimachus, who classified the collec tion in. a catalogue running to one hundred and twenty rolls. We picture a corps of copyists, presumably slaves, making duplicates of precious orig inals, and a hive of scholars separating the materials into groups. Some of these men wrote histories of various departments of literature or science, others edited definitive editions of the masterpieces, others composed com mentaries on these texts for the enlightenment of laity and posterity. Aristophanes of Byzantium effected a literary revolution by separating the clauses and sentences of the ancient writings with capitals and marks of punctuation; and it was he who invented the accents that so disturb us in reading Greek. Zenodotus began, Aristophanes advanced, Aristarchus completed, the recension of the Iliad and the Odyssey, establishing the present text, and illuminating its obscurities in learned scholia. By the end of the third century the Museum, the Library, and their scholars had made Alexandria, in everything but philosophy, the intellectual capital of the Greek world.
Doubtless other Hellenistic cities had libraries. Austrian archeologists have exhumed the remains of an ornate municipal library at Ephesus, and we hear of a great library being consumed in the destruction of Carthage by Scipio. But the only one that evoked comparison with Alexandria's was that of Pergamum. The kings of this transient state looked with enlightened envy upon the cultural enterprises of the Ptolemies. In 196 Eumenes II established the Pergamene Library, and brought to its halls some of the finest scholars of Greece. The collection grew rapidly; when Antony presented it to Cleopatra to replace that part of the Alexandrian Library which was burned in the uprising against Caesar in 48 B.c., it num bered some 200,000 rolls. Through this library, and the Attic taste of the Attalid kings, Pergamum became, towards the end of the Hellenistic pe riod, the center of a purist school of Greek prose, which considered no word clean that had not come down from classic days. To the enthusiasm of these classicists we owe the preservation of the chef-d'oeuvres of Attic prose.
It was above all an age of intellectuals and scholars. Writing became
a profession instead of a devotion, and generated cliques and coteries whose appreciation of talent varied inversely as the square of its distance from themselves. Poets began to write for poets, and became artificial; scholars began to write for scholars, and became dull. Thoughtful men felt that the creative inspiration of Greece was nearing exhaustion, and that the
CHAP.XXVI)	BOOKS
most lasting service they could render was to collect, shelter, edit, and expound the literary achievements of a bolder time. They established the methods of textual and literary criticism in almost all its forms. They tried to sift out the best from the mass of existing manuscripts, and to guide the reading of the people; they made lists of "best books," the "four heroic poets," the "nine historians," the "ten lyric poets," the "ten orators," etc." They wrote biographies of great writers and scientists; they gathered and saved the fragmentary data which are now all that we know concerning these men. They composed outlines of history, literature, drama, science, and philosophyt some of these "shon cuts to knowledge" helped to pre serve, some replaced and unwittingly obliterated the original works that they summarized. Saddened by the degeneration of Attic Greek into the Orientalized "pidgin" Greek of their time, Hellenistic scholars compiled dictionaries and grammars, and the Library of Alexandria, in the manner of the French Academy, issued edicts on the correct usage of the ancient tongue. Without their learned and patient "ant industry" the wars, revo lutions, and catastrophes of two thousand years would have destroyed even those "precious minims" which have been transmitted to us as the ship wrecked legacy of Greece.
THE BOOKS OF THE JEWS
Through all the turmoil of the time the Jews maintained their traditional love of scholarship, and produced more than their share of the lasting literature of the age. To this period belong some of the finest portions of the Bible. Near th close of the third century a Jewish poet (or poetess?) composed the lovely Song of Songs: here is all the artistry of Greek verse from Sappho to Theocritus, but with something undiscoverable in any Greek author of the time-an intensity of imagination, a depth of feeling, and an idealist devotion strong enough to welcome the body, as well as the soul, of love, and to turn the flesh itself into spirit. Panly in Jerusalem, mostly in Alexandria, partly in other cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Hellenistic Jews wrote-in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek-such masterpieces as Ecclesiastes, Daniel, pan of Proverbs and Psalms, and most of the greater Apocrypha. They composed histories like Chronicles, novelettes like Esther and Judith, and idyls of family life like the Book of Tobit. The Soferim changed the Hebrew script from the old Assyrian to the square Syrian style, which has remained to this day.11 Since most of the Jews in the Near East now spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew, the scholars explained
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXVI
the Scriptures in brief Aramaic T argums, or interpretations. •Schools were opened for the study of the Torah, or Law, and the explanation of its moral code to growing youth; such explanations, commentaries, and illus trations, handed down from teacher to pupil across the generations, sup plied in a later age most of the material of the Talmud.
By the close of the third century the scholars of the Great Assembly had completed the editing of the older literature, and had closed the canon of the Old Testament;"' it was their judgment that the age of the prophets was ended, and that literal inspiration had ceased. The result was that many works of this epoch, full of wisdom and beauty, lost the chance of divine collaboration, and fell into the unfortunate category of Apocrypha.* The two books of Esdras may owe something of their literary excellence to King James' translators; but these can hardly be credited with the touch ing account of how Esdras asked the angel Uriel to explain why the wicked prosper, the good suffer, and Israel is in bondage; to which the angel an swers, in powerful similes and yet simple speech, that it is not given to the part to understand or judge the whole.
The prologue of Ecclesiasticus describes it as a Greek translation, com
pleted in 1 32, of discourses written in Hebrew two generations before by the translator's grandfather, Jesus the son of Sirach. This Joshua hen Sirach was both a scholar and a man of affairs; after seeing something of the world through travel he had settled down to make his home a school for students; and to them he delivered these essays on the wisdom of life.:ia He denounces the rich Jews who have abandoned their faith to cut a better figure in the Gentile world; he warns youth against the courtesans who wait for it every where; and he offers the Law as still the best guide amid the evils and pit falls of the world. But he is no puritan. Unlike the Chasidim he has a good word to say for harmless pleasure; and he protests against the mystics who reject medicine on the ground that all maladies, having come from God, can be cured by God alone. The book is rich in epigrams, of which the most renowned brings together the rod and the child. "The number of whippings laid to his account," said Renan, "must be incalculable.'"" It is a noble book, wiser and kinder than Ecclesiastes.
The Old Testament Apocrypha (lit. hidden) are those books that were excluded from the Jewish canon of the Old Testament as uninspired, but were included in the Roman Catholic Vulgate-i.e., the Latin translation, by St. Jerome, of the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible. The chief O. T. Apocrypha are Ecclesiasticus, I and II Esdras, and I and Maccabees. The apocalyptic (i.e., revealing) books are those that purport to contain pro phetic divine revelations; sucli writinl?S began to appear about 250 u.c., and continued into the Christian era. Some apocalypses, like the Book of Enoch, are considered apocryphal and uncanonical; others, like the Book of Revelation, are considered canonical.
CHAP.XXVI)	BOOKS	605
In the twenty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus we are told that "Wisdom is the first product of God, created from the beginning of the world." Here and in the first chapter of Proverbs are the earliest Hebrew forms of the doctrine of the Logos-Wisdom as a "demiurge," or intermediate creator, delegated by God to design the world. This hypostatizing of Wisdom as personified intelligence becomes a dominating idea of Jewish theology in the last centuries before Christ. Alongside of it runs increasingly the con ception of personal immortality. In the Book of Enoch, written appar ently by several authors in Palestine between 170 and 66 B.c., the hope of heaven has become a vital need; the success of wicked power and the mis fortunes of a pious and loyal people could no longer be borne unless that hope might be entertained; without it life and history seemed to be the work of Satan rather than of God. A Messiah will come who will estab lish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and will reward the virtuous with everlasting happiness after death.
In the Book of Daniel the whole terror of the age of Antiochus IV finds a voice. About 166, when the faithful had been persecuted to the death for their beliefs, and ever larger enemies were advancing upon the Macca bean band, one of the Chasidim, probably, undertook to rekindle the cour age of the people by describing the sufferings and prophecies of Daniel in the days of Nebuchadrezzar in Babylon. Copies of the book passed secretly among the Jews; it was given out as the work of a prophet who had lived three hundred and seventy years before, had borne greater trials than any Jew under Antiochus, had emerged victorious, and had predicted a like triumph for his race. And even if the virtuous and faithful found indifferent fortune here, their reward would come at the Last Judgment, when the Lord would welcome them into a heaven of unending happiness, and plunge their persecutors into everlasting hell.


(XI11) Alcinous is so moved with sympathy by Odysseus' tale that he bids his men row Odysseus to Ithaca, but to blindfold him lest he learn and reveal the location of their happy land. On Ithaca the goddess Athena guides the wanderer to the hut of his old swineherd Eumaeus, who (xiv), though not recognizing him, receives him with Gargantuan hospitality. (xv) When Telem achus is led by the goddess to the same hut Odysseus (XVI) makes himself known to his son, and both "wail aloud vehemently." He unfolds to Telem achus a plan for slaying all the suitors. (XVII-XVIII) In the guise of a beggar he enters his palace, sees the wooers feasting at his expense, and rages inwardly when he hears that they lie with his maidservants at night even while court ing Penelope by day. (xix-xx) He is insulted and injured by the suitors, but he defends himself with vigor and patience. (xx1) By this time the wooers have discovered the trick of Penelope's web, and have forced her to finish it. She agrees to marry whichever of them can string Odysseus' great bow-which hangs on the wall-and shoot an arrow through the openings of twelve axes ranged in line. They all try, and all fail. Odysseus asks for a chance, and suc ceeds. (xxu) Then with a wrath that frightens everyone, he casts off his dis guise, turns his arrows upon the suitors, and, with the 'help of Telemachus, Eumaeus, and Athena, slays them all. (xxm) He finds it hard to convince Penelope that he is Odysseus; it is difficult to surrender twenty suitors for one husband. (niv) He meets the attack of the suitors' sons, pacifies them, and
.re-establishes his kingdom.
Meanwhile in Argos the greatest tragedy in Greek legend was pursuing its course. Orestes, son of Agamemnon, grown to manhood and aroused by his bitter sister Electra, avenged their father by murdering their mother and her paramour. After many years of madness and wandering Orestes ascended the throne of Argos-Mycenae (ca. 1176 B.c.) and later added Sparta to his kingdom.• But from his accession the house of Pelops began to decline. Perhaps .the decline had begun with Agamemnon, and that
Sir Arthur Evans has found, in a Mycenaean tomb in Boeotia, engravings representing a
,:oung man attacking a sphinx, and a youth killing an older man and a woman. He believes i:hat these refer to Oedipus and Orestes; and as he ascribes these enFvings to ca. 1450 B.C.e he argues for a date for Oedipus and Orestes some two centuries earlier than the epoch tenta• tively assigned to these characters in the text.80
62	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. III
vacillating chieftain had used war as a means of uniting a realm that was already falling to pieces. But his victory completed his ruin. For few of his chieftains ever returned, and the kingdoms of many others had lost all loyalty to them. By the end of the age that had opened with the siege of Troy the Achaean power was spent, the blood of Pelops was exhausted. The people waited patiently for a saner dynasty.
THE DORIAN CONQUEST
About the year 1104 u.c. a new wave of immigration or invasion came flown upon Greece from the restlessly expanding north. Through lliyria "nd Thessaly, across the Corinthian Gulf at Naupactus, and over the Isthmus t Corinth, a warlike people, tall, roundheaded, letterless, slipped or marched or poured into the Peloponnesus, mastered it, and almost com pletely destroyed Mycenaean civilization. We guess at their origin and their route, but we know their character and their effect. They were still in the herding and hunting stage; now and then they stopped to till the soil, but their main reliance was upon their cattle, whose need for new pasturage kept the tribes ever on the move. One thing they had in un heard-of quantity-iron. They were the emissaries of the Hallstatt• cul ture to Greece; and the hard metal of their swords and souls gave them a merciless supremacy over Achaeans and Cretans who still used bronze to kill. Probably from both west and east, from Elis and Megara, they came down upon the separate little kingdoIDS of the Peloponnesus, put the ruling classes to the sword, and turned the Mycenaean remnant into helot-serfs. Mycenae and Tiryns went up in flames, and for some centuries Argos be came the capital of Pelops' isle. On the Isthmus the invaders seized a com manding peak-the Acrocorinthus-and built around it the Dorian city of Corinth.""a The surviving Achaeans fled, some of them into the mountains of the northern Peloponnesus, some into Attica, some overseas to the islands and coasts of Asia. The conquerors followed them jnto Attica, but were repulsed; they followed them to Crete,11 and made final the destruction of Cnossus; they captured and colonized Melos, Thera, Cos, Cnidus, and Rhodes. Throughout the Peloponnesus and Crete, where the Mycenaean culture had most flourished, the devastation was most complete.
This terminal catastrophe in the prehistory of Aegean civilization is what modem historians know as the Dorian conquest, and what Greek tradi-
A town in Austria whose iron remains have given its name to the first period of the
Iron Age in Europe.
CHAP.m)	THE  HEROIC  AGE
tion called the Return of the Heracleidae. For the victors were not con tent to record their triumph as a conquest of a civilized people by bar barians; they protested that what had really happened was that the de scendants of Heracles, resisted in their just re-entry into the Peloponnesus, had taken it by heroic force. We do not know how much of this is his tory, and how much is diplomatic mythology designed to transform a bloody conquest into a divine right. It is difficult to believe that the Dorians were such excellent liars iri the very youth of the world. Perhaps, as dis putanrs will never allow, both stories were true: the Dorians were con querors from the north, led by the scions of Heracles.
Whatever the form of the conquest, its result was a long and bitter inter ruption in the development of Greece. Political order was disturbed for centuries; every man, feeling unsafe, carried arms; increasing violence dis rupted agriculture and trade on land, and commerce on the seas. War flourished, poverty deepened and spread. Life became unsettled as families wandered from country to country seeking security and peace.• Hesiod called this the Age of Iron, and mourned its debasement from the finer ages that had preceded it; many Greeks believed that "the discovery of iron had been to the hurt of man."88 The arts languished, painting was neglected, statuary contented itself with figurines; and pottery, forgetting the lively naturalism of Mycenae and Crete, degenerated into a lifeless "Geometrical Style" that dominated Greek ceramics for centuries.
But not all was lost. Despite the resolution of the invading Dorians to keep their blood free from admixture with that of the subject population despite the racial antipathies between Dorian and Ionian that were to incarnadine all Greece-there went on, rapidly outside of Laconia, slowly within, a mingling of the new stocks with the old; and perhaps the addi tion of the vigorous seed of Achaeans and Dorians with that of the more ancient and volatile peoples of southern Greece served as a powerful bio logical stimulant. The final result, after centuries of mingling, was a new and diverse people, in whose blood "Mediterranean," "Alpine," "Nordic," and Asiatic elements were disturbingly fused.
Nor was Mycenaean culture entirely destroyed. Certain elements of the Aegean heritage-instrumentalities of social order and government, ele ments of craftsmanship and technology, modes and routes of trade, forms and objects of worship,"' ceramic and toreutic skills, the art of fresco paint ing, decorative motives and architectural forms-maintained a half-stifled existence through centuries of violence and chaos. Cretan institutions, the Greeks believed, passed down into Sparta;• and the Achaean assembly
64	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.m
remained the essential structure of even democratic Greece. The Myce naean megaron probably provided the ground plan of the Doric temple,.. to which the Dorian spirit would add freedom, symmetry, and strength. The artistic tradition, slowly reviving, lifted Corinth, Sicyon, and Argos to an early Renaissance, and made even dour Sparta, for a while, smile with art and song; it nourished lyric poetry through all this historyless Dark Age; it followed Pelasgian, Achaean, Ionian, Minyan exiles in their flight-migra tion to the Aegean and Asia, and helped the colonial cities to leap ahead of their mother states in literature and art. And when the exiles came to the islands and Ionia they found the remains of Aegean civilization ready to their hands. There, in old towns a little less disordered· than on the Con tinent, the Age of Bronze had kept something of its ancient craft and brilliance; and there on Asiatic soil would come the first reawakening of Greece.	•
In the end the contact of five cultures-Cretan, Mycenaean, Acha.ean, Dorian, Oriental-brought new youth to a civilization that had begun to die, that had grown coarse on the mainland through war and plunder, and effeminate in.Crete through the luxury of its genius. The mixture of races and wa.ys took centuries to win even a moderate stability, but it contributed to produce the unparalleled variety, flexibility, and subtlety of Greek thought and life. Instead of thinking of Greek culture as a flame that shone suddenly and miraculously amid a dark sea of barbarism, we must conceive of it as the slow and turbid creation of a people almost too richly endowed in blood and memories, and surrounded, challenged, and instructed by war like hordes, powerful empires, and ancient civilizations.
BOOK II
THE	RISE  OF GREECE
I000-480 B.C.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK II
NOTES: All dates before 4,8<>, except 776, are uncertain. A place name without other description indicates the traditional date of its first Greek settlement.


The rediscovery of that lost civilization is one of the major achievements of modem archeology. Here was an island twenty times larger than the largest of the Cyclades, pleasant in climate, varied in the products of its fields and once richly wooded hills, and strategically placed, for trade or war, midway between Phoenicia and Italy, between Egypt and Greece. Aristotle had pointed out how excellent this situation was, and how "it had enabled Minos to acquire the empire of the Aegean.'" But the story of Minos, accepted as fact by all classical writers, was rejected as legend by modem scholars; and until sixty years ago it was the custom to suppose, with Grote, that the history of civilization in the Aegean had begun with the Dorian invasion, or the Olympic games. Then in A.D. 1878 a Cretan mer chant, appropriately named Minos Kalokairinos, unearthed some strange
antiquities on a hillside south of Candia.t The great Schliemann, who had
but lately resurrected Mycenae and Troy, visited the site in 1886, an nounced his conviction that it covered the remains of the ancient Cnossus, and opened negotiations with the owner of the land so that excavations might begin at once. But the owner haggled and tried to cheat; and Schlie mann, who had been a merchant before becoming an archeologist, with drew in anger, losing a golden chance to add another civilization to history. A few years later he died.'
In 1893 a British archeologist, Dr. Arthur Evans, bought in Athens a number of milkstones from Greek women who had worn them as amulets. He was curious about the hieroglyphics engraved upon them, which no scholar could read. Tracing the stones to Crete, he secured passage thither,
All dateS in this volume are B.c. unless otherwise stated or obviously A.D.
t The modem capital, now officially renamed Heracleum. .
6	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
and wandered about the island picking up examples of what he believed to be ancient Cretan writing. In 1895 he purchased a part, and in 1900 the re mainder, of the site that Schliemann and the French School at.Athens had identified with Cnossus; and in nine weeks of that spring, digging feverishly with one hundred and fifty men, he exhumed the richest treasure of modem historical research-the palace of Minos. Nothing yet known from an tiquity could equal the vastness of this complicated structure, to all appear ances identical with the almost endless Labyrinth so famous in old Greek tales of Minos, Daedalus, Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur. In these and other ruins, as if to confirm Evans' intuition, thousands of seals and clay tablets were found, bearing characters like those that had set him upon the trail. The fires that had destroyed the palaces of Cnossus had preserved these tablets, whose undeciphered pictographs and scripts still conceal the early story of the Aegean.•
Students from many countries now hurried to Crete. While Evans was working at Cnossus, a group of resolute Italians-Halbherr, Pernier, Savig noni, Paribeni-unearthed at Hagia Triada (Holy Trinity) a sarcophagus painted with illuminating scenes from Cretan life, and uncovered at Phaestus a palace only less extensive than that of the Cnossus kings. Meanwhile two Americans, Seager and Mrs. Hawes, made discoveries at Vasiliki, Mochlos, and Gournia; the British-Hogarth, Bosanquet, Dawkins, Myres-explored Palaikastro, Psychro, and Zakro; the Cretans themselves became interested, and Xanthoudidis and Hatzidakis dug up ancient residences, grottoes, and tombs at Arkalochori, Tylissus, Koumasa, and Chamaizi. Half the nations of Europe united under the flag of science in the very generation in which their statesmen were preparing for war.
How was all this material to be classified-these palaces, paintings, statues, seals, vases, metals, tablets, and reliefs?-to what period of the past were they to be assigned? Precariously, but with increasing corroboration as research went on and knowledge grew, Evans dated the relics according to the depth of their strata, the gradation of styles in the pottery, and the agreement of Cretan finds, in form or motive, with like objects exhumed in lands or deposits whose chronology was approximately known. Digging down patiently beneath Cnossus, he found himself stopped, some forty-three feet below the surface, by the virgin rock. The lower half of the excavated area was occupied by remains characteristic of the Neolithic Age-primitive forms of handmade pottery with simple linear ornament, spindle whorls for spinning and weaving, fat-buttocked
Evans labored brilliantly at Cnossus for many years, was knighted for his discoveries, and completed. in 1936, his monumental four-volume report, The Palace of Minos.
CHAP, I)	CRETE	7
goddesses of painted steatite or clay. tools and weapons of polished stone, but nothing in copper or bronze.• Classifying the pottery, and correlating the remains with those of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, Evans divided the post neolithic and prehistoric culture of Crete into three ages-Early, Middle, and
Late Minoan-and each of these into three periods.t
The first or lowest appearance of copper in the strata represents for us, through a kind of archeological shorthand, the slow rise of a new civilization out of the neolithic stage. By the end of the Early Minoan Age the Cretans learn to mix copper with tin, and the Bronze Age begins. In Middle Minoan I the earliest palaces occur: the princes of Cnossus, Phaestus, and Mallia build for themselves luxurious dwellings with countless rooms, spacious storehouses, specialized workshops, altars and temples, and great drainage conduits that startle the arrogant Occidental eye. Pottery takes on a many colored brilliance, walls are enlivened with charming frescoes, and a form of linear script evolves out of the hieroglyphics of the preceding age. Then, at the close of Middle Minoan II, some strange catastrophe writes its cynical record into the strata; the palace of Cnossus is laid low as if by a convulsion of the earth, or perhaps by an attack from Phaestus, whose palace for a time is spared. But a little later a like destruction falls upon Phaes s, Mochlos, Gournia, Palaikastro, and many other cities in the island; the pottery is covered with ashes, the great jars in the storerooms are filled with debris. Middle Minoan III is a period of comparative stagnation, in which, per haps, the southeastern Mediterranean world is long disordered by the Hyksos conquest of Egypt.•
In the late Minoan Age everything begins again. Humanity, patient under every cataclysm, renews its hope, takes courage, and builds once more. New and finer palaces rise at Cnossus, Phaestus, Tylissus, Hagia Triada, and Gournia. The lordly spread, the five-storied height, the luxuri ous decoration of these princely residences suggest such wealth as Greece would not know till Pericles. Theaters are erected in the palace courts, and gladiatorial spectacles of men and women in deadly combat with animals amuse gentlemen and ladies whose aristocratic faces, quietly alert, still live
Since the earliest layer of copper implements at Cnossus may be dated, by correlation with the remains of neighboring cultures, about 3400 e.c., i.e., about 5300 years ago, and since the neolithic strata at Cnossus occupy some fifty-five per cent of the total depth from surface to rock, Evans calculated that the Neolithic Age in Crete had lasted at least 4500 rears before the coming of metals-approximately from 8000 to 3400. Such calculations o time from depth of strata are, of course, highly problematical; the rate of deposition may change from age to age. Allowance has been made for a slower rate after the abandonment of Cnossus as an urban site in the fourteenth century e.c.' No paleolithic remains have been found in Crete.
t For the approximate duration of these epochs cf. the Chronological Table on p. 2..
8	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. I
for us on the bright frescoes of the resurrected walls. Wants are multiplied, tastes are refined, literature flourishes; a thousand industries graciously per mit the poor to prosper by supplying comforts and delicacies to the rich. The halls of the king are noisy with scribes taking inventories of goods dis tributed-or received; with artists making statuary, paintings, pottery, or re liefs; with high officials conducting conferences, hearing judicial appeals, or dispatching papers stamped with their finely wrought seals; while wasp waisted princes and jeweled duchesses, alluringly decollete, crowd to a royal feast served on tables shining with bronze and gold. The sixteenth and fifteenth centuries before our era are the zenith of Aegean civilization, the classic and golden age of Crete.
m. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A CIVILIZATION
If now we try to restore this buried culture from the relics that remain playing Cuvier to the scattered bones of Crete-let us remember that we are engaging upon a hazardous kind of historical television, in which imagina tion must supply the living continuity in the gaps of static and fragmentary material artificially moving but long since dead. Crete will remain inwardly unknown until its secretive tablets find their Champollion.
Men and Women
As we see them self-pictured in their art, the Cretans curiously resemble the double ax so prominent in their religious symbolism. Male and female alike have torsos narrowing pathologically to an ultramodern waist. Nearly all are short in stature, slight and supple of build, graceful in movement, athletically trim. Their skin is white at birth. The ladies, who court the shade, have fair complexions conventionally pale; but the men, pursuing wealth under thesun, are so tanned and ruddy that the Greeks will call them (as well as the Phoenicians) Phoinikes-the Purple Ones, Redskins. The head is rather long than broad, the features are sharp and refined, the hair and eyes are brilliantly dark, as in the Italians of today; these Cretans are apparently a branch of the "Mediterranean race."• The men as well as the women wear their hair partly in coils on the head or the neck, partly in ring-
Current anthropology divides post-neolithic Europeans into three types, respectively pre ponderating in north, central, and southern Europe: (1) "Nordic" man-long-headed, tall, and fair of skin and eyes and hair; (2) "Alpine" man-broad-headed, of mediwn height, with eyes tending to gray and hair to brown; and (3) "Mediterranean" man-long-headed, short, and dark. No people is exclusively any of these "races."


The Cretan Zeus, as the Greeks call Velchanos, is subordinate to his mother in the affections of the Cretans. But he grows in importance. He becomes the personification of the fertilizing rain, of the moisture that in this religion, as in the philosophy of Thales, underlies all things. He dies, and his sepulcher is shown from generation to generation on Mt. louktas, where the majestic profile of his face can still be seen by the imaginative traveler; he rises from the grave as a symbol of reviving vegetation, and the Kouretes priests celebrate with dances and clashing shields his glorious resurrection.'"' Sometimes, as a god of fertility, he is conceived as incarnate in the sacred bull; it is as a bull that he
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.I
mates in Cretan myth with Minos' wife Pasiphae, and begets by her the mon strous Minos-bull, or Minotaur.
To appease these deities the Cretan uses a lavish rite of prayer and sacrifice, symbol and ceremony, administered usually by women priests, sometimes by officials of the state. To ward off demons he bums incense; to arouse a negli gent divinity he sounds the conch, plays the flute or the lyre, and sings, in chorus, hymns of adoration. To promote the growth of orchards and the fields, he waters trees and plants in solemn ritual; or his priestesses in nude frenzy shake down the ripe burden of the trees; or his women in festal procession carry fruits and flowers as hints and tribute to the goddess, who is borne in state in a palanquin. He has apparently no temple, but raises altars in the palace court, in sacred groves or grottoes, and on mountaintops. He adorns these sanctu aries with tables of libation and sacrifice, a medley of idols, and "horns of con secration" perhaps representative of the sacred bull. He is profuse with holy symbols, which he seems to worship along with the gods whom they signify: first the shield, presumably as the emblem of his goddess in her warrior form; then the cross-in both its Greek and its Roman shapes, and as the swastika-cut upon the forehead of a bull or the thigh of a goddess, or carved upon seals, or raised in marble in the palace of the king; above all, the double ax, as an instru ment of sacrifice magically enriched with the virtue of the blood that it sheds, or as a holy weapon unerringly guided by the god, or even as a sign of Zeus the Thunderer cleaving the sky with his bolts.11
Finally he offers a modest care and worship to his dead. He buries them in clay coffins or massive jars, for if they are unburied they may return. To keep them content below the ground he deposits with them modest portions of food, articles for their toilette, and clay figurines of women to tend or console them through all eternity. Sometimes, with the sly economy of an incipient skeptic, he substitutes clay animals in the grave in place of actual food. If he buries a king or a noble or a rich trader he surrenders to the corpse a part of the precious plate or jewelry that it once possessed; with touching sympathy he buries a set of chess with a good player, a clay orchestra with a musician, a boat with one who loved the sea. Periodically he returns to the grave to offer a sustaining sacrifice of food to the dead. He hopes that in some secret Elysium, or Islands of the Blest, the just god Rhadamanthus, son of Zeus Velchanos, will receive the purified soul, and give it the happiness and the peace that slip so elusively through the fingers in this earthly quest.
Culture
The most troublesome aspect of the Cretan is his language. When, after the Dorian invasion, he uses the Greek alphabet, it is for a speech completely alien
CHAP. I)	CRETE
to what we know as Greek, and more akin in sound to the Egyptian, Cypriote, Hittite, and Anatolian dialects of the Near East. In the earliest age he confines himself to hieroglyphics; about 1800 B.c. he begins to shorten these into a linear script of some ninety syllabic signs; two centuries later he contrives another script, whose characters often resemble those of the Phoenician alphabet; per haps it is from him, as well as from the Egyptians and the Semites, that the Phoenicians gather together those letters they will scatter throughout the Med iterranean to become the unassuming, omnipresent instrument of Western civ ilization. Even the common Cretan composes, and like some privy councilor, leaves on the walls of Hagia Triada the passing inspirations of his muse. At Phaestus we find a kind of prehistoric printing: the hieroglyphs of a great disk unearthed there from Middle Minoan III strata are impressed upon the clay by stamps, one for each pictograph; but here, to add to our befuddlement, the characters are apparently not Cretan but foreign; perhaps the disk is an impor tation from the East.""
The clay tablets upon which the Cretan writes may some day reveal to us his accomplishments in science. He has some astronomy, for he is famed as a navigator, and tradition hands down to Dorian Crete the ancient Minoan cal endar. The Egyptians acknowledge their indebtedness to him for certain medi cal prescriptions, and the Greeks borrow from him, as the words suggest, such aromatic and medicinal herbs as mint (mintha), wormwood (apsinthon), and an ideal drug (daukos) reputed to cure obesity without disturbing gluttony."" But we must not mistake our guessing for history.
Though the Cretan's literature is a sealed book to us, we may at least contem plate the ruins of his theaters. At Phaestus, about 2000, he builds ten tiers of stone seats, running some eighty feet along a wall overlooking a flagged court; at Cnossus he raises, again in stone, eighteen tiers thirty-three feet long, and, at right angles to them, six tiers from eighteen to fifty feet in length. These court theaters, seating four or five hundred persons, are the most ancient play houses known to us-older by fifteen hundred years than the Theater of Diony sus. We do not know what took place on those stages; frescoes picture audiences viewing a spectacle, but we cannot tell what it is that they see. Very likely it is some combination of music and dance. A painting from Cnossus preserves a group of aristocratic ladies, surrounded by their gallants, watching a dance by gaily petticoated girls in an olive grove; another represents a Dancing Woman with flying tresses and extended arms; others show us rustic folk dances, or the wild dance of priests, priestesses, and worshipers before an idol or a sacred tree. Homer describes the "dancing-floor which once, in broad Cnossus, Daedalus made for Ariadne of the lovely hair; there youths and seductive maidens join hands in the dance ... and a divine bard sets the time to the sound of the lyre."" The seven-stringed lyre. ascribed by the Greeks to the inventiveness of Ter-
16	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
pander, is represented on a sarcophagus at Hagia Triada a thousand years before Terpander's birth. There, too, is the double flute, with two pipes, eight holes, and fourteen notes, precisely as in classical Greece. Carved on a gem, a woman blows a trumpet made from an enormous conch, and on a vase we see the sistrum beating time for the dance.rs' feet.
The same youthful freshness and lighthearted grace that animate his dances and his games enliven the Cretan's work in the arts. H!:l has not left us, aside from his architecture, any accomplishments of massive grandeur or exalted style; like the Japanese of samurai days he delights rather in the refinement of the lesser and more intimate arts, the adornment of objects daily used, the patient perfecting of little things. As in every aristocratic civilization, he accepts conventions in the form and subject of his work, avoids extravagant novelties, and learns to be free even within the limitations of reserve and taste. He excels in pottery, gem cutting, bezel carving, and reliefs, for here his micro scopic skill finds every stimulus and opportunity. He is at home in the working of silver and gold, sets all the precious stones, and makes a rich diversity of jeweJs. Upon the seals that he cuts to serve as official_ signatures, commercial labels, or business forms, he engraves in delicate detail so much of the life and scenery of Crete that from them alone we might picture his civilization. He hammers bronze into basins, ewers, daggers, and swords ornamented with floral and animal designs, and inlaid with gold and silver, ivory and rare stones. At Gournia he has left us, despite the thieves of thirty centuries, a silver cup of finished artistry; and here and there he has molded for us rhytons, or drinking horns, rising out of human or animal heads that to this day seem to hold the breath of life.
As a potter he tries every form, and reaches distinction in nearly all of them. He makes vases, dishes, cups, chalices, lamps, jars, animals, and gods. At fust, in Early Minoan, he is content to shape the vessel with his hands along lines bequeathed to him from the Neolithic Age, to paint it with a glaze of brown or black, and to trust the fire to mottle the color into haphazard tints. In Middle Minoan· he has learned the use of the wheel, and rises to the height of his skill. He makes a glaze rivaling the consistency and delicacy of porcelain; he scatters recklessly black and brown, white and red, orange and yellow, crim son and vermilion, and mingles them happily into novel shades; he fines down the clay with such confident thoroughness that in his most perfect product-the graceful and brightly colored "eggshell" wares found in the cave of Kamares on Mt. Ida's slopes-he has dared to thin the walls of the vessel to a millimeter's thickness, and to pour out upon it all the motifs of his rich imagination. From
2100 to 1950 is the apogee of the Cretan potter; he signs his name to his work, and his trade-mark is sought throughout the Mediterranean. In the Late Minoan Age he brings to full development the technique of faience, and forms the
CHAP, 1)	CRETE
brilliant paste into decorative plaques, vases of turquoise blue, polychrome god desses, and marine reliefs so realistic that Evans mistook an enamel crab for a fossil... Now the artist falls in love with nature, and delights to represent on his vessels the liveliest animals, the gaudiest fish, the most delicate .flowers, and the most graceful pla1;1ts. It is in Late Minoan I that he creates his surviving masterpieces, the Boxers' Vase and the Harvesters' Vase: in the one he presl:nts us crudely with every aspect and attitude of the pugilistic game, adding a zone of scenes from the bull-leaper's life; in the other he follows with fond fidelity a procession probably of peasants marching and singing in some harvest fes tival. Then the great tradition of Cretan pottery grows weak with age, and the art declines; reserve and taste are forgotten, decoration overruns the vase in bizarre irregularity and excess, the courage for slow conception and patient execution breaks down, and a lazy carelessness called freedom replaces the finesse and finish of the Kamares age. It is a forgivable decay, the unavoidable death of an old and exhausted art, which will lie in refreshing sleep for a thou sand years, and be reborn in the perfection of the Attic vase.
Sculpture is a minor art in Crete, and except in bas-relief and the story of Daedalus, seldom graduates from the statuette. Many of these little figures are stereotyped crudities seemingly produced by rote; one is a delightful snapshot in ivory of an athlete plunging through the air; another is a handsome head that has lost its body on the way down the centuries. The best of them excels in anatomical precision and in vividness of action anything that we know from Greece before Myron's time. The strangest is the Snake Goddess of the Boston Museum-a sturdy figure of ivory and gold, half mammae and half snakes; here at last the Cretan artist treats the human form with some amplitude and success. But when he essays a larger scale he falls back for the most part upon animals, and confines himself to painted reliefs, as in the bull's head in the Heracleum Museum; in this startling relic the fixed wild eyes, the snorting nostrils, the gasping mouth, and the trembling tongue achieve a power that Greece itself will never surpass.
Nothing else in ancient Crete is quite so attractive as its painting. The sculp ture is negligible, the pottery is fragmentary, the architecture is in ruins; but this frailest of all the arts, easy victim of indifferent time, has left us legible and admirable masterpieces from an age so old that it slipped quite out of the mem ory of that classic Greece of whose painting, by contrast so recent, not one original remains. In Crete the earthquakes or the wars that overturned the palaces preserved here and there a frescoed wall; and wandering by them we molt forty centuries and meet the men who decorated the rooms of the Minoan kings. As far back as 2 500 they make wall coatings of pure lime, and conceive the idea of painting in fresco upon the wet surface, wielding the brush so rapidly that the colors sink into the stucco before the surface dries. Into the
18	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. I
dark halls of the palaces they bring the bright beauty of the open fields; they make plaster sprout lilies, tulips, narcissi, and sweet marjoram; no one viewing these scenes could ever again suppose that nature was discovered by Rousseau. In the museum at Heracleum the Saffron Picker is as eager to pluck the crocus as when his creator painted him in Middle Minoan days; his waist is absurdly thin, his body seems much too long for his legs; and yet his head is perfect, the colors are soft and warm, the flowers still fresh after four thousand years. At Hagia Triada the painter brightens a sarcophagus with spiral scrolls and queer, almost Nubian figures engrossed in some religious ritual; better yet, he adorns a wall with waving foliage, and then places in the midst of it, darkly but vividly, a stout, tense cat preparing to spring unseen upon a proud bird preening its plumage in the sun. In Late Minoan the Cretan painter is at the top of his stride; every wall tempts him, evety plutocrat calls him; he decorates not merely the royal residences but the homes of nobles and burghers with all the lavish ness of Pompeii. Soon, however, success and a surfeit of commissions spoil him; he is too anxious to be finished to quite touch perfection; he scatters quantity about him, repeats his flowers monotonously, paints his men impossibly, con tents himself with sketching outlines, and falls into the lassitude of an art that knows that it has passed its zenith and must die. But never before, except per haps in Egypt, has painting looked so freshly at the face of nature.
All the arts come together to build the Cretan palaces. Political power, commercial mastery, wealth and luxury, accumulated refinement and taste commandeer the architect, the builder, the artisan, the sculptor, the potter, the metalworker, the woodworker, and the painter to fuse their skills in pro ducing an assemblage of royal chambers, administrative offices, court theaters, and arenas, to serve as the center and summit of Cretan life. They build in the twenty-first century, and the twentieth sees their work de stroyed; they build again in the seventeenth, not only the palace of Minos but many other splendid edifices at Cnossus, and in half a hundred other cities in the thriving island. It is one of the great ages in architectural history.
The creators of the Cnossus palace are limited in both materials and men. Crete is poor in metal and quite devoid of marble; therefore they build with limestone and gypsum, and use wood for entablatures, roofs, and all columns above the basement floor. They cut the stone blocks so sharply that they can put them together without mortar. Around a central court of twenty thousand square feet they raise to three or four stories, with spacious stair ways of stone, a rambling maze of rooms-guardhouses, workshops, wine press, storerooms, administrative offices, servants' quarters, anterooms, re ception rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, chapel, dungeon, throne room, and a
CHAP. I)	CRETE	19


saying: "This is all my fortune; think now what you are doing." Undis couraged, she left her rich home, donned the beggar's garb, and went to live with Crates in free love. Their nuptials, we are informed, were consum mated in public, but their lives were models of affection and fidelity."
Zeno was impressed by the stern simplicity of the Cynic life. The fol
lowers of Antisthenes had now become the Franciscan monks of antiquity, vowed to poverty and abstinence, sleeping in any natural shelter that they came upon, and living upon the alms of people too industrious to be saints. Zeno took from the Cynics the outlines of his ethic, and did not conceal his debt. In his first book, The Republic, he was so far under their influence that he espoused an anarchist communism in which there should be no money, no property, no marriage, no religion, and no laws."' Recognizing that this utopia and the Cynic regimen offered no practicable program of life, he left Crates and studied for a time with Xenocrates at the Academy, and with Stilpo of Megara. He must have read Heracleitus receptively, for he incorporated into his own thought several Heracleitean ideas-the Divine Fire as the soul of man and of the cosmos, the eternity of law, and the re peated creation and conflagration of the world. But it was his custom to say that he owed most of all to Socrates, as the fountainhead and ideal of the Stoic philosophy.
After many years of humble tutelage Zeno at last, in 301, set up his own school by discoursing informally as he walked up and down under the colonnades of the Stoa Poecile, or Pointed Porch. He welcomed poor and rich alike, but discouraged the attendance of young men, feeling that only mature manhood could understand philosophy. When a youth talked toQ much Zeno informed him that "the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may hear more and talk less."'" Antigonus II, when in Athens, attended Zeno's classes, became his admiring friend, sought his ad vice, seduced him into momentary luxury, and invited him to come and live as his guest in Pella. Zeno excused himself and sent his pupil Persaeus instead. For forty years* he taught in the Stoa, and lived a life so consistent with his teachings that "more temperate than Zeno" became a proverb in Greece. Despite his intimacy with Antigonus the Athenian Assembly gave him the "keys to the walls," and voted him a statue and a crown. The de cree read:
Whereas Zeno of Citium has passed many years in our city in the study of philosophy, being in all other respects a good man (sic),
All dates for Zeno are disputed; the sources are contradictory. Zeller concludes to 350
for his birth and 26o for his death...
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXIX
and also exhorting all the young men who have sought his company to the practice of temperance; making his own life a modf:l of the greatest excellence ... it has been resolved by the people to honor Zeno ... to present him with a golden crown ... and to build him a tomb in the Ceramicus at the public expense.•
"He died," says Laertius, "in the following manner," reputedly in his nine tieth year. ''When he was going out of his school he tripped and broke a toe. Striking the ground with his hand, he repeated a line from the Niobe: 'I come; why·call me so?' And immediately he strangled himself."'"'
His work at the Stoa was carried on by two Asiatic Greeks-by Cleanthes of Assus and then by Chrysippus of Soli. Cleanthes was a pugilist who came to Athens with four drachmas, worked as a common laborer, refused public relief, studied for nineteen years under Zeno, and lived a life of industry and ascetic poverty. Chrysippus was the most learned and prolific of the school; he gave the Stoic doctrine its historic form by expounding it in 750 books, which Dionysius of Halicarnassus held up as models of learned dull ness. After him Stoicism spread throughout Hellas, and found its greatest exponents in Asia: in Panaetius of Rhodes, Zeno of Tarsus, Boethus of Sidon, and Diogenes of Seleucia. Out of the casual fragments that survive from a once voluminous literature we must piece together a composite picture of the most widespread and influential philosophy in the ancient world.
It was probably Chrysippus who divided the Stoic system into logic, natural science, and ethics. Zeno and his successors prided themselves on their contributions to logical theory, but the streams of ink that flowed from them on this subject have left no appreciable residue of enlightenment or use.* The Stoics agreed with the Epicureans that knowledge arises only out of the senses, and placed the final test of truth in such perceptions as compel the assent of the mind by their vividness or their persistence. Ex perience, however, need not lead to knowledge; for between sensation and reason lies emotion or passion, which may distort experience into error even as it distorts desire into vice. Reason is the supreme achievement of man, a seed from the Logos Spermatikos, or Seminal Reason, that made and rules the world.
The world itself, like man, is at once completely material and inherently divine. Everything that the senses report to us is material, and·only ma-
Except in certain additions to terminology, like the word logic itself. Zeno's pupil Aristo likened logicians to people eating lobsters, who take a great deal of trouble for a little morsel of meat concealed m much shell.""
CHAP.XXIX)   THE  SURRENDER  OF PHILOSOPHY
terial things can cause or receive action. Qualities as well as quantities, vir tues as well as passions, soul as well as body, God as well as the stars, are material forms or processes, differing in degrees of fineness, but essentially one."' On the other hand all matter is dynamic, full of tensions and powers, perpetually engaged in diffusion or concentration, and animated by an in ternal and eternal energy, heat, or fire. The universe lives through innumer able cycles of expansion and contraction, development and dissolution; periodically it is consumed in a grand conflagration, and slowly it takes form again; then it passes through all its previous history, even in minutest detail;* for the chain of causes and effects is an unbreakable circle, an end, less repetition. All events and all acts of will are determined; it is as im, possible for anything to happen otherwise than it does as it is for some thing to come out of nothing; any break in the chain would disrupt the world.
God, in this system, is the beginning, the middle, and the end. The Stoics
recognized the necessity of religion as a basis for morality; they looked with a genial tolerance upon the popular faith, even upon its demons and its divination, and found allegorical interpretations to bridge the chasm be, tween superstition and philosophy. They accepted Chaldean astrology as essentially correct, and thought of earthly affairs as in some mystic and continuous correspondence with the movements of the stars..-one phase of that universal sympatheia by which whatever happened to any part affected all the rest. As if preparing not only an ethic but a theology for Christian, ity, they conceived the world, law, life, the soul, and destiny in terms of God, and defined morality as a willing surrender to the divine will. God, like man, is living matter; the world is his body, the order and law of the world are his mind and will; the universe is a gigantic organism of which God is the soul, the animating breath, the fertilizing reason, the activating fire... Sometimes the Stoics conceive God in impersonal terms; more often they picture him as a Providence designing and guiding the cosmos with supreme intelligence, adjusting all its parts to rational purposes, and making everything redound to the use of virtuous men. Cleanthes identifies him with Zeus in a monotheistic hymn worthy of Ikhnaton or Isaiah:
Thou, 0 Zeus, art praised above all gods: many are thy names and thine is all power for ever.
The beginning of the world was from thee: and with law thou rul est over all things.
We are relieved to learn that some of the Stoics were not quite certain on this point.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXIX
Unto thee may all flesh speak: for we are thy offspring.
Therefore will I raise a hymn unto thee: and will ever sing of thy power.
The whole order of the heavens obeyeth thy word: as it moveth around the earth:


distance of thirty-eight miles.• The structure was completed m 279 u.c., and was destroyed in the thirteenth century A.D. The island of Phares, on which it stood, is now the Ras-et-Tin quarter of Alexandria;. the site of the lighthouse has been covered by the sea.
CHAP.XXV)	EGYPT  AND  THE  WEST	591
nomic opportunities, unprecedented facilities for the life of the mind, and a wealthy court as the source and center of a luxurious social life. Nor was the king an incalculable despot. Egyptian tradition combined with Greek law to build up a system of legislation which borrowed from, and improved upon, the Athenian code in every respect except freedom. The edicts of the king had full legal force; but the cities enjoyed considerable self-government, and the Egyp tian, Greek, and Jewish population lived each under its own system of law, chose its own magistrates, and pied before its own courts  A Turin papyrus gives us
the record of an Alexandrian lawsuit; the issues are precisely defined, the evi dence is carefully presented, precedents are summarized, and the final judgment is given with judicial impartiality. Other papyri preserve Alexandrian wills, and reveal the antiquity of legal forms: "This is the will of Peisias the Lycian, son of X, of sound mind and deliberate intention."•
The Ptolemaic was the most efficiently organized government in the Hellenis tic world. It took its national form from Egypt and Persia, its municipal form from Greece, and passed them on to Imperial Rome. The country was divided into nomes or provinces, each administered by appointees of the king. Nearly all these officials were Greek. The idea of Alexander, that Greek and Oriental or. Egyptian should live and mingle on equal terms, was forgotten as unlucrative; the valley of the Nile became frankly a conquered land. The Greek overseers brought an advanc d technology and management to the economic life of Egypt, and enormously. expanded the wealth of the nation; but they took the increase. The state charged high prices for the products which it controlled, and barred competition with a tariff....wall; hence olive oil that cost twenty-one drachmas in Delos cost fifty-two in Alexandria. Everywhere the government took rentals, taxes, customs, and tolls, sometimes labor and life itself. The peasant paid a fee to the state for the right to keep cattle, for the fodder that he fed them, and for the privilege of grazing them on the common pasture land. The private owner of gardens, vineyards, or orchards paid a sixth-under Ptol emy II a half-of his produce to the state."' All persons except soldiers, priests, and government officials paid a poll tax. There were taxes on salt, legal docu ments, and bequests; a five per cent tax on rentals, a ten per cent tax on sales, a twenty-five per cent levy on all fish caught in Egyptian waters, a toll on goods passing from village to town, or along the Nile; there were high export as well as import duties at all Egyptian ports; there were special taxes to maintain the fleet and the lighthouse, to keep the municipal physicians and police in good humor, and to buy a gold crown for every new king;81 nothing was overlooked that could fatten the state. To keep track of all taxable products, income, and transactions the government maintained a swarm of scribes, and a vast system of personal and property registration; to collect the taxes it farmed them out to specialists, supervised their operations, and held their possessions as security till
592	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XXV
the returns were in. The total revenue of the Ptolemies, in money and kind, was probably the greatest gathered by any government between the fall of Persia and the ascendancy of Rome.
ALEXANDRIA
Most of this wealth came to Alexandria. The nome capitals and a few other towns were also prosperous, with paved and lighted streets, police protection, and a good water supply; but nothing quite so "modern" as Alexandria had ever been seen before. Strabo describes it in the first cen tury A.D. as over three miles long and a mile wide; Pliny reckons the city wall as fifteen miles in length." Dinocrates of Rhodes and Sostratus of Cnidus laid out the city on the rectangular plan, with a central avenue one hundred feet wide running from east to west, crossed by an equally wide avenue from north to south. Each of these thoroughfares, and probably some others, was well lighted at night, and was kept cool during the day by mile after mile of shaded colonnades. Of the four quarters into which the main arteries divided the city the westernmost, Rhacotis, was occupied chiefly by Egyptians; the northeast portion formed the Jewish quarter; the southeast comer, or Brucheum, contained the royal palace, the Museum, the Library, the tombs of the Ptolemies, the sarcophagus of Alex ander (the Hotel des lnvalides of the age), the arsenal, the chief Greek temples, and many spacious parks. One park had a portico six hundred feet in length; another contained the royal zoological collection. In the center of the city were the administrative buildings, the government store houses, the courthouse, the main gymnasium, and a thousand shops and bazaars. Outside the gates were a stadium, a hippodrome or race track, an amphitheater, and a vast cemetery known as the Necropolis, or City of the Dead... Along the beach ran a succession of bathing establishments and resorts. A dike or mole, called Heptastadium because it was seven stadia long, connected the city with the island of Pharos, and made two harbors out of one. Behind the city lay Lake Mareotis, which provided ports and outlets for the traffic on the Nile; here the Ptolemies kept their pleasure boats and took their royal ease.•
The population of Alexandria about 200  B.c. was as varied as in a mod
ern metropolis: from four to five hundred thousand Macedonians, Greeks,
Hardly anything but a few catacombs and pillars have been preserved from ancient Alexandria. Its remains lie directly under the present capital, making excavation expensive; probably they have sunk beneath the water level; and parts of the old city have been co,·ered by the Mediterranean.
CHAP. XXV)	EGYPT  AND THE  WEST	593
Egyptians, Jews, Persians, Anatolians, Syrians, Arabs, and negroes.•11 The growth of commerce had swelled the lower middle class, and filled the cosmopolitan capital with a busy, talkative, litigious crowd of shopkeepers and traders, always on the alert for a bargain, and with no prejudice in favor of honesty. At the top were the Macedonians and the Greeks, liv ing in such luxury as astonished the Roman ambassadors who were ap pointed to the court in 2 73. Athenaeus recounts the delicacies that bur dened the tables and digestions of the master class,"' and Herodas writes: "Alexandria is the house of Aphrodite, and everything is to be found there-wealth, playgrounds, a large army, a serene sky, public displays, philosophers, precious metals, fine young men, a good royal house, an academy of science, exquisite wines, and beautiful women.""' Alexandria's poets were discovering the literary value of virginity, and its novelists would soon make it the theme and final casualty of many a tale; but the city was notorious for the generosity of its women and the number of its stepdaughters of joy; Polybius complained that the finest private homes in Alexandria belonged to courtesans.• Women of all classes moved freely through the streets, shopped in the stores, and mingled with the men. Some of them made a name for themselves in literature and scholarship." The Macedonian queens and ladies of the court, from Ptolemy II's Arsinoe to Antony's Cleopatra, took an active part in politics, and served policy rather than love with their crimes; but they retained sufficient charm to arouse the men to unprecedented gallantry, at least in poetry and prose, and brought into Alexandrian society an element of feminine influence and grace un
known in classic Greece.
Probably a fifth of Alexandria's population was Jewish. As far back as the seventh century there had been Hebrew settlements in Egypt; many Jewish traders had entered in the wake of the Persian conquest. Alexander had urged Jews to emigrate to Alexandria, and had, according to Josephus, o.ffered them equal political and economic rights with the Greeks.  Ptol
emy I, after taking Jerusalem, carried with him into Egypt thousands of Jewish captives, who were freed by his successor;.. at the same time he invited well-to-do Hebrews to establish their homes and businesses in Alexandria.•• By the beginning of the Christian era there were a million Jews in Egypt." A large number of these lived in the Jewish quarter of the capital. It was no ghetto, for the Jews were free to live in any quarter but the Brucheum, which was restricted to official families and their servi-
The population of Alexandria in 1927 was 570,000.
594	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXV
tors. They chose their own gerousia or senate, and followed their own worship. In 169 the high priest Onias III built a great temple at Leontopolis, a suburb of Alexandria, and Ptolemy VI, his personal friend, assigned the revenues of Heliopolis for its maintenance. Such temples served as schools and meeting places as well as for religious se ices; hence they were called by the Greek-speaking Jews synagogai, i.e., places of assembly. Since few Egyptian Jews after the second or third generation in Egypt knew Hebrew, the reading of the Law was followed by an interpretation in Greek. Out of these explanations and applications rose the custom of preaching a sermon on a text; and out of the ritual came the first forms of the Catholic Mass.'"
This religious and racial separation combined with economic rivalries to arouse, towards the end of this period, an anti-Semitic movement in Alex andria. The Greeks and Egyptians alike were habituated to the union of church and state, and frowned upon the cultural independence of the Jews; furthermore, they felt the competition of the Jewish artisan or business man, and resented his energy, tenacity, and skill. When Rome began to import Egyptian grain it was the Jewish merchants of Alexandria who car ried the. cargoes in their fleets."'• The Greeks, perceiving their failure to Hellenize the Jews, feared for their own future in a state where the majority remained persistently Oriental, and bred so vigorously. Forgetting the leg islation of Pericles, they complained that the Jewish law forbade mixed marriages, and that the Jews for the most part kept to themselves. Anti Semitic literature multiplied. Manetho, the Egyptian historian, gave cur rency to the story that the Jews had been expelled from Egypt, centuries back, because they had been afflicted with scrofula or leprosy.'" Feeling mounted on both sides until, in the first century of the Christian era, it broke out into destructive violence.
The Jews did what they could to allay the resentment against their amixia-their social separation-and their success. Though they clung to their religion they spoke Greek, studied and wrote about Greek literature, and translated their sacred books and their histories into Greek. To ac quaint the Greeks with the Jewish religious tradition, and to enable the Jew who knew no Hebrew to read his own.scriptures, a group of Alexan drian Jewish scholars began, probably under Ptolemy II, a Greek transla tion of the Hebrew Bible. The kings favored the undertaking in the hope that it would make the Jews of Egypt more independent of Jerusalem, and would lessen the flow of Jewish-Egyptian funds to Palestine. Legend told how Ptolemy Philadelphus, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum,
CHAP.XXV)	EGYPT  AND  THE  WEST	59J
had invited some seventy Jewish scholars to come from Judea about 250 to translate the scriptures of their people; how the King had lodged each of them in a separate room on Pharos, and had kept them without inter communication until each had made his own rendering of the Pentateuch; how all the seventy versions, when finished, agreed word for word, prov ing the divine inspiration of the text and of the translators; how the King rewarded the scholars with costly presents of gold; and how from these circumstances the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible came to be known as the hermeneia kata tous hebdomekonta-the lnterjJ'1'etation accO'Tdmg to the Seventy-in Latin, lnterjJ'1'etatio Septuaginta (sc. Seniorum)-in a word, the "Septuagint."*" Whatever the process of translation, the Pentateuch seems to have appeared in Greek before the close of the third century, and the Prophetic books in the second.'" This was the Bible used by Philo and St. Paul.
The process of Hellenization in Egypt failed as completely with the natives as with the Jews. Outside of Alexandria the Egyptians sullenly maintained their own religion, their own dress or nudity, their own im memorial ways. The Greeks thought of themselves as conquerors, not as fellow men; they did not bother to build Greek cities south of the Delta, or to learn the language of the people; and their laws did not recognize the marriage of an Egyptian with a Greek. Ptolemy I tried to unite the Greek and native faiths by identifying Serapis and Zeus; later Ptolemies encour aged the cult of themselves as gods to offer a common and convenient ob ject of worship to their heterogeneous population; but those Egyptians who were not courting office paid little attention to these artificial cults. The Egyptian priests, shorn of their wealth and power, and dependent for their sustenance upon grants of money from the state, waited patiently for the Greek wave to recede. In the end it was not Hellenism that won in Alexandria, but mysticism; now were laid the foundations of Neo-Platonism and the medley of promissory cults that competed for the Alexandrian soul in the centuries that surrounded the birth of Christ. Osiris as Serapis became the favorite god of the later Egyptians, and of many Egyptian Greeks; Isis regained popularity as the goddess of women and motherhood. When Christianity came neither the clergy nor the people found it impossible to change Isis into Mary, and Serapis into Christ.