CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 

 DATE DUE 
 
 
 sEP-^mM~JSf 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 CAYLORD 
 
 
 
 "''XlfilillSiiiiMliiK,,!.'! Alexander's emp 
 
 3 1924 028 243 420 
 
The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028243420 
 
THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM IN 
 ALEXANDER'S EMPIRE 
 
The Progress of Hellenism 
 in Alexander's Empire 
 
 By 
 
 John Pentland MahafFy, C.V.O., D.D., D.C.L. 
 
 Sometime Professor of Ancient History 
 in the University of Dublin 
 
 CHICAGO: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
 
 LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 1905 
 
 T 
 
7? 
 
 A- -!.o<iU!ru 
 
 copykight 1905 
 The University of Chicago 
 
 3 
 
 February, 1905 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The following Lectures, delivered in the Univer- 
 sity of Chicago, represent the compendium of a 
 long and brilliant development of human culture. 
 To obtain a brief and yet accurate survey of it is 
 certainly a desideratum to various classes of readers, 
 and will, I trust, satisfy a real want. The general 
 reader, who desires to learn something of the ex- 
 pansion of Greek ideas toward the East, will here 
 find enough for a working knowledge of a very com- 
 plicated epoch. The specialist, who has devoted 
 himself to some department of this field, will find 
 here those general views of the whole which are 
 necessary to every inteUigent research into the parts. 
 More especially, the student or teacher of Christi- 
 anity will find here the human side of its origin 
 treated in a strictly historical spirit. To all such 
 this little volume may be as welcome as were the 
 lectures which compose it to the large and very sym- 
 pathetic class who heard them in the summer of 
 1904. 
 
 Compendiums have so often been written by mere 
 literary hacks that the public has been misled to 
 believe it an easy task, which can be accomplished 
 at second hand. But no collection of extracts from 
 larger books ever made a sound hand-book. It 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 must be produced fresh from the sources by one 
 who has made himself perfectly at home in the sub- 
 ject. It is, in fact, rather the work suited to the 
 close than to the beginning of a literary life. So far 
 at least these lectures satisfy the proper conditions. 
 This epoch has occupied me for more than twenty 
 years. 
 
 The appearance of Xenophon in this company 
 will seem novel to many; and it is so in truth. But 
 this new view of a familiar figure is amply justified 
 by the works which any sceptic may consult for 
 himself. This first lecture is, therefore, that which 
 will chiefly attract classical scholars, to whom Xeno- 
 phon is a household word in the class-room. If it 
 encourages them to read him through, instead of 
 confining themselves to his popular works, I shall 
 have attained what I most desire. To my American 
 readers, who have hitherto been very sympathetic 
 friends, I offer my respectful greeting on the appear- 
 ance of this my first American book. 
 
 J. P. M. 
 
 Dublin, January, 1905. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTUEE I pj^OE 
 
 Xenophon the Precursor of Hellenism .... i 
 
 LECTURE n 
 
 Macedonia and Greece 29 
 
 LECTURE m 
 Egypt 63 
 
 lecture iv 
 Syria 91 
 
 lecture v 
 General Reflections on Hellenism 107 
 
 lecture vi 
 Hellenistic Influences on Christianity . . . . 125 
 
 Index 151 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR OF 
 HELLENISM 
 
LECTURE I 
 XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR OF HELLENISM 
 
 You have done me a high honour in asking me 
 to speak in this great university. I shall best express 
 my deep gratitude by economising your time and 
 by setting to work at once to teach what I can with- 
 out further excuse or preamble. 
 
 The first thing essential is that you and I should 
 understand one another, especially regarding the 
 topic of my discourse. I am not sure that all of you 
 agree with me in the meaning you attach to the 
 word "Hellenism." And no wonder; for if you read 
 the immortal Grote, you will find it used by him for 
 the high culture of Athens, and as the substantive 
 corresponding to the adjective "Hellenic." If, on 
 the other hand, you open the great work of Droysen, 
 the History of Hellenism, you will find that it excludes 
 the purest Greek culture, and corresponds to the 
 adjective "Hellenistic." As you may see from 
 the program of my lectures, I intend to use the word 
 in the latter sense, and to speak of that diffusion 
 of Greek speech and culture through Macedonia 
 and the nearer East which, while it extended the 
 influence, could not but dilute the purity, of Hellenic 
 civiUsation. I wish Grote had adopted from the 
 Germans the word "Hellenedom," to correspond 
 
 3 
 
4 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 with "Hellenic." Then all would have been clear. 
 Or perhaps I should have coined "Hellenicism," 
 to correspond to "Hellenistic." But what chance 
 had I of accompHshing what the Roman emperor 
 despaired of-^adding a new word to one's mother- 
 tongue ? I must therefore be content with repeating 
 that by "Hellenism" I mean that so-caUed "silver 
 age" of Greek art and Hterature, when they became 
 cosmopoHtan, and not parochial; and by "Hellen- 
 istic," not only what was Greek, but what desired 
 and assumed to be Greek, from the highest and 
 noblest imitation down to the poorest travesty.' 
 The pigeon EngHsh of the Solomon islander is as 
 far removed from the prose of Ruskin or of Froude 
 as is the rudest Hellenistic epitaph or letter from 
 the music of Plato's diction, but both are clear 
 evidence of the imperial quality in that language 
 which sways the life of miUions of men far beyond 
 the limits of its original domain. Yet it must needs 
 be that as the matchless idiom of Aristophanes 
 passed out to Macedonian noble, to Persian grandee, 
 to Syrian trader, to Egyptian priest, each and all of 
 these added somewhat of their national flavour, and 
 so produced an idiom and a culture uniform indeed 
 in apphcation, though by no means uniform in 
 construction. 
 
 ' I notice with surprise that Mr. Bevan, in his recent mas- 
 terly book on The House oj Seleucus, uses the word "Hellenism" 
 indifferently in both senses, without apparent knowledge of the 
 ambiguity. 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 5 
 
 It is customary to date the origin of this Hellen- 
 ism from the reign of Alexander, whose house had 
 adopted Greek culture, and whose arms carried it 
 into the far East; but this is to my mind a superficial 
 view, and it is the object of my first lecture to show 
 you that Hellenism was a thing of older growth, 
 and that it began from the moment that Athens 
 ceased to be the dominant centre of Greece in pohtics 
 as well as in letters. 
 
 The end of the long Peloponnesian war threw 
 out of Greece a crowd of active and ambitious men 
 — some exiled from their homes, some voluntary 
 absentees — in search of employment. Neighbouring 
 nationaUties — Macedonians, Persians, Egyptians — 
 were coming into nearer view, and becoming the 
 possible homes of expatriated Greeks. All these 
 countries had long since sought and found merce- 
 naries, not only among the poor mountaineers of 
 Achffia and Arcadia, but among the aristocrats of 
 Lesbos and Rhodes, nay even of Athens and Sparta. 
 And now mercenary service not only became more 
 frequent and more respectable, but the relations 
 between the employers and the employed began to 
 change. Earlier Persian kings and satraps had 
 regarded their Greek mercenaries as they regarded 
 their Indian elephants — mere tools to win victories. 
 The relations of the younger Cyrus with the Greeks 
 were of a wholly different kind. He endeavoured to 
 make them friends, and to reconcile them to Persian 
 
6 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 ideas of state and of sovereignty. How well he 
 succeeded I will proceed to show in the case of 
 Xenophon. 
 
 But not only in the case of active men and travellers 
 but among the stay-at-home and purely literary, 
 there grew up in this generation a feeling that culture 
 was more than race, and wealth better than nobility. 
 We have Isocrates, the rhetorician and schoolmaster, 
 saying in a passage of which he probably did not 
 himself apprehend the deep meaning, that to be an 
 Athenian meant, not to be born in Attica, but to 
 have attained to Attic culture. Socrates, the most 
 undeniable of Athenians, had already by his teaching 
 loosened the bonds of city patriotism. He had taught 
 wider views, and laid larger issues before men; and 
 so we have a typical pupil, Xenophon, using the 
 Delphic oracle, not for Hellenic, but Hellenistic 
 purposes, compeUing its assent to his schemes of 
 ambition, and looking forward to eastern war and 
 travel as the obvious resource for a man without a 
 fixed position at home. 
 
 It is an exceptional good fortune for the modern 
 historian that this figure of Xenophon, furnished 
 with all the books he ever wrote (and some which he 
 never wrote), stands out so clearly at this momentous 
 epoch, when constant petty wars and rumours of wars 
 at home were preparing Greece for the coming 
 change. He begins his hfe a pure Athenian, and 
 to the end remained entitled by his style to the name 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 7 
 
 of the Attic bee. But where did that bee not gather 
 honey ? Not merely from the thyme of Attica and 
 the cistus of the Peloponnese, but from the rose 
 gardens of Persia and the sunflowers of Babylonia. 
 And so in every successive work there is some new 
 flavour in the diction and the tone of thought, till 
 we come in the Cyropcedia to that extraordinary 
 panegyric on the methods of the Persian monarchy, 
 even including the employment of eunuchs to take 
 charge of the king's household. 
 
 But generalities or metaphors are not sufficient 
 to prove my case. Let us descend into details. I 
 say that in the main features of his life and teaching 
 Xenophon represents the first step in the transition 
 from Hellenedom to Hellenism. It is apparent, 
 first, in his language; for though he writes excellent 
 Attic Greek, he discards the niceties of style which 
 were then invading Attic prose,' and which made 
 the essays of his contemporary Isocrates, and the 
 orations of Demosthenes, the most artificial of all 
 the great prose writing the world has seen. Still 
 more he allows himself the use of stray and strange 
 words provincial in the sense of not being Attic, 
 picked up in his travels at Sinope or Samos or 
 Byzantium, and often appearing but once in his 
 works. Thus his language distinctly approximates 
 
 ' In particular the avoidance of hiatus, e. g., ending and 
 beginning two consecutive words with vowels, so that the voice 
 must stop between them to make the words clear. 
 
8 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 to that common dialect which was the lingua franca 
 of all the Hellenistic world. Hence he remained 
 always popular, while the writers in dialect — Sappho, 
 Theocritus, nay even Herodotus — were well-nigh 
 unintelligible to the Hellenistic child. There is, 
 moreover, a great diminution in his use of particles, 
 as compared, e. g., with the prose of Plato. These 
 delicate spices, which gave flavour to every page of 
 Plato, very soon lost their perfume; they became as 
 unintelligible to the later Greeks as they are to our 
 scholars; that is to say, grammarians could still talk 
 about them, but no man knew how to use them. 
 And so the simpler prose of Xenophon became the 
 highest ideal of their aspirations. 
 
 But if in this respect his life became simpler and 
 plainer, in others it followed a contrary course. In 
 his Socratic dialogues he had given a very complete 
 analysis of all that could be attained in Attic life. 
 His Socrates is not only a perfect man of high intel- 
 lectual endowments, who discusses all the problems 
 of life, but the pupils he has trained, men of high 
 birth and independent fortune, are represented as 
 putting his theory into practice. Ischomachus, in 
 the dialogue or tract On Household Economy, not 
 only gives us a famous picture of the educating 
 of his own wife, after her marriage, but tells of the 
 whole course of the work and the amusements of an 
 Attic country gentleman. None of us questions 
 that it was in this Socratic education that Xenophon 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 9 
 
 laid the foundation of his all-around capacities both 
 for intellectual and for practical life. He was not 
 a deep philosopher, and he cared not to be; but, as 
 Tacitus says of Agricola, another practical man, 
 retinuit, quod est difficillimum, in philosophia modum. 
 He had not the tastes or the ambitions of a college 
 Don. When he had graduated, so to speak, under 
 Socrates, he went out into the world. And there 
 he found other nations which could do some things 
 better than the Greeks, and could attain great hap- 
 piness denied to them. 
 
 There are several blind spots in the ideal prospects 
 of Ischomachus — the Attic gentleman. In the first 
 place, field sports were impossible in Attica. In a 
 land so thickly populated, and so carefully cultivated, 
 large properties were scarce, and preservation 
 impossible. So game was long since extirpated 
 from Attica. But no sooner did Xenophon go to 
 visit the younger Cyrus in Asia Minor than he woke 
 up to the dignities and dehghts of hunting. This 
 taste he kept up all his hfe. After his return with 
 the Ten Thousand, he was attached to the Spartans 
 in their campaigns against the Persian satraps, and 
 so he had frequently the chance of poaching their 
 splendid preserves. In later life, when Sparta 
 desired to reward him, he obtained a sporting estate 
 on the Arcadian side of Olympia, which he turns 
 aside to describe (in his Anabasis V, 3) with evident 
 delight. He writes tracts on hunting, and says that 
 
10 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 the pursuit of the hare is so fascinating as to make a 
 man forget that he ever was in love with anything 
 else. Now, all this side of his life he learned not 
 from Socrates or at Athens, but from his intercourse 
 with Persian grandees. 
 
 In another place, when speaking of order in the 
 keeping of a household, he quotes no Greek example, 
 but rather the great Phoenician merchantman he had 
 seen at Corinth, where all the tackle and the freight 
 were packed away with such neatness and economy 
 as to make it a sight for the Greeks to visit. And 
 so he adds that the planting of a paradise belonging 
 to his patron Cyrus was not only far superior to any- 
 thing in Greece, but, what was more astonishing, 
 that great prince had deigned to occupy his own 
 hands with this planting. In the laying out, there- 
 fore, of orchards and parks he found that the Greeks 
 had everything to learn from a race of men whom 
 they had been brought up to hate and despise. I 
 notice, by the way, that in one point both the Attic 
 and the Persian gardens were still undeveloped. 
 In all his descriptions of them Xenophon is silent on 
 the culture of flowers. Nor does he ever speak of 
 the beauty of his fruit trees in flower. When we 
 hear of Alexandria, in the next century, that it pro- 
 duced beautiful flowers at every season in its green- 
 houses, we see that the Hellenism of Xenophon was 
 only incipient. Queen Cleopatra had been taught 
 many luxuries unknown even to the younger Cyrus. 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR ii 
 
 Still the very changes of residence in Xenophon's 
 life could not but broaden his views and enlarge 
 his tastes beyond those of the cultivated Athenian. 
 Consider for a moment how much of the world he 
 had seen. Starting from Sardis with the army of 
 Cyrus, and being free from discipline as a volunteer, 
 he travelled all through southern Asia Minor into 
 Babylonia, where he tells us of the strange and new 
 aspect of the country, with its wide rivers, its great 
 deserts, its dense cultivation, and its fauna and 
 flora so much more tropical than anything known 
 in Greece. Then comes the battle of Kunaxa and 
 the disastrous death of his great patron, Cyrus. 
 The famous retreat of the Ten Thousand is what has 
 made Xenophon's name immortal, and though, as 
 I gravely suspect, he has much exaggerated his own 
 importance in that arduous affair, he must certainly 
 have had the experience of a journey over the high 
 passes of Armenia in deep snow and arctic tempera- 
 ture, to contrast with the burning plains of Babylonia. 
 He returns along the north coast of Asia Minor, 
 encountering many strange savage tribes, whose man- 
 ners and customs he notes with curious interest. Then 
 from Byzantium he makes a tour among the bar- 
 barians of European Thrace, and thence returns to 
 Greece, only to revert again to Asia Minor, and 
 this time to campaign in' its central provinces. He 
 next comes home with his second patron. King 
 Agesilaus of Sparta, through Boeotia, where the 
 
12 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 famous battle of Koronea gives him a foretaste of 
 Boeotian supremacy. Yet of all the Greeks none 
 were so distasteful to him as these hardy vulgarians. 
 Not even the great and refined Epaminondas earns 
 from him more than rare and unwiUing praise, and 
 presently our travelled Athenian departs in exile 
 to the Pelopormese, where he seems to have spent 
 the rest of his long life. 
 
 Thus Xenophon had studied not only all Greece, 
 but all the borders of the Greek, world in Asia 
 Minor and Thrace; he had penetrated the great 
 Persian empire and learned its splendour and its 
 weakness. In fact, the whole sphere of early Hel- 
 lenism was under his ken. The West only — Sicily 
 and southern Italy — he neglects, and this is quite 
 characteristic of the rise of Hellenism in the next 
 generation. All the desires, the ambitions, the 
 prospects of the Greeks of the fourth and third 
 centuries before Christ lay eastward, not westward. 
 To them the Romans were yet unknown and unnoticed 
 barbarians, and the Greek West no land of large 
 promise like the East; for apart from the tough 
 mountaineers of Calabria and Sicily, dangerous 
 neighbours on land, there was the Carthaginian 
 sea-power which took care to close the avenues of 
 trade to the fabulous isles and coasts, that loomed 
 against the setting sun. But in the armies he com- 
 manded there were not wanting many mercenaries 
 haiUng from the far West; there must also have been 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 13 
 
 many who had served in Egypt; and it was from 
 these that he derived his great respect and admira- 
 tion for that ancient civiHsation. The Egyptians 
 who fight against the great Cyrus in Xenophon's 
 romance, who are uUimately settled by him as a 
 colony in Asia Minor, are the bravest and best of 
 oriental nations. Such, then, being this man's wide 
 experience, it is well worth seeking from his writings 
 his general views regarding the Greek world, his 
 estimate of its strength and of its weakness, and above 
 all, what he has said — or would have said, had we 
 asked him — of the future prospects of the complex 
 of states around him. 
 
 The first and most important point I notice is 
 his firm belief in the expansion of the Hellenic race. 
 He has before him constantly the feasibility of set- 
 tling colonies of Greeks anywhere through Asia. 
 When the Ten Thousand reach the Black Sea, and 
 the next problem is how to occupy or provide for 
 them, one of the ideas always recurring, and one 
 which makes Xenophon suspected by all those who 
 are longing for their homes in Greece, is his supposed 
 ambition to be the founder of a new Greek city on 
 the Euxine, where by trade, and by intermarriage 
 with the natives, his companions might acquire a new 
 and a wealthy home. Had not Olbia and ApoUonia 
 and Trapezus and many other Greek colonies of 
 earlier days fared splendidly in these remote but 
 most profitable regions, where sea and land, river 
 
14 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 and plain, combined to produce their natural 
 wealth for the enterprising stranger ? The Thracian 
 king, who calls in his services, quite naturally makes 
 similar offers. Xenophon is to possess a castle, 
 marry a Thracian princess, and settle down as a 
 magnate who brings about him Greeks for the 
 purposes of trade and of mercenary service. Every 
 ambitious Greek had therefore this prospect dang- 
 ling before his eyes. And this gave him a new, a 
 practical, interest in learning to appreciate the 
 qualities of the neighbour races, hitherto set down 
 in the lump as barbarians. The Persian grandees on 
 their side must have found both pleasure and profit 
 in bringing Greeks about their courts. If so far 
 back as the days of Sappho we hear that one of the ' 
 girls she had educated in charms went to exercise 
 them in Lydian Sardis,^ is it not to be assumed that 
 also this Greek influence upon the East was stiU 
 waxing? The profession of Greek mercenary was 
 not confined to men-at-arms, and among the booty 
 brought home by the Ten Thousand there were so 
 many women that their outcry was quite a feature in 
 the camp in moments of excitement. It is highly 
 improbable that many of these had followed the army 
 from Hellenic lands in their upward march, and 
 if not, here was an eastern element affecting the next 
 generation of the profession of arms. The fusion of 
 
 > This appears from the new fragment published by WiLA- 
 MOWITZ-MOELLENDORFF in the Proceedings of the Berlin Academy 
 io-T 1903. 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 15 
 
 races, therefore, though slow and sporadic, was 
 distinctly on its increase. The campaigns of the 
 Spartan king Agesilaus in Asia Minor, where he was 
 attended, and no doubt advised, by Xenophon, 
 pointed to a large invasion of the East; and had he 
 not been recalled by the miserable dissensions and 
 quarrels of Greece, the conquest, partial if not 
 total, of the Persian empire was in near prospect. 
 Isocrates in more than one public letter implores the 
 leaders of his nationahty to compose their parochial 
 disputes, and unite for the great object of becoming 
 lords of the East. 
 
 The result he regarded as certain; but who was to 
 accomplish this great Hellenic league for the sub- 
 jugation of the East ? On this question Xenophon's 
 opinions and his forecast are not the less clear because 
 we have to gather them indirectly from many stray 
 indications in his works. He had had large practical 
 experiences, besides the theoretical opinions of his 
 master Socrates, to afford him materials for a sound 
 judgment. In the first place, he had made essay of 
 democracy, both the best and the worst that Greece 
 could afford. He had lived an Athenian during the 
 latter half of the great war which deprived his city 
 of her supremacy, and he had' seen his great mas- 
 ter gradually alienating the majority by his trench- 
 ant criticism, tiU that master's Ufe was sacrificed to 
 the vulgar prejudices of a democratic jury: Yet 
 Athens was the most refined and cultivated democracy 
 
i6 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 that ever existed. The bitter and satirical tract On 
 the Polity of the Athenians, still printed among the 
 works of Xenophon, is now generally recognised 
 as the work of an older writer, living at Athens when 
 Xenophon was a child. But it would not have 
 attained its place, or kept it so long, had not the 
 readers of Xenophon felt that it expressed the opin- 
 ions he was likely to hold. It is certain that the 
 school of Socrates, even before his shameful prosecu- 
 tion and condemnation, were no friends of democracy. 
 They all regarded the opinion of the majority, as 
 such, worth nothing, and thought that the masses 
 should be guided by the enlightened judgment 
 of the select one or the select few. What they would 
 have said or thought, had they made experience of 
 the democracies of our day, is another question. 
 They had before them a sovereign assembly which 
 by a bare majority at a single meeting might abrogate 
 a law or take away a human life without further 
 penalty than the contrition and the shame which some- 
 times followed upon calmer reflection.' There were 
 no higher courts of appeal from the sovereign assem- 
 bly, no rehearing by a second and smaller House; 
 
 ' This contrition had only one practical expression, which not 
 infrequently followed the reaction. The spokesman who had 
 given voice to the folly and the passion of the majority and had 
 framed or supported the resolution, was prosecuted and con- 
 demned for having "deceived the sovereign demos" by having 
 proposed things contrary to the laws — truly a monstrous cure 
 for a monstrous evil. 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 17 
 
 the Athenian demos was recognised as a tyrant, above 
 the laws which itself had sanctioned. That such a 
 state should carry out a large policy of conquest, based 
 upon a confederation of friendly states, was clearly 
 impossible. Apart from other difficulties, the con- 
 duct of military affairs by a political assembly was 
 absurd. When a general could be appointed or dis- 
 missed by a mere civihan vote of ordinary citizens, 
 was any prompt or elaborate campaign possible? 
 The generals were all playing a political as well as a 
 strategic game, and looking to their supporters at 
 home more than to their troops abroad for support. 
 There are not wanting parallels for all this in modern 
 times. Great foreign conquests both then and now 
 require something very dififerent from the leading of 
 a democratic assembly. 
 
 But Xenophon had other and far worse experiences 
 of Greek democracy. As a leader of importance, 
 selected by the majority to command an army of 
 Greek mercenaries, he found himself in an impromptu 
 military republic, whose city was its camp, and 
 whose laws the resolutions of armed men swayed by 
 the momentary gusts of passion, of panic, or of pride. 
 At the same time, they were no mere random 
 adventurers, who regarded the camp as their only 
 home, but men of whom the majority had not gone 
 out from poverty, but because they had heard so 
 high a character of Cyrus. Some brought men, 
 some money, with them; some had run away from 
 
i8 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 home, or left wife and children behind them, with 
 the hope and intention of coming back rich men.' 
 Yet such men, though obedient enough to discipline 
 on the march or in action, were constantly breaking 
 out into riots in camp; officers were deposed, inno- 
 cent men hunted to death in the fury of the moment.^ 
 To Uve among such people, still more to be respon- ' 
 sible for the leading of them, was a life of imminent 
 daily risk. Such was the wilder democracy which 
 Xenophon experienced, and here he had not the 
 resource, which he strongly recommends to the cav- 
 alry general in his tract, that above all things he 
 must "square" the governing council of his city, 
 and have on his side a leading politician to defend 
 him. Xenophon therefore saw very plainly what 
 hampered and weakened the Athens of Demosthenes 
 in the next generation, and handed over Greece to 
 Philip of Macedon — that a democracy which exposes) 
 its executive government to constant criticism, and! 
 which constantly discusses and changes its mihtar^J 
 plans, is wholly unfit to make foreign conquests and ' 
 to rule an extended empire. 
 
 There was evidently far more hope from the side 
 of Sparta, which at this very moment — I mean dur- 
 ing Xenophon's youth and his campaigning days — 
 held supremacy in Greece, commanded considerable 
 armies, and was under monarchical goverrunent. 
 More especially under an able king like Agesilaus, 
 
 ' Anabasis vi, 4. ' Cf. Anabasis vi, 6 ; v, 7, § 21-24. 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 19 
 
 Xenophon must have felt his hopes of invading the 
 East within reach of their fulfilment. But a closer 
 survey of the far-famed Spartan constitution showed 
 him that here, too, there were flaws and faults which 
 made Sparta unfit to hold empire. He has left us a 
 tract On the Lacedamonian Polity, in which he details 
 to us with admiration the strict discipline of that 
 state and especially the thorough organisation of its 
 education of boys and men for war. The order, 
 the respect for authority, the simpHcity of life, the 
 subordination of even the most sacred family rights 
 to the service of the state — all these aristocratic 
 features fascinated every cultivated Greek who 
 lived under the sway of that most capricious tyrant, 
 a popular assembly. But they did not appreciate 
 the compensating advantages which democracy, 
 however dangerous and turbulent, afforded them. 
 
 As Grote has expounded to us with complacent 
 insistence, no Spartan would have been so fitted to 
 take a lead suddenly in public affairs, civil or mili- 
 tary, as the cultivated pupil of Socrates from Athens, 
 who Jumps in a moment from an amateur into a 
 general. When Sparta obtained her empire, she 
 had no competent civil service to manage her 
 dependencies. Her harmosts, as they were called, 
 were but rude and overbearing soldiers, not above 
 venaUty and other corruption, but wholly unable to 
 maintain the imperial dignity which is the only 
 justification of a ruler from without, the only coun- 
 
20 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 terpoising boon for those who find their liberties 
 impaired. And even if there had been competent 
 rulers among the Spartan aristocracy, the method 
 of appointment was radically vicious. For though 
 Sparta was in name a dual monarchy, the real 
 power lay with the five ephors — so far as we know 
 them, narrow and bigoted men — who were more 
 anxious to keep the kings in subjection than to 
 appoint fit men as governors in the subject cities. 
 Xenophon's experiences when the Ten Thousand 
 returned to Byzantium show us how arbitrary and 
 cruel was the rule of these governors, how absurd 
 their mutual jealousies, how incompetent their 
 handling of great public interests. Yet there was 
 no remedy while the ephors appointed their personal 
 friends, against whose crimes it was well nigh im- 
 possible to obtain redress. 
 
 With all these various experiences before him, 
 Xenophon wrote his largest and most elaborate 
 treatise, doubtless that on which he staked his 
 reputation — the book On the Education of Cyrus. 
 The fate that mocks so many human efforts has 
 not spared the Attic bee. This voluminous book, 
 in which the many speeches and curious digressions 
 seem to suggest the garrulity of advancing age, has 
 been neglected from the author's own day till now, 
 while the Anabasis has been inflicted on every school- 
 boy for two millenniums. The wonder is that so 
 little-heeded a treatise ever survived the neglect of 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 21 
 
 ages. Yet no Greek book should have excited 
 greater likes and dislikes than this. Its theme is 
 the vindication, both theoretically and practically, 
 of absolute monarchy, as shown in the organisation 
 of the Persian empire. In many other of his writ- 
 ings — as, for example, in the (Economicus, he sets 
 forth the Socratic idea that if you can find the man 
 with a ruling soul, the archie man, you had better 
 put him in control, and trust to his wisdom rather 
 than to the counsels of many. But now he takes as 
 his ideal the far-off figure of the first Cyrus, whose 
 gigantic deeds impress aUke the Hebrew prophet 
 and the Greek philosopher, and, amplifying his 
 picture with many romantic details, gives us in the 
 form of a historical novel a monarch's handbook 
 for the gaining and the administration of a great 
 empire. We never hear that Alexander the Great 
 read this treatise. Most probably his tutor Aristotle 
 hid it from him with jealous care. For what teaching 
 could be more odious. to the Hellenic mind ? Never- 
 theless, in all Greek literature there was hardly a 
 book which would prove more interesting to Alex- 
 ander, or more useful to him in justifying his adop- 
 tion of oriental ideas. 
 
 What is even more striking is this, that after 
 Alexander's magnificent display of what the "archie 
 man" could do if he possessed an acknowledged 
 monarchy, the whole Hellenistic world acquiesced 
 in monarchy as the best and most practical form of 
 
22 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 government. The seventh and eighth books of the 
 Cyrofadia were in spirit but the earliest of the many 
 tracts composed by Stoic and Peripatetic philoso- 
 phers about monarchy {-rrepl ^acn\eCa<;), and it was 
 marvellous how even the democrats of Athens outbid 
 their neighbours in their servile adulation of such a 
 king as Demetrius, whose father had founded a 
 new dynasty. Before a century had elapsed since 
 Xenophon's treatise appeared, hardly a Greek city 
 existed which was not directly or indirectly under 
 the control of a king. Even the Rhodian confederacy 
 lasted only because the surrounding kings found their 
 finances more manageable in a neutral banking cen- 
 tre with vast credit, and therefore with vast capital 
 secured in a place of safety. And so when a great 
 earthquake ruined the city, it was all the kings of 
 the Hellenistic world who sent contributions to re- 
 store it — kings at war or at variance one with the 
 other, but all bound to support the financial credit 
 of Rhodes and avert a commercial crash. 
 
 I will but notice one more feature in this monarchy 
 which overspread the Hellenistic world, which 
 Xenophon saw in his day and admired, though he 
 did not fully comprehend its strange nature. It is 
 this, that hereditary monarchy develops in its sub- 
 jects a loyalty to the sovereign almost unintelligible 
 to the modem republican. The notion that it was 
 the highest honour not only to die for the king, but 
 to live in his personal service, was as foreign to the 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 23 
 
 old Hellenic societies as it is to the modem American. 
 And yet among the great and proud nobility of 
 Persia, as among that of the French monarchy, and 
 even now in England, men and women of the greatest 
 pride and the largest wealth are "lords-in- waiting," 
 "women of the bed chamber," "mistresses of the 
 robes," "chamberlains," and "maids of honour." 
 Xenophon saw this kind of devotion at the very 
 outset of the Anabasis (I, 5). If Clearchus, the 
 Lacedaemonian general, saw anyone slothful or 
 lagging behind, he struck him with his stick, but set 
 to the work himself, in order that he might turn 
 pubHc opinion to his side. How different the posi- 
 tion of Cyrus ! He sees a lot of carts stuck in the deep 
 mud of a pass, and the men set to extricate them 
 shirking the work. Whereupon he calls upon his 
 retinue of lords to show them an example. These, 
 without a word, throwing off their purple headdress, 
 dash into the mud with their costly tunics, their 
 coloured trousers, with tores of gold around their 
 necks, and bracelets on their wrists, and, setting to 
 work with a will drag out the carts forthwith. Xeno- 
 phon wonders at this instance of discipline {eiiTa^Ca) 
 in these young nobles. It was nothing of the kind. 
 It was that loyalty that holds the personal service of 
 the prince by divine right to be the noblest self-sac- 
 rifice. These Persians were proud to do the work of 
 asses and of mules when called upon by their prince, 
 and yet they were far greater gentlemen than the 
 
24 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 Greeks who would have been highly offended at such 
 an order. 
 
 Starting, then, with Macedon and Persia, whose 
 kings, like the Spartan kings, professed a descent 
 from the gods, the whole Hellenistic world learned 
 to regard a Ptolemy, a Seleucus, even an Attalus, 
 as something superhuman in authority. This was 
 the change which Xenophon foresaw as highly 
 expedient, if not necessary to the management of a 
 great empire. 
 
 It is, I think, well worth observing that this prob- 
 lem of monarchy did not occupy Xenophon merely 
 in his old age. If the Cyropcedia shows in its style, 
 as I am convinced, something of the proUxity of age, 
 the Hiero, or dialogue between that tyrant and 
 Simonides, shows much of the exuberance of youth, 
 and accordingly it has by general consent been 
 classed among Xenophon's earliest works. In the 
 former part of this most interesting tract Hiero sets 
 forth the dangers and miseries of the Greek tyrant's 
 life, surrounded as he was by flattery concealing 
 hatred and mistrust, regarded as he was by all a 
 public enemy, whose murder would be regarded an 
 act of patriotism. Hiero details the circumstances 
 which he regards essential to a tyrant's safety, and 
 therefore certain to entail his unpopularity and its 
 consequent miseries. A tyrant must keep up a 
 mercenary force; he must therefore levy taxes for its 
 support; he cannot possibly travel or see the world. 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 25 
 
 for fear of a revolution in his absence, and so on, 
 through the catalogue of difficulties, which were a 
 commonplace of Greek literature. But when all is 
 said on that side, Simonides reposts that it is not by 
 reason of their external circumstances, but of their 
 own characters, that Greek tyrants have earned the 
 mistrust and hatred of men. He goes on to show 
 how even a monarch not hereditary, who has risen 
 from a private station, could earn the esteem and 
 gratitude of his subjects, and, by identifying his own 
 interests with those of his city, make himself the 
 acknowledged benefactor of all around him. Even 
 the keeping of a mercenary force is justified by good 
 practical reasons, as the protection of frontiers was 
 always a great burden to a citizen population, and 
 as the readiness and discipline of professional soldiers 
 must be superior to a sudden levy of amateurs in 
 war, if such unwiUing recruits can indeed be called 
 amateurs. With such arguments Xenophon justifies 
 the fact that most ambitious Greeks regarded the 
 attaining to a tyranny as the very acme of their desires. 
 However, if this fact was known to the Ten Thous- 
 and, it justifies not a little of their suspicions that 
 Xenophon dreamt of being not only the founder but 
 the autocrat of a new city on the Euxine. The 
 picture of the benevolent tyrant, shown in the Hiero, 
 would hardly be a sufficient guarantee to them that 
 Xenophon, as a monarch, would indeed depart so 
 widely from the ordinary and hateful traditions of a 
 
26 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 Greek tyranny. We need only here insist that the 
 idea of monarchy had already occupied the early 
 attention of the author of the Cyropadia, and that 
 he had probably found the arguments in its favour 
 an ordinary topic among the young aristocrats in the 
 school of Socrates. 
 
 I confess that the extremes to which he carries 
 his defence of the imperii instrumenta employed by 
 the kings of Persia must be distasteful to any rea- 
 sonable critic, most of all to any democrat, ancient 
 or modern. The way in which he describes the 
 great king absorbing all the interests and ambitions 
 of his subjects, and making every man in the state 
 look to the sovran as the fountain of honour and 
 of promotion — all this savours of a Napoleonic cen- 
 tralisation and a Napoleonic tyranny, which, as it 
 saps all individual independence, so it kills the 
 growth and nurture of the highest qualities in human 
 nature. This unpleasant side of the book may afford 
 one reason for its systematic neglect. It is so far 
 like one of those artificial school-exercises, so com- 
 mon in the next generation, where the speaker made 
 it his glory to vindicate some villain or justify some 
 crime. And perhaps Xenophon was infected with 
 this "sophistic" more than his readers imagine. 
 Nevertheless, I for one have no doubt that real con- 
 victions in favour of monarchy underhe all his semi- 
 sophistical arguments. 
 
 Grote, the great historian of Greece, who was the 
 
XENOPHON THE PRECURSOR 27 
 
 first to inspire me, and perhaps many of you, with 
 the love of Greek history and Greek literature, looks 
 upon this momentous change as the death-knell of 
 his favourite country. " 'Tis Greece, but living 
 Greece no more." And yet at no time did the Greeks 
 do more for the letters, the commerce, the civility of 
 all the ancient world. And hence it is that I have 
 chosen this somewhat neglected period as the topic 
 of my discourses. 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 
 
THE ANTIGONID DYNASTY 
 
 [We need not consider the stormy and broken rule of Deme- 
 trius I (the Besieger).] 
 
 1. Antigonus Gonatas (bom at Gonoe in Thessaly) 278- 39 
 
 2. Demetrius the iEtolian 239- 29 
 
 3. Antigonus Doson 229- 21 
 
 4. Philip V 221-178 
 
 5. Perseus 178- 68 
 
LECTURE II 
 MACEDONIA AND GREECE 
 
 In my last address I showed you how Xenophon 
 — a thorough and cultivated Hellene, and yet a 
 travelled man, and acquainted with the East — fore- 
 shadowed the spread of Hellenic influence and cul- 
 ture beyond its early and restricted home. He is 
 not, like Isocrates, a poHtical theorist, nor does he 
 formally, in any of his works, hold out the conquest 
 of the East by the Greeks as the great national 
 object of the future. He probably thought the 
 practical difi&culties to be insurmountable, for till 
 an absolute ruler should arise able to coerce Greece 
 into unity, at least for military purposes, all theories 
 and exhortations were useless. But Isocrates, living 
 a few years longer, saw clearly enough that such a 
 solution was within sight, and in his open letter to 
 Philip of Macedon exhorts him to lead the Greeks 
 away from internal disputes and wars into the new 
 r61e of a conquering race. But no Phihp, nay even 
 no Alexander, could have done this work with Greek 
 armies, either citizen or mercenary. He must have 
 the backbone of quite another force — bound to 
 him not only by discipline, but by loyalty, and ready 
 to protect him against Greek intrigue and Greek 
 insurrection. All these conditions were satisfied 
 
 31 
 
32 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 by Macedonia, with Philip as its monarch. But it 
 required nearly twenty years of organisation, of 
 civilisation, and of subjugation to prepare the com- 
 bined forces of Greece, Macedon, Illyria, and 
 Thrace for its great work; and when all was ready 
 Philip was struck down by the hand of an assassin. 
 Providentially, a great successor was ready to carry 
 out the matured plan. But had Alexander been 
 killed in his first melee at the Granikos, when the 
 Persian nobles fought so gallantly with him hand 
 to hand, the whole history of Hellenism would have 
 been changed, and its progress delayed till some 
 other organising and conquering genius had arisen. 
 It was therefore to the king of Macedon, leading his 
 own people, that the first great spread of Hellenism 
 is directly due.' 
 
 Macedonia had long been known to the Greeks, 
 especially through the cities they had founded on the 
 coast, which carried on some trade with the semi- 
 civihsed interior; but, except for the court, neither 
 Greek language nor Greek culture had penetrated 
 into the wild country. The kings had, indeed, long 
 since made out for themselves a Greek pedigree, 
 
 ' At no moment, by the way, does the now somewhat fash- 
 ionable theory, that national movements are everything, and 
 individuals nothing, in history, appear to me more absurd. To 
 tell me that the conquest of the East was in the air, and that 
 some other Alexander would have carried out the national desire, 
 had the son of Philip been killed at the outset of his career, is 
 to tell me what no man could possibly prove, and what runs 
 counter to all the experience we possess. 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE ^^ 
 
 and had courted Greek literary men. If Simonides 
 had basked in the courts of Thessaly, Euripides had 
 produced plays for the Macedonian, though it is 
 very likely that the Macedonian nobles who came to 
 hear the Bacchce at court understood it no better 
 than did the Parthian lords who saw the head of 
 Crassus brought in to play its ghastly part in the same 
 immortal drama. But how little hold Greek ever 
 took upon the people is manifest from the fact 
 that we know not of a single Macedonian author, 
 unless we count the royal Ptolemies, some of whom 
 dabbled in literature. 
 
 The materials which the genius of Alexander 
 found to his hand were quite distinct — the mihtary 
 quaUties of the Macedonians and the culture of the 
 Greeks; and both were absolutely necessary for his 
 purpose. Moreover, both remained clear and dis- 
 tinct elements in every kingdom which was formed 
 out of his vast empire. If it were only for this reason, 
 it is desirable to lay firm hold of the general features 
 of both these nations before we consider the Egypt 
 and the Syria which they transformed, or failed to 
 transform, from oriental into Hellenistic states. 
 Remember I must take broad views in this sketch, 
 and must speak of Greece as one conglomerate, 
 though as you all know, it was made up of little 
 separate cities, each with its own small territory and 
 its independence, like the little states which crowded 
 the map of Germany when we were young, and still 
 
34 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 more like the little city-republics which crowded the 
 map of Italy in mediaeval times. And so I must talk 
 of Macedonia as one thing, though it never was a 
 stricter unity in its older history than the unity 
 of Germany now is, and though it doubtless con- 
 tained with its Agrianes, Paeonians, Epirots, etc., a 
 greater variance than there is between Bavarians 
 and Saxons in the German empire. But, as I may 
 presume that you know all this about Greece, I 
 will confine myself chiefly to Macedonia. 
 
 When Macedonia emerged from its obscurity 
 owing to the genius of the famous Philip,' it had 
 long been known and despised by the Greeks,' as 
 the home of people who did not inhabit cities. If 
 you go now and visit Macedonia, you will see at once 
 the force of this contrast. The Greek loved the 
 sea-side, the neighbourhood of many men, the lounge 
 and the talk in the market-place. His amusements 
 were processions, feasts, ceremonies, athletics, plays. 
 He was essentially no sportsman, and he was only a 
 soldier from the compulsion of defending his home, 
 or of making money abroad. There is little of what 
 we call chivalry among the Greeks, if we except 
 the earlier, or rather the ideal, Spartans. 
 
 ' He was really Philip II. 
 
 ' Demosthenes says with very ill-advised contempt that no 
 decent slave could be procured from that country. He thought 
 this a scathing remark ; we might interpret it as a compliment. 
 The retort is obvious that very fine masters came from it, as the 
 Greeks learned to their cost. 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 35 
 
 Now, in contrast, the Macedonians were rude 
 and hardy, mountaineers in the strict sense of the 
 word, living among forests and glens, loving to 
 pursue the bear and the wolf through pathless 
 wilds, or to spear the boar in hand-to-hand conflict. 
 And, as you might expect in such a country, there 
 were feudal lords, who held a sort of hereditary 
 sovereignty over certain districts, and who had the 
 traditions and the dignity of royal pretensions, 
 though these were all swallowed up in the splendour 
 of their suzerain, the king of Macedonia. 
 
 Yet the fact is not without its importance. These 
 nobles — Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Craterus — 
 took service under Alexander just as the German 
 hereditary princes now serve under the Prussian 
 headship. In both cases we find that this kind of 
 officer gives a pecuhar character to the army, and that 
 such leaders are obeyed far better and are more 
 efficient, than men promoted from^p ranks. Sec- 
 ondly, when Alexander died, and these men set up 
 as independent sovereigns, they did so with the 
 habits of ruhng, and with the dignity only attained 
 by generations of nobiUty. 
 
 Thus there is a marked contrast between Alex- 
 ander and his generals with what appears at first 
 sight a close parallel. Napoleon was an upstart, and 
 his generals were upstarts who failed as kings. 
 Alexander was a hereditary king, and his generals 
 hereditary princes and nobles, who consequently 
 
36 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 succeeded in founding new royal houses. The 
 ablest of the staff, Eumenes, of Kardia, who was 
 Alexander's intimate secretary, failed in establish- 
 ing a kingdom for himself, not for want of bravery, 
 not for want of abiUty as a general, but because the 
 Macedonians would not be led by an upstart Greek — 
 so completely had the tables turned upon the intellec- 
 tual leaders of the world. This peculiar character 
 of the Macedonian aristocracy is, I think, of the 
 last importance in understanding the career of the 
 Macedonians as a conquering race. 
 
 I shall not go into the politics of Philip, which 
 you can all study in any ordinary Greek history, 
 but will say a word about his mihtary idea, the 
 famous phalanx. The intention of it is evident. 
 He wished to make an inferior infantry — that is, 
 one of less training and of inferior arms — equal to 
 the full-armed Xireeks by massing it into a column, 
 a moving square, in which five rows of lance-points 
 formed an impenetrable barrier to assailants, and 
 which, if it advanced, must walk through any oppo- 
 sition made in loose order. This object was really 
 effected, and so thoroughly that even the Roman 
 infantry could not resist its advance, and Paullus 
 .(Emilius, the conqueror of Macedonia at the battle 
 of Pydna, told his friend Polybius he had never seen 
 anything so terrible. But, of course, the advancing 
 of the vast and solid column was attended with 
 great difficulties. Any interruption in the ground 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 37 
 
 made an obstacle not to be overcome without break- 
 ing the formation, and so an advance on broken 
 ground was fatal to the phalanx. It seems also to 
 have been so constructed that facing about to meet 
 an attack from the flank or rear was never practi- 
 cally possible. Let me also remind you that the 
 modem square with which we fight large bodies of 
 savages has that terrible offensive weapon, the rifle, 
 while the Macedonian phalanx could not use even 
 the sUngs and darts of ancient warfare. 
 
 The fact therefore remains that in its early days 
 the phalanx was not of much real importance. 
 Philip may have won one great battle with it; Alex- 
 ander never did; it was only in the great wars of his 
 successors, when both sides used the phalanx, that 
 the direct shock of the opposing infantry was decided 
 by the steadier troops holding together, while the 
 weaker melted away before the actual conflict, as 
 is now usually the case if two hostile Hues charge 
 with the bayonet. 
 
 I revert now to the statement, which may have 
 surprised some of you, that Alexander never won a 
 battle with the Macedonian phalanx. This is quite 
 certain. While a mere boy, he had decided his 
 father's great battle of Chasronea against the Thebans 
 and Athenians by a charge of cavalry; and all through 
 his hfe he pursued the same tactics. He (like Crom- 
 well) won his battles by charges of cavalry, using the 
 phalanx merely as his defensive arm, which occupied 
 
38 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 and threatened the enemy while the decisive work was 
 done on his right wing. It appears to me that he 
 even regarded the phalanx as a clumsy and unman- 
 ageable arm, for at the moment of his death he was 
 breaking it up into smaller and lighter formations. 
 That wonderful general, whose great secret lay in 
 the promptness and decision of his operations, 
 naturally chose the handiest order for rapid advance, 
 and the most inteUigent co-operation, and as he 
 found the phalanx unsuitable, so he despised the 
 use of both elephants and scythed chariots, which 
 his oriental enemies employed, as weapons not 
 trustworthy and likely to confuse a sound and 
 rational plan of battle. On the other hand, he per- 
 fected his heavy cavalry and his footguards in every 
 practical way. The footguards were very lightly 
 armed, and intended to support the cavalry as 
 promptly as possible. The cavalry was made the 
 special service for his friends and his nobles, essen- 
 tially the household cavalry, and specially trained 
 to riding and to the use of the spear. For as the 
 use of stirrups was still unknown, fighting on horse- 
 back was a very different thing from what it is nowa- 
 days, and the use of the sword must have been 
 comparatively small, when rising in the saddle, nay 
 the saddle itself, was unknown. 
 
 The other point in which Alexander made ini:- 
 provements in the art of war, which have not 
 been appreciated, was that of artillery. Phihp had 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 39 
 
 already used all the newer mechanical discoveries 
 for siege trains and battering purposes, but Alexan- 
 der appHed them to field artillery, which he brought 
 to such perfection that his army could carry with it 
 engines which threw stones and darts three hundred 
 yards. Imagine what an advantage this gave him. 
 He frequently cleared a narrow pass or the opposite 
 side of a river of the enemy by the mere fire of his 
 catapults, and then crossed at leisure. 
 
 I think it worth giving you these details, because 
 it is a vague thing, though a perfectly true thing, to 
 say that it was by his genius that Alexander con- 
 quered the eastern world. Genius always works 
 with the means at its disposal, or rather disposes of 
 the ordinary means in such a way as to produce 
 exceptional results. Thus Alexander found ready 
 the phalanx, the siege trains, and the military aris- 
 tocracy which his father had employed in an active 
 and successful reign. He enlarged their use, or 
 modified them to suit greater and nobler plans. 
 
 His army, as you know, was a small one. To 
 carry a vast number of men into Asia in a rapid 
 campaign, through hostile country, would be im- 
 possible; so that he probably never had an effective 
 force of more than thirty thousand under his com- 
 mand. I except of course sieges, hke that of Tyre, 
 when he formed a settled camp and delayed for 
 months, and his progress in ships down the Indus. 
 But even with thirty thousand men you will wonder 
 
40 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 how he could undertake to attack a new and strange 
 country, and penetrate far beyond the knowledge 
 of any Macedonians and Greeks, among nations of 
 strange languages and customs, unless he were a 
 wandering knight-errant in search of romantic ad- 
 ventures. This, indeed, is the very view of him 
 taken by the romances on his life composed at 
 Alexandria, which are not unlike the Arabian Nights 
 composed at Cairo, the mediaeval successor to Alex- 
 andria, in their imagination. But the real Alexander 
 was no such person, and the key to his action is given 
 in a curious passage of Josephus.' I need hardly tell 
 you that when his great expedition was successful, 
 he rapidly established Greek as the lingua jranca of 
 the whole empire, and this it was which gave the 
 chief bond of union to the many countries of old 
 civilisation, which had hitherto been isolated. 
 
 This unity of culture is the remarkable thing in 
 the history of the world. Before Alexander, Persia, 
 India, Egypt, and Italy were all separately following 
 out their own ideas. After Alexander, all conform 
 to a common standard, and desire to be regarded 
 as members of a common civilisation. St. Paul re- 
 
 'The reference is JOSEPHtrs, Antiquities, xi, 8, §§4, S- I" 
 the embellished story note that Alexander says the high-priest 
 whom he saw in his dream promised that he would conduct the 
 king's army; and after the Jews had obtained local liberties and 
 a remission of taxes in the sabbatical year, the king invites them 
 to serve with him, on condition of living as Jews, and "many 
 were ready to accompany him in his wars." 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 41 
 
 quired no gift of tongues to preach to the civihsed 
 world. He wrote in Greek to Jews, Galatians, Mace- 
 donians, and Romans; and far beyond their Hmits 
 Greek would carry the traveller from Gades to Ceylon. 
 This was the direct result of Alexander's conquests. 
 It will be our duty in the next two lectures to follow 
 out the effects of this Hellenizing of the world in its 
 two most striking examples — the kingdoms of Alex- 
 andria and of Antioch, which better describe them 
 than Egypt and Syria. 
 
 But what was the result upon Macedonia and 
 Greece, the original nucleus of all this vast domin- 
 ion? It is remarkable that neither ever lost its 
 importance in the great new complex of nations. 
 However splendid and important Babylon or Alex- 
 andria might be, Macedonia was the true home of 
 the kings, it gave its title to the military nobility of 
 Syria and Egypt, and none of the early Successors 
 thought he had succeeded to the empire, if he had 
 not recovered the ancient seat of the monarchy and 
 laid his bones in the royal sepulchre at ^gae. The 
 Regent for the heirs of Alexander was naturally sup- 
 posed to live there; the great majority of Alexan- 
 der's house, his mother, his wife and child, resided 
 there. There, too, they were all successively mur- 
 dered, to make way for the house of Antipater, whom 
 the great king himself had intrusted with Macedonia, 
 and whose son Casander estabUshed himself over the 
 murdered remains of all his master's house. After 
 
42 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 Casander's death his contemptible sons either died 
 or were murdered to make way for Demetrius the 
 Besieger, of whom Plutarch has left so interesting a 
 life, the son of Antigonus, who was the fellow- 
 commander and rival of Antipater. This Demetrius 
 was married to Casander's sister, so that their son 
 Antigonus Gonatas, who may be regarded as the real 
 founder of the new and famous Une of Macedonian 
 kings which ended with the Roman conquest, was 
 the offspring of two of Alexander's most eminent 
 generals — both of them great Macedonian nobles, 
 with hereditary rights, and thus commanding the 
 respect of the warlike mountaineers not only by their 
 prowess, but by their social position. This is the 
 real secret of the attachment and devotion of the 
 Macedonians to their kings. I will consider as briefly 
 as possible the general characteristics of this famous 
 line, and point out to you their real importance in 
 modifying the world's history. 
 
 The first king, Antigonus of Macedon, grandson 
 of Alexander's general of the same name, had a 
 long and checkered struggle for his kingdom. He 
 was at first foiled by the famous Pyrrhus, his superior 
 in arms; by old Lysimachus, another companion of 
 Alexander; lastly by the terrible fury of the Celts 
 or Galatians, whose invasion swept all Macedonia, 
 got rid of his rivals for him, and allowed him to begin 
 again the task of making for himself a kingdom. 
 
 This invasion of the Celts is one of the turning- 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 43 
 
 points in Greek history. It took place in 278 B. C, 
 when the original companions of Alexander were all 
 gone from the scene through age if not through vio- 
 lence, and when the world was longing for rest after 
 forty years of confusion. All the knight-errants of 
 the world were now passing away, and six years more 
 saw the end of Pyrrhus, who was in Italy when this 
 great barbarian invasion took place. Macedonia 
 and Greece were weary of wars and rumours of wars, 
 and were glad to acquiesce in the claims of the 
 prudent, philosophical, high-principled Antigonus. 
 From this time to the year 168 B. C, when the battle 
 of Pydna and the capture of Kling Perseus made an 
 end of the kingdom of Macedonia, the Antigonids, 
 as they were called, were the ruling house, and suc- 
 ceeded one another on strictly hereditary principles. 
 In round numbers, the first king reigned forty years; 
 his son, ten; his cousin, Antigonus Doson, nearly ten 
 as guardian to the infant heir; then this new Phihp, 
 the opponent of the Romans, for over forty years; 
 and his son Perseus, for about ten; that is to say, 
 two long reigns of about forty years, and three short 
 ones of about ten, made up the whole period of the 
 Antigonids during which they remained great figures 
 in the Hellenistic world. Of course, I cannot go 
 into the details of these reigns, but there are certain 
 general features which you can easily carry away, 
 and which will give you an interest in learning more 
 about them. 
 
44 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 In the first place, it was not only the first An- 
 tigonus (Gonatas) who was obliged to conquer his 
 kingdom. His son, Demetrius II, had to do so; 
 and again his nephew, Antigonus Doson, so cele- 
 brated for his victory at Sellasia, and his conquest 
 of Sparta with the help of the Achsean League. It 
 was not till Philip V that these kings succeeded 
 peaceably, and with a general consent on the part 
 of Greece and their northern dependents. And 
 strange to say, it was not until the last two kings, 
 who succeeded peaceably, that we perceive a degra- 
 dation in their character. The first three, who came 
 to a stormy heritage, like Philip and Alexander 
 before them, and fought their way to recognition, 
 were all strong, able, and righteous men; the last two, 
 Philip and Perseus, who had their kingdom ready 
 for them, were very inferior — the former cruel, sen- 
 sual, and treacherous; the latter mean and stingy to 
 an extent which caused his ruin. 
 
 But what, you will ask, were the conflicts which 
 the three kings had to fight for their kingdom ? For 
 the Macedonians were loyal to the house, and were 
 wont to be governed by kings. Well, Macedonia 
 proper was so; the nation owed the first Antigonus 
 a great debt for his struggles against the Gauls, 
 and there is no doubt that it accepted him as 
 the lawful sovran. But the kingdom included far 
 more than''thaiEr" It included a number of semi- 
 barbarous tribes reaching into the modern Dalmatia 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 45 
 
 and Montenegro, as well as into Bulgaria, in an ill- 
 _ defined way; and these tribes were easily excited to 
 follow some pretender, as soon as the death of the 
 king left the throne vacant and the control was for 
 a moment relaxed. Moreover, there was a constant 
 tendency in the northern barbarians about the 
 Danube to invade the Hellenic peninsula, and it was 
 the greatest service done by Macedonia to the world, 
 after Alexander, that it formed a strong barrier 
 against these invasions, and protected the culture and 
 refinement of Greece from perishing at the hand of 
 savages. 
 
 There are periods in the world's history when a 
 single man has done this service. The great Cyrus 
 spent most of his life, and died at last, in defending 
 his northern frontier against the Turanian hordes 
 which would have inundated civilised Asia centuries 
 sooner but for the strong barrier made by the Persian 
 king and his organisation. The same kind of service 
 was done by the Antigonids. There were Illyrians 
 and Dardanians, and many other less-known tribes, 
 which at this time seem to have increased in numbers 
 and in restlessness, and were ready to migrate in 
 thousands, Hke the Celts, and seek new homes in 
 the warmer and more fruitful south. But they were 
 barbarians, pure and simple, who would not have 
 understood or respected the laws, the religion, the 
 art, or the poHteness of the Greeks. Had these 
 latter been destroyed, all the finer elements of Roman 
 
46 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 culture must have been lost, for these came from 
 Greece during and after this very period; and so 
 the world would have been permanently poorer and 
 worse, but for the efficient frontier duty done by 
 the Antigonids in Macedonia. 
 
 But if you imagine that they received thanks or 
 gratitude from the Greeks, you are greatly mistaken. 
 For the Greeks of that day were in the peculiar posi- 
 tion of being sentimentally and artistically superior, 
 while they were materially — and, I will add, politi- 
 cally — inferior to their neighbours. The Greeks had 
 done wonderful things as a complex of small 
 states, either republican or aristocratic, but their 
 mutual jealousies and wars had worn them out, 
 and the young and vigorous power of Macedonia 
 under its brilliant kings had completely overshadowed 
 them. Their military power was quite fallen into 
 the second rank, and was a mere appendage to the 
 phalanx and heavy cavalry of Alexander and his 
 successors. Nevertheless, neither the second Philip 
 nor Alexander had ever ventured to treat them as 
 mere ordinary subjects. They had been left their 
 constitutions and their liberties. All that was 
 required of them was to acknowledge the headship 
 of Macedon, and to furnish men and money when 
 war was declared at a formal congress of which the 
 king was the president. This sort of imperfect 
 conquest, and the permission of separate assem- 
 blies or pariiaments with the traditions of former 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 47 
 
 liberty and of long-past importance, often falsified by 
 exaggeration, were to Macedon, as it has been to every 
 power that ever essayed it since, a constant source of 
 weakness. These little states were either, Hke Sparta 
 and Athens, coerced into obedience, and always 
 ready to assert their old imperial position ; or else they 
 were Httle democracies, where the needy and the 
 turbulent had the voting power, and were ready to 
 confiscate the property of the rich, or to join any 
 power hostile to Macedon for the sake of plunder or 
 from the love of change. In many industry was 
 decaying, and the population emigrating to new 
 settlements in the East ; and there was that silly feeling 
 which has not yet died out of the world, that the 
 existing government is to blame for all misfortunes, 
 and that any change of government or of laws may 
 bring with it new times and a recovery of prosperity. 
 Above all, where there were Macedonian garrisons 
 which occasionally interfered with the license of the 
 democracies, and would not allow lawlessness and 
 plunder, there was a bitter feeling that all Hberty 
 was gone, and that the Greeks, once free, were now 
 the slaves of Macedonian masters. And in many 
 senses this was really true.) The question, however, 
 remains: Would the Greeks have been as happy, 
 and in a deeper sense as free, if they had been allowed 
 to pass every mad resolution which assemblies of 
 needy and reckless persons chose to adopt ? 
 
 As soon as any popular assembly loses its dignity. 
 
48 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 and votes either from fear of threats or from hope 
 of bribes, its real life is gone, and the sooner it is 
 abolished the better. Now, this was the case even 
 with the assembly of Athens, which, we may assume, 
 was the most respectable in Greece. The lives of 
 Phocion and of Demetrius by Plutarch prove it plainly 
 enough. Flattery of foreign tyrants, supplications 
 for foreign subsidies, unjust condemnations of their 
 own citizens, confiscations of property — these are the 
 leading features of the later assemblies of Greece, 
 with very few exceptions. And the main exception— 
 that of the Achsean League in its good days — was 
 distinctly that of a constitution where the propertied 
 classes had all the power. They met in various cities, 
 but the league voted by cities, and so a few men 
 of wealth and pubHc spirit coming from remote 
 towns could counterbalance the whole populace of 
 the town where the meeting was held. This league 
 and other inferior leagues or confederations through 
 Greece, were, however, always a thorn in the side of 
 Macedon, and were dealt with by diplomacy rather 
 than by force. 
 
 As regards the isolated states, there were two 
 ways of controlUng them possible, and each was 
 adopted in various cases. If the democracy lasted, it 
 must be kept in control by a Macedonian garrison, 
 which interfered when the peace of the citizens or 
 the property of the rich was in danger, and which 
 also prevented the populace from caUing in some , 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 49 
 
 foreign potentate, and making their city a starting- 
 point for a foreign war against Macedon. It is 
 as if nowadays home-rule were granted to Ireland, 
 and the English found it necessary to keep a garrison 
 in Dublin, both to overawe the violence of the popu- 
 lace, and to prevent the Irish ParHament making 
 a treaty with some hostile power, and inviting it to 
 occupy Irish harbours. The other expedient was to 
 encourage some ambitious man to seize the supreme 
 power in his city, and make himself what the Greeks 
 called a "tyrant," that is, an irresponsible or absolute 
 ruler, but trusting to Macedon for support, and 
 hence governing his city in that interest. 
 
 You must not be misled by the violent effusions 
 of many eminent historians, from Herodotus to Free- 
 man, to imagine that all these tyrants were tyrants 
 in the modem sense — villains who violated every right 
 and every sacred feeling to gratify their passions; liv- 
 ing, moreover, in constant terror and suspicion, which 
 vented itself in murders and banishments. Such 
 tyrants there were at all times, and not infrequently 
 at this time also. But the majority, I firmly be- 
 lieve, were able and sincere men, persuaded not 
 only by the world's history, as they saw it, but by 
 the arguments of all the Greek philosophers, that 
 the masses were unfit to rule, and that enlightened 
 monarchy was the proper and reasonable form of 
 government. These men did a great deal for art 
 and culture at all periods of Greek history; they 
 
50 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 insisted upon internal peace, and if they purchased 
 this at the cost of forbidding public discussions or 
 the right of public meetings to protest against their 
 government, they certainly got some return for their 
 bargain. It was the habit of the Macedonian kings 
 to encourage these ambitious men, and yet so thor- 
 oughly was the taste for talking and voting engrained 
 in the people, that, however virtuous or just such men 
 mights be, it was thought an act of religious patriot- 
 ism to^iurder them — nay, if possible, to torture 
 them ^ as a punishment for their usurpation. 
 
 You can feel, then, the great difSculties connected 
 with the government of Greece by Macedonia, seeing 
 that it was an imperfect conquest, and that the ideas 
 of the world were strongly in favour of preserving, in 
 appearance at least, the Uberties of Greece. It was 
 bad enough to be obliged to reconquer again and 
 again the northern barbarians; it was far worse 
 to have to deal with a number of small, jealous, 
 turbulent states, which were always passing resolu- 
 tions against Macedon, always calUng in her great 
 rival Egypt, always bringing to mind the old days, 
 when Macedonia was obscure and despised, while 
 Greece played the leading part in the world. It was 
 this social and intellectual inferiority which made 
 Philip and Alexander rather affect to be Greeks them- 
 selves, and assume a Greek genealogy, education, 
 and manners, than subdue Greece as they were able 
 to do, and reduce it to a dependent province. 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 51 
 
 And this weakness proved the ultimate ruin of the 
 kingdom. 
 
 The day came when Rome began to meddle with 
 the affairs of the East; or rather when first the out- 
 rages of Illyrian pirates upon Roman ships, and 
 then the interference of Philip V of Macedon in the 
 second Punic war, made some such policy necessary. 
 No sooner did the Greeks perceive this than they 
 saw a splendid opportunity of working Rome 
 against Macedon. 
 
 By a curious coincidence, this new and still more 
 powerful neighbour had the same kind of position in 
 civiUsation as the kingdom pf Philip and Alexander 
 — a great miUtary power with a culture quite inferior 
 to the Greeks, and most anxious to adopt it. Hence 
 the petty Greek states were at first treated by Rome 
 with extravagant courtesy. To be allowed to com- 
 pete at the public Greek games, or to be initiated in 
 Greek mysteries, was thought a high honour, and to 
 write or speak in Greek a distinction, at Rome. 
 'AH the tall talk about ancient liberties, about the 
 virtue of slaying tyrants, about the equality of all free 
 citizens, was paraded for the Romans and they 
 undertook the task, which every Successor of Alex- 
 ander had put forward in turn as a poHtical watch- 
 word, of liberating Greece. 
 
 And unfortunately this coincided with the reign in 
 Macedon of PhiKp V — a man in whom military 
 talents and agreeable manners were combined 
 with unbridled passions and political incapacity. 
 
52 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 Wliile he, who had succeeded to his kingdom 
 as the darling of all Greece, was alienating his friends 
 by private outrages and public deceit, the Romans 
 were making capital out of their unselfish policy of 
 hberating without annexing, and of respecting the 
 ancient dignity of the Greeks. The people of 
 Pergamum even invented for the Romans a Greek 
 genealogy, and the story of ^neas starting from the 
 ruins of Troy for Italy became an article of 
 history at Rome, owing to which the Romans began 
 to write letters in Greek from their senate; they 
 began to shower benefits upon their ancestral home, 
 Ilion; it was a claim to support from Rome to state 
 that your ancestors were among those who had not 
 taken part with the Greeks in the Trojan war, or had 
 even joined the Trojans. So we too have seen ancient 
 history paraded, or rather dressed up, by way of 
 showing that present legislation should direct itself 
 to the atonement of hypothetical crimes committed 
 against the mythical ancestors of imaginary descen- 
 dants; in fact, the substitution of maudhn and false 
 sentimentality for justice and common-sense. 
 
 The conflict ended, as you know, in two great 
 wars — the first against Philip V, closing with the 
 battle of Cynoscephalae (198), the second with the war 
 against Perseus, and with Pydna (168). The first was 
 hailed by the Greeks as a great victory, and the 
 proclamation of Flamininus at Corinth that all the 
 Greeks under Macedon should now be free and 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 53 
 
 independent caused transports of delight. Home- 
 rule was established in every little Greek city, and 
 a reign of peace and prosperity was confidently 
 expected. 
 
 How is it, then, that within thirty years the defeat 
 of Perseus at Pydna and the final conquest of 
 Macedon were regarded by these same Greeks not 
 as a more complete victory, but as a crushing defeat 
 and a terrible calamity? 
 
 The history of this change is one of the most 
 instructive in ancient history, especially as we are 
 face to face with similar problems all over Europe 
 in our own day. What the Greeks were always 
 longing for, ever since they fell under Macedonian 
 sway, was home-rule, and not merely home-rule for 
 all Greece, but separate home-rule for each little 
 subdivision of it. This is what the Romans gave 
 them; and what resulted was that the populace in 
 each tovra, where there was poverty, began to plunder 
 the property of the rich; or else the leagues of cities, 
 such as the Achaean and ^tolian, began to make 
 conquests and oppress their neighbours; and finally 
 the disorders of this home-rule became such that 
 every person of property, and almost every person 
 of sense, went to Rome to entreat the great repubUc 
 to interfere. It was represented to the Romans that, 
 if they had already interfered with Macedonia and 
 given the Greeks their hberty, they were bound at 
 the same time not to permit civil war or confiscation. 
 
54 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 The Romans did what they could by way of 
 peaceful intervention. They sent constant commis- 
 sions and gave decisions in these quarrels; they 
 advised, they warned, they threatened; last of all 
 they actually threatened that they would refrain 
 from all control, which was felt to be the worst 
 danger of all. 
 
 But during these weary negotiations the party 
 at Rome which had posed as Philhellenes, and 
 carried out the sentimental civilities to the Greeks, 
 like Flamininus, began to lose ground, and a very 
 different party arose who were for no more nonsense, 
 who thought all this talk of liberty mere fooling, and 
 who were determined on stopping these interminable 
 negotiations with a strong hand. They intended 
 to abolish all this local and separate home-rule, and 
 establish a strict union of Greece with Rome, or 
 rather under Rome. They found strong allies in 
 the scanty richer classes throughout Greece, many 
 of whom were dissolute and idle, seeking to ingratiate 
 themselves at Rome by flattery and complaisance, 
 and by vilifying their own people with the grossest 
 want of patriotism. But there were also the serious 
 people who wanted peace and security, and they, 
 much as they regretted the loss of old traditions, 
 were determined that there was no safety possible 
 except in close union with Rome. 
 
 The lower classes, on the other hand, the rabble, 
 the poor, the socialists, began to look on Rome as 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 55 
 
 the chief danger to their independence and the chief 
 obstacle in letting them carry out their views. They 
 found that if Macedon had chastised them with 
 whips, Rome was Ukely to chastise them with 
 scorpions. So when they saw a new straining of 
 the relations between Rome and Macedon, and knew 
 that the latter had long been preparing for a new 
 conflict, all their hopes turned to King Perseus, 
 whom they encouraged with their sympathy, while 
 they were flattering and paying court in words 
 to the Romans. These latter were not blind to the 
 real sentiments of Greece, and during the long course 
 and doubtful issue of the last Macedonian war must 
 have seen plainly in the conduct of their Greek 
 auxiliaries that they had to deal with faithless alUes. 
 All they had done in the way of hberation, of senti- 
 mental politeness, of remission of taxes, had fallen 
 upon ungrateful soil. And this ingratitude was so 
 far justified in that there was a party at Rome which 
 fomented Greek quarrels, and triumphed in the tur- 
 moil and confusion of Greek poHtics. Still more, 
 it lay in the sentimental complaint that the Romans 
 were a cold, unsympathetic, stupid race, vastly 
 inferior, socially, to the Greeks, who were ever being 
 insulted, misunderstood, despised, and patronised 
 by them. If you knew how powerful a factor this 
 social question has been in the modem difficulties 
 of Ireland with England, you would attach great 
 weight to this remark. The result was that after 
 
56 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 the battle of Pydna, when endless compromising 
 correspondence were seized among King Perseus' 
 papers, the Romans made a searching and remorse- 
 less inquisition into the Macedonian sympathies 
 of each city, and deported to Italy as captives all the 
 so-called patriot party from many cities. The case 
 of the one thousand Achaeans is the best known, and 
 perhaps the least excusable, as we hear that there was 
 no definite evidence against them;' but in spite 
 of all that Polybius, who was one of them, can say, 
 there can be no doubt that it was the only way of 
 pacifying and quieting Greece. But it was done at 
 a terrible expense, with a great deal of hardship and 
 injustice, and to the profit of many worthless Roman- 
 izers who now got the reward of their infamous and 
 treacherous truckling to their masters. It is, of 
 course, these wretched creatures who are pilloried 
 for us by the deported home-rule party, and we are 
 told to beUeve that was the sort of person who sold 
 for money and for blood the liberties of his country. 
 Fortunately we have the evidence of Polybius him- 
 self, a leading member of the home-rule party, who 
 struggled as long as he could for the independence 
 of Achaea. But after his long captivity, and a great 
 intimacy with the Romans and the politics of the 
 world outside the petty cantons of Greece, he gives it 
 
 ' And yet was there no evidence ? Who knows how many 
 autographs were denied, how much testimony suppressed or 
 falsified ? 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 57 
 
 as his deliberate opinion that home-rule was imprac- 
 ticable, and that the union with Rome was the only 
 reasonable solution for the difficulties of civil war, 
 anarchy, confusion, and confiscation which were the 
 miserable heritage left to decaying Greece by her 
 past history. 
 
 The drama ended by a hopeless and bloody 
 insurrection, conducted with despair and cruelty, 
 in which the so-called patriots behaved much as the 
 Irish patriots did in 1798, and made their war with 
 Rome the excuse for executing, torturing, and 
 plundering their political opponents. The victory 
 at Corinth settled forever the question of home-rule, 
 and put the country under the control of the Roman 
 governor and of the propertied classes, who thus 
 won their fatal victory in this melancholy struggle. 
 From this time the political history of Greece closes 
 for many centuries.' 
 
 ' I have been obliged to omit in this lecture all mention of 
 the Greek cities of Asia Minor and the islands, which played a 
 very important part in the history of the day. But these com- 
 munities are rather associated with the kingdoms of Syria and 
 Egypt, which exercised or claimed sovereignty over them, than 
 with Macedon, and their fortunes were not settled in connection 
 with Greece so much as in connection with Asia Minor, if we except 
 Rhodes, which was ruined commercially for its sympathy with 
 Macedon in the final great war. The great difference between 
 Asiatic and European Greek cities was this, that the former had 
 long learned to be content with local self-government and had 
 given up all claim to poUtical independence or to imperial rights. 
 Hence they long retained the substance, which their European 
 brethren lost by grasping at the shadow, of independence. 
 
S8 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 But what was the final settlement of Macedon? 
 The conflict was here not one of politics, but of 
 military powers, one of which had ruled, and the 
 other was going to rule, the world. The triumph 
 of Rome was no half-victory, and the conquered 
 power was indeed, to use a notorious modem expres- 
 sion, saignee d. hlanc. Every person of importance, 
 all the richer classes, all the officials, the whole court 
 — all were carried captives to Italy with their king. 
 Nothing was left in the country but what some 
 extreme patriots would like to see left in Ireland — 
 the poor and the ignorant. But by way of parody 
 on this wholesale slavery the country was broken 
 up into four sections, and in each of them was estab- 
 lished what was called in the shibboleth of that day 
 a free constitution, a republic, where each man could 
 talk and vote in a parliament, and pass resolutions 
 binding the minority. Polybius, a sensible man, 
 wonders that the people were not content with this 
 precious boon, more especially as they now paid 
 only one-half the taxes they had formerly paid to 
 their kings. The fact is that they were put under 
 the most intolerable restrictions. The four sections 
 were forbidden all intercourse, connubial, commer- 
 cial, or otherwise, while Roman traders passed freely 
 all through the land. Old connections and friend- 
 ships were dislocated, things were made criminal 
 which had once been lawful, the development of 
 industry was rendered impossible, and the march of 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 59 
 
 civilisation in the country rudely checked. All the 
 men of family and culture had been removed; and 
 what did the wretched Macedonians get in return for 
 all this? A so-called free constitution; that is, the 
 substitution of little parochial parliaments for the 
 rule of the royal house which had brought Macedon 
 all its splendour and to which the nation were loyally 
 and deeply attached! Need we wonder that they 
 broke out time after time into bloody insurrections, 
 that every impostor who claimed royal blood became 
 a popular pretender, and that after several serious 
 struggles the Romans found their experiment in 
 constitution-making so egregious a failure that they 
 were obliged to reduce the whole country to a prov- 
 ince ruled directly by a military governor? The 
 comedy of it is that they blamed the wretched Mace- 
 donians for not appreciating liberty, instead of 
 themselves for such folly as to imagine that the name 
 of a repubhc can outweigh the effect of massacres 
 and deportations, and the violation of every noble 
 tradition. 
 
 Thus the history of that great and dominant 
 people ends in tears and in blood, and ends forever. 
 While Greece never lost the intellectual superiority 
 which made the very slaves of her race the teachers 
 and advisers of the world, and while her traditions 
 have been great enough to cause a national reju- 
 venescence, Macedonia as a nation disappears from 
 history. It was the battlefield for the Romans, 
 
6o THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 when in their great civil war they met at Philippi; 
 it was the home of a Christian church of St. Paul's 
 foundation, in whose time PhiUppi and Thessalonica 
 appear as flourishing Greek towns; but Macedonia 
 as such was blotted out from the catalogue of nations. 
 It seems to me also that with Macedonian rule 
 there disappeared from Hellenism a valuable type, 
 which has figured largely in modem civilisation— I 
 mean the type of the sporting country gentleman, 
 who despises the restraints of city Ufe and lives a 
 life of physical energy in the pure air of untutored 
 nature. How deeply this feeling was engrained in 
 Macedonian life appears from the curious absence of 
 any important capital of the Antigonid dynasty. 
 While Egypt and Syria were all centred in the great 
 cities of Alexandria and Antioch, we never hear of 
 any Macedonian city important enough to exercise 
 any influence. Pella and JEgie were always, so far 
 as we know, insignificant. The reason for this pe- 
 culiarity I consider to be the habits of the Mace- 
 donian nobility and gentry, who would not settle in 
 a city, and who would not take to commerce or town 
 amusements like the Greeks. But these latter made 
 town life the almost universal type of Hellenism, 
 much to its ultimate loss and decay. The famous 
 seventh oration of Dion Chrysostom, which I have 
 treated very fully in another work, shows how an 
 acute and sympathetic observer regretted this nar- 
 rowing of later Greek life. 
 
MACEDONIA AND GREECE 6i 
 
 There have been cases where a great body of 
 exiles have produced an effect in their new home. 
 Such, for example, was the powerful influence on 
 civilisation exercised by the French Huguenot 
 refugees upon England and Ireland, when they left 
 their homes upon the revocation of the edict of 
 Nantes. The whole of the nobility — that great 
 dominant nobiUty — of Macedon was deported and 
 settled in Roman or Italian towns or villages. We 
 should have expected that some distinguished 
 Italian would have sprung from this new noble 
 blood introduced into the country. And yet the 
 whole Macedonian importation disappears abso- 
 lutely, unless you recall the fact that the son of the 
 captive king earned a poor livelihood as a petty 
 clerk in a country town. Truly Rome was a great 
 boa-constrictor, which not only enveloped, but 
 crushed a large part of the culture of the world. , 
 
EGYPT 
 
THE PTOLEMAIC DYNASTY 
 
 1. Ptolemy Soter - - - - 321 (king 3o6)-28s 
 
 2. Ptolemy Philadelphus 285-246 
 
 3. Ptolemy Euergetes I 246-221 
 
 4. Ptolemy Philopator 221-204 
 
 5. Ptolemy Epiphanes 204-181 
 
 7. Ptolemy Philometor 181-146 
 
 9. Ptolemy Euergetes II (Physcon) - - - 146-117 
 
 10. Ptolemy Soter II, 1 
 
 1 1 . Ptolemy Alexander J 
 
 12. Ptolemy Auletes ------ 80-51 
 
 13. Cleopatra (and her brother) - - - 5 1-30 
 
 [Ptolemies VI and VIII were children, who were only 
 nominal kings for a few weeks, but whose names occur in the 
 Egyptian royal lists. Ptolemies X and XI went on and off 
 the throne alternately, so their whole joint period only is given 
 in this skeleton chronology.] 
 
 117-80 
 
LECTURE III 
 EGYPT 
 
 We approach today a subject not less in magnitude 
 and importance than the last, but certainly less compH- 
 cated. The history of Egypt as a Hellenistic kingdom 
 is a very consistent and uniform history, for though 
 the Ptolemies were engaged in many foreign wars 
 and in all the complicated diplomacies of the world, 
 the internal development and the problems of gov- 
 ernment in Egypt were very clear and definite. 
 But as I was obhged in the last lecture to deal chiefly 
 with poUtics, so I will endeavour to bring out social 
 and intellectual life in the present discourse. 
 
 Egypt, as you know, was seized as his lawful 
 conquest by Ptolemy, son of Lagus, a native Mace- 
 donian prince and personal intimate of Alexander, 
 who had fought all through the great campaigns, 
 and in later years wrote the best account of Alex- 
 ander's life, known to us unfortunately only through 
 the citations of Arrian. This Ptolemy was a very 
 clear-headed man, who saw from the beginning, 
 what most of the other generals did not see, that to 
 keep together Alexander's whole empire was im- 
 possible, and that, when it was broken up into sepa- 
 rate kingdoms, Egypt was the richest province and 
 the most easily defended. 
 
 6s 
 
66 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 I need hardly remind you that it is compassed 
 with deserts, and that it cannot be attacked except 
 through these deserts, or with great difficulty by 
 sea, for the constant north wind and the shallows 
 around the Delta made ancient navigation there a 
 thing of the utmost peril. Accordingly a good river 
 fleet and good defences upon the outer mouths of the 
 Nile, the Canopic and Pelusiac, make it impregnable. 
 As you also know, the fertihty of Egypt is enormous; 
 though its area is only about two-thirds that of 
 Ireland, it was able to support perhaps seven mil- 
 lions of people, and, moreover, to produce com 
 enough for great exports. It was said that to bring 
 up a child to maturity in Egypt cost about three and 
 one-half dollars of your money — a state of things 
 which I remember in Ireland, when it cost no more 
 to bring up a child to full size on potatoes. 
 
 The further source of wealth which Egypt then 
 commanded was the sea route from India by the 
 Red Sea, which was the highway for all the rarities 
 and wonders of the East lately revealed to European 
 ambition and European luxury.' 
 
 The mart for all these things was Alexandria, the 
 
 I How wide was this connection appears from the fragments of 
 a farce found by Grenfell and Hunt, in which a barbarian king 
 is introduced talking a strange jargon. (Cf. Oxyrhynchus 
 Papyri, III, pap. 413.) The last discovery concerning this jar- 
 gon is that it has been read as Canarese ! (Cf. E. Hultzsch in 
 Hermes for 1904, pp. 307 ff.) This is justly compared by Blass 
 to the Punic passage in Plautus' Mercator. 
 
EGYPT 67 
 
 foundation of Alexander which has perhaps brought 
 him the greatest fame, though it consisted in httle 
 more than bringing the old Greek mart of Naucratis 
 down its arm of the river to the sea. The same king 
 founded seventeen Alexandrias, from Asia Minor as 
 far as the Punjaub. The present Candahar (Isken- 
 der, Al-Iskender, etc.) is another still remaining. 
 But however good the insight of Alexander in the 
 foundation, it was the opening up of eastern traffic 
 and the enhghtened rule of Ptolemy which made it 
 the principal city of the world. The population 
 consisted from the beginning of (i) Egyptians, the 
 old inhabitants of the village Rakotis, embraced in 
 the new site. These were the lowest and poorest 
 parts of the population. (2) Jews, whose sudden and 
 hitherto mysterious alliance with Alexander I have 
 explained to you already (p. 3^, and who followed 
 his invitation in crowds to the new foundation, where 
 he settled them under their own magistrates, and 
 with certain rights and privileges which were after- 
 ward supposed to amount to full civic rights, though 
 they did not imply so much.' The other races 
 were the really dominant, viz., (3) the Macedonians, 
 who continued at this new centre to form a military 
 
 ' This statement of Josephus was disputed by various critics, 
 till I found that there was a village called Samaria in the Fayyum 
 under the second Ptolemy, and also other allusions to them, 
 which I have published in my edition of the Petrie Papyri. Since 
 that discovery more evidence from the second century before 
 Christ has come in. 
 
68 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 aristocracy about the court which proclaimed form- 
 ally any new king as the approved choice of the 
 citizen-soldiers of Macedonia. In the case of weak 
 or infant kings, they assumed the power for which we 
 can show parallels in those miUtary bodies called 
 prastoriaji guards, or mamelukes, or janissaries, at 
 courts otherwise despotic, over all the other subjects. 
 (4) Lastly come the Greeks, in many respects the 
 most important, for they held high posts in the army, 
 where they were well-tried and hereditary mercena- 
 ries; about the court, where they often displaced in 
 the civil service the prouder Macedonians; in trade, 
 where they contended with the Jews; and lastly, in 
 the museum and university, where they had it all 
 their own way. 
 
 This conglomerate of nations, gathered into a 
 great capital — full of refinement and luxury, of splen- 
 dour in shows and military pageants, of great disso- 
 luteness side by side with the most serious scientific 
 study — soon became a sort of world of its own, and 
 the Alexandrians were known through Hellenistic 
 history as "a pecuHar people, zealous of bad works." 
 Yet, in spite of its cruel mob, in spite of its wild 
 insurrections and massacres, which often remind one 
 of the Paris mob of the revolutions, think what we 
 owe to Alexandria! First of all, the Greek version 
 of the Old Testament. Secondly, the development 
 of pure mathematics and of mechanics, which led 
 the way for the great men of Europe, Descartes, 
 
EGYPT 69 
 
 Pascal, and Leibnitz, when they set out upon that 
 great voyage of discovery in science which has revo- 
 lutionised modem life, and of which the immortal 
 Euchd is still the first great name/ Thirdly, that 
 first great essay in really religious philosophy which, 
 under the name of Neo-Platonism, passed to the 
 Mystics of the Middle Ages and has been the parent 
 of the deepest and purest elements in all our modem 
 rehgions, humanly considered. 
 
 You will wonder that I have not yet mentioned 
 literature. The fact is that the influence of Alexan- 
 dria was here of a very peculiar kind: indirectly, 
 enormous and permanent; directly, you might think 
 it an epoch of decadence, but for the idylls of 
 Theocritus. 
 
 It is curious, but not strange, that from a city fife, 
 in the middle of sand hills, between a great lagoon 
 and a tideless sea, should spring the only poetry in 
 all Greek literature which makes the delights of 
 rural Hf e — the bleating of lambs, the whispering of the 
 stream, " the moan of doves in immemorial elms, and 
 murmuring of innumerable bees"^a blessed recrea- 
 tion for the cultivated and weary townsman. This 
 reaction from a highly artificial city Hfe is noticeable 
 in other societies, and there was no extravagance of 
 the Itahan Renaissance, when pedants posed as 
 shepherds and imitated the supposed innocence of 
 the artless swain, which had not its prototype in the 
 
 1 1 shall return to this subject in Lecture V. 
 
70 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 University of Alexandria. You have the Arcadia 
 of Sannazaro, concerning which I have spoken at 
 large in my Rambles and Studies; you have such 
 poems as Milton's Lycidas, where his college tutor 
 appears as old Damcetas, a rustic; in fact, you have 
 all the pastoral poetry of France and Germany, all 
 the art of Watteau and his school down to the Trianon 
 of Marie Antoinette — a thousand other develop- 
 ments of artificial innocence are derived from 
 Alexandria. 
 
 The second great inheritance left by Alexandria 
 (to which I shall return) was the love-story — I 
 mean that kind which forms the backbone of all 
 our modem novels. The notion came in from the 
 East, and is first mentioned in the fragments of 
 Chares of Mytilene, a companion of Alexander in 
 the East. 
 
 So you see the world is richer by this now gigantic 
 branch of Hterature on account of Alexandria, and 
 though it is more than probable that some other 
 society, some modern society, would have thought 
 of it, I beg to remind you that the Greeks — a great 
 literary nation, who were just as famiHar with fall- 
 ing in love as we are — never thought of it in any of 
 their tragedies or histories, till it was produced by 
 CalHmachus.' 
 
 1 1 need not tell you, what you will find in my Greek Lije and 
 Thought, that the love affairs in the Comedy of Menander were 
 of a wholly different kind, and on a far lower level. 
 
EGYPT 71 
 
 I will not detain you here with the indirect effects 
 of Alexandria's work on the Roman poets.' 
 
 These great Uterary and scientific results were 
 achieved by the first and second Ptolemies in found- 
 ing what may fairly be called the University of 
 Alexandria, with its college of fellows (the Museum), 
 its botanical and zoological gardens, and its great 
 library. The Museum gave it that precious charac- 
 ter as a home for leisure and research, as well as 
 ultimately a teaching power, which we possess in 
 Oxford and Cambridge, and which has been lost 
 or forgotten in those new foundations of mere 
 examining bodies falsely called universities. But 
 unfortunately the Museum was far too strictly under 
 royal patronage, and suffered by it. The repubUcan 
 character of the private corporations called the 
 schools, or academies, at Athens was far more 
 stable and independent. The Mus.eum and Hbrary 
 were part of the royal quarter of the city, close to 
 the palaces built by successive Ptolemies — for they 
 were in this like modem kings, who will not be con- 
 tent with the palaces of predecessors — and so active 
 was the trade in books copied by slaves from the 
 originals in the Museum, and sold over the world, 
 that a conflagration among the ships in the har- 
 bour during JuHus Caesar's campaign spread to the 
 
 I All of them (save Horace) — Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, even 
 Virgil— owe the Alexandrians far more than they do the older and 
 greater Greek masters. Cf. below. Lecture V. 
 
72 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 Stores on the shore and destroyed so many books that 
 the accident was by and by magnified into the 
 destruction of the great Hbrary itself. 
 
 The rest of the city was designed in a style rather 
 handsome than picturesque, its figure being deter- 
 mined by two great thoroughfares at right angles, 
 whose intersection was the acknowledged centre, 
 and at whose extremities were the four principal 
 gates. The other new features in the city, which 
 was a model to a hundred others, were its system- 
 atic Ughting of the streets, and its colonnades. 
 
 But you will be impatient to know what I have 
 to say about the rest of Egypt and the Ptolemaic 
 rule there, and how, the old culture of Egypt har- 
 monised with all this mushroom splendour of Alex- 
 andria. The fact is that the first and second 
 Ptolemies thought very httle about Egypt, except 
 as a source of revenue, and as a nation to be kept 
 quiet while it fed the glory of the Grasco-Macedonian 
 rule. Though the first Ptolemy did found Ptole- 
 mais in upper Egypt (the modern Meushieh), some 
 eighty miles below Thebes, and though we hear 
 of Greek festivals held there, it is most noteworthy 
 that he did not give the city of Alexandria a Greek 
 constitution, with a senate and an assembly. He 
 knew Hellenic assemblies too well. StiU, all the 
 care of these two men was directed, not merely to 
 making their military position secure, but also to 
 making Alexandria the rival of Athens. Now, for 
 
EGYPT 73 
 
 miKtary purposes the Egyptians were accounted 
 nearly useless. For several generations back, Greek 
 mercenaries had supplanted the old miHtary caste 
 in Egypt, and all kings of Egypt — indigenous, Per- 
 sian, Macedonian — trusted to a supply of paid for- 
 eign soldiers, who were as veterans settled with 
 property and privileges, and became a sort of new 
 military caste, hereditary in character/ The native 
 Egyptians were mostly disarmed, and were not used 
 as soldiers till a great crisis under the fourth Ptolemy 
 in the year 217 B. C. 
 
 As regards literature or science, the Greeks had 
 long laid aside the habit of consulting the wis- 
 dom of Egypt and of the East, from which their 
 civiHsation had once sprung, and no attempt was 
 made, beyond bringing out the armals of the old king- 
 dom in Greek (by Maijetho), to examine and utihse 
 all the deep and occult lore of the priests. We may 
 depend upon it that these priests were not wilUng to 
 impart it to the upstart Greeks, and the hieroglyphic 
 writing and strange language were almost impene- 
 trable barriers to the few Greeks who attempted to 
 learn them. So the wisdom and the art of Memphis, 
 Thebes, HeliopoHs, and all the other splendid old 
 Egyptian cities remained a thing apart and foreign 
 to the Alexandrians; the Egyptians were regarded 
 
 I The Petrie Papyri, which it was my highest good fortune to 
 decipher and publish, give us a quantity of information about 
 one of these settlements (probably the most important) in the 
 Fayyum. 
 
74 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 as a foreign and subject population, only fit to labour 
 and pay taxes, and no systematic attempt was made 
 to Hellenize them. 
 
 Such has always been the fate of unhappy Egypt. 
 From the earUest days her kings and governors have 
 been strangers, and her people — a beautiful, gentle, 
 laborious people — have been so engrained with the 
 instinct of submission that it will require long efforts 
 to reverse this ancient and lamentable education in 
 slavery. 
 
 But in the days of the Ptolemies Egypt still pos- 
 sessed her powerful and native priestly caste, and 
 with it a fund of resistance to the Macedonian kings 
 with which they were soon obliged to reckon. 
 Neither the first nor the second Ptolemy has left 
 us many monuments of note; the second, indeed, one 
 which already shows the beginning of the Egyptian 
 reaction — a ruined temple, made wholly of red gran- 
 ite blocks brought seven hundred miles from the 
 first cataract to the Delta, adorned with his name 
 and attributes in thoroughly Egyptian fashion. 
 
 But with the reign of the third Ptolemy, a great 
 conqueror, who overran all Asia, begins the long 
 series of Ptolemaic temples, still extant in Egypt, 
 which are distinctly not Greek, but Egyptian. 
 
 It is usual to speak of the marriage of Greek and 
 Egyptian civilisation, and of the genius of the 
 Ptolemies in producing this fusion. I confess I can see 
 little of the kind. As to Alexandria, very few things 
 
EGYPT 75 
 
 have been done in the way of excavation, and not 
 a single old secular building of the early Ptolemaic age 
 survives; but we may be certain that everything they 
 were proud of in the royal quarter of Alexandria was 
 as purely Greek as they knew how to build it. No 
 statues of Egyptian gods and hieroglyphic ornaments 
 could find a place in these buildings. On the other 
 hand, go into the country, and examine the great 
 temples which the later Ptolemies (from the third on) 
 built at Esneh, Edfu, Denderah, and Thebes,' and 
 you will find them so thoroughly Egyptian that until 
 the hieroglyphics were deciphered, only one man, 
 Letronne, ever suspected that they could be the 
 work of Greek-speaking kings. The figures of the 
 kings, the ornaments, the gods worshipped — all is 
 purely Egyptian. The same may be said of the 
 smaller specimens of art gathered from various 
 places into the Cairene Museum. I went to Egypt 
 to satisfy myself upon this point, and to study for 
 myself what the marriage or combination of Greek 
 and Egyptian art might be. It was surprising how 
 scarce such combinations were, though they do exist, 
 especially in grotesque figurines, and probably did 
 exist in furniture and household decorations. 
 
 You need not tell me that two separate schools of 
 art can not or will not combine. It may be wrong or 
 
 I There seems to be a solitary exception of a portal at Luxor, 
 on which the third Ptolemy is represented in something like a 
 Greek costume. I have looked at it carefully, and can see but 
 faint traces of anything not Egyptian in the dress. We have also 
 found Egyptian work in the Egyptian Alexandria, viz., in Rakotis. 
 
76 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 ugly to do it, but it can be done and has been 
 done, as, for example, when our seventeenth-century 
 people combined Gothic and classical features in 
 architecture, and made ugly buildings; or when 
 the SiciUans about Palermo combined Gothic build- 
 ing with Saracen ornament, and produced very 
 beautiful results. This kind of thing did not take 
 place in Egypt. The Greek towns were distinct, 
 the Greeks lived with the Egyptians under separate 
 laws, and so their pubUc buildings and their art were 
 distinct. The whole of Egyptian society was settled 
 upon principles totally different from those of Mace- 
 donia and Greece, and it was only gradually that 
 even the strange features of Egyptian life were inter- 
 fered with by the kings' decrees. The great manu- 
 script even of the ninth Ptolemy, published by Gren- 
 f ell and Hunt, ' gives special direction for suits between 
 natives, between Greeks, and between Greeks and 
 natives. There were native courts and judges, with 
 Egyptian as their language, but the natives were 
 encouraged to come into the Greek courts. What 
 was really fused was Macedonian and Greek, nay 
 even Persian and Greek, among the soldiers' 
 settlements. 
 
 And not only did the Macedonians and Greeks 
 not amalgamate with the natives, but gradually the 
 patient fellahs of that day, led by their priests — 
 an old and wealthy organisation as strong as the 
 
 ' Tebtunis Papyri, pp. 17 £f. 
 
EGYPT 77 
 
 Catholic church in Spain or in Ireland — began to 
 resist the oppression exercised upon them by the 
 fourth and fifth Ptolemies, and presently there rose 
 up Mahdis, who promised them deliverance from 
 the strangers and a restoration of their old national 
 monarchy. We know that there were several insur- 
 rections,' put down with trouble and difficulty, and 
 that the kings were obliged to bribe the national 
 priesthood with presents and privileges to declare 
 pubhcly that the Ptolemy was the real god and king. 
 For if all the Hellenistic monarchs were incHned to 
 assume the attributes and dignities of divinities, the 
 Ptolemies, above all, ruled in a country where for 
 centuries the kings had been systematically deified. 
 The declarations of the priests, therefore, were really 
 a declaration of pohcy, though they seemed to be 
 mere politenesses and flatteries. 
 
 We have now two famous texts of these decrees, 
 the Stone of San and the Rosetta stone, of which 
 you will find the full texts and translations in my 
 Empire oj the Ptolemies. 
 
 In the end the monarchy became so completely 
 Egyptian, especially after the ninth Ptolemy 
 (Physcon) had let loose the soldiery upon the insur- 
 gent Greeks of Alexandria, that when the Romans 
 came to deal with Egypt they found a strong and 
 stubborn national resistance, based on loyalty to the 
 
 ' They are spoken of in the papyri as rapaxal, and were 
 always onsets of natives against the settlers. 
 
78 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 Ptolemaic dynasty. But it was the Ptolemies who 
 became Egyptian, not the Egyptians who became 
 Hellenistic. Such, then, was the internal policy of 
 this remarkable kingdom. 
 
 What, you will desire to know, was the foreign 
 policy which marked the course of this Egyptian 
 history? It is an equally interesting, but a more 
 complicated, subject. 
 
 The kingdom of Egypt was one of the three great 
 divisions of Alexander's empire, Macedonia and 
 Syria being the other two. Each of the three was 
 perpetually striving to obtain preponderance partly 
 by aggrandisement or conquest, partly by weakening 
 its opponents through insurrections fomented among 
 those opponents' subjects, and partly by securing 
 the influence of a number of Greek city-states estab- 
 lished around the Levant. For these had extended 
 their local independence into something like a little 
 kingdom by confederations, and by their naval and 
 commercial resources. Of these Rhodes and Byzan- 
 tium were the chief. The position of Egypt between 
 Syria and Macedonia was that of a smaller kingdom, 
 relatively richer, and with a safe and central position, 
 opposed to neighbours who were on land decidedly its 
 mihtary superiors, but were checked by its naval 
 resources and its unUmited power of hiring merce- 
 naries. Thus Egypt always kept the ambition of 
 Macedon in check by sending money, and some- 
 times ships, to the Peloponnesus and to Athens, and 
 
EGYPT 79 
 
 so threatening the coasts. Nay, for a time Egypt 
 held coast cities even in Thrace. 
 
 The conflict with Syria was longer and more 
 serious, and was the continuation of a duel which 
 is perhaps the most protracted known in history. 
 Since the dawn of civihsation, when the two great 
 alluvial river basins of the Tigris- Euphrates and Nile 
 rose into wealth and then into culture, the conquest 
 of each was always the great ambition of the other. 
 It is for this reason that the history of Palestine is a 
 world-history. That country was the highroad 
 from one to the other, and whether it was Shishak 
 or Necho who came up from Egypt, or Assurbanipal 
 or Nebuchadnezzar who came from Mesopotamia, 
 the inhabitants of Palestine suffered the fate of 
 being on the great thoroughfare. 
 
 In the days of Hellenism, when every king desired 
 to be regarded a member of the civilisation which 
 lay around the ^gean, the Mesopotamian power 
 moved its capital to Antioch, and so the great old 
 struggle is now called the struggle of Syria and Egypt. 
 In the days of the first Ptolemy the conflict was 
 doubtful. He made conquests in Palestine, and 
 lost them again, and it has been observed that it 
 was as easy to hold Egypt by way of defence, as it 
 was diflicult to enlarge it by conquest. 
 
 The second Ptolemy was a man of peace and of 
 policy, who did perhaps m.ore than his successors 
 in conciliatmg the Jews and making them friends of 
 
8o THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 Egypt rather than of Syria. There is little doubt 
 in my mind that it was he who first promoted the 
 translation of the Hebrew and of other Scriptures 
 into Greek, though I do not subscribe to all the fables 
 with which the so-called letter of Aristeas adorns 
 this momentous pohcy. I will add, by way of 
 digression, that by far the greatest contribution of 
 Alexandrian prose to the great literature of the 
 world is this very translation of the Old Testament, 
 entitled the Septuagint, which has preserved for us 
 a text centuries older than any of the Hebrew copies 
 known to exist. We have, of course, in our recent 
 discoveries found endless documents written in the 
 Greek current in Egypt. The earliest, which I had 
 the good fortune to publish, are in very sound and 
 grammatical Greek. The rest show a somewhat 
 rapid degeneration, according as the Greek idiom of 
 Plato fell into the hands of uneducated people of 
 hybrid descent. 
 
 The third Ptolemy was a great conqueror, who 
 dismembered for a moment the whole empire of 
 Syria, conquered Antioch, held its seaport Seleucia 
 with an Egyptian garrison, and then made a prog- 
 ress into the East second only to that of Alexander. 
 This great triumph of Egyptian arms is not only cele- 
 brated in the Canopus inscription (San) already men- 
 tioned, but was commemorated on a marble throne 
 at Adule far down on the Red Sea which the monk 
 Cosmas luckily copied, and so the text has reached us. 
 
EGYPT 8i 
 
 I found, moreover, in the Petrie papyri fragments of 
 the despatch sent by the king, announcing the sur- 
 render of Seleucia and Antioch without a struggle.' 
 The king had also built a small temple — a purely 
 Egyptian temple — at Esneh, on which he had told all 
 his history, and this temple was standing up to the 
 time when ChampolUon and Roselhni were just deci- 
 phering the inscriptions. But they had such infinite 
 materials before them that they did not copy these 
 texts, and since then the whole building was destroyed 
 to make a sugar factory, which now exhales its hid- 
 eous black smoke from a gaunt chimney into the 
 pure and pellucid atmosphere of the Nile. Such are 
 the accidents by which precious history is lost. 
 
 The fourth and fifth Ptolemies were a lamentable 
 instance of decay in a great family. The former, 
 said by our historians to be a mere debauchee, cer- 
 tainly maintained himself after the great victory of 
 Raphia over Syria, and died without seeing his con- 
 trol of the ^gean islands diminished. But the consist- 
 ent evidence against him is too strong to be set aside. 
 The gradual discontent of the Egyptians broke into 
 insurrection, which endangered the first years of 
 his successor, who was yet a child; and there is no 
 doubt that the energetic Syrian (Antiochus III) would 
 now have captured Egypt, just as his son Antiochus 
 Epiphanes would have done, but for the interference 
 of the Romans. So the tables were turned, and in 
 
 ■ Pet. Pap., II, xlix. 
 
82 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 the latter days Syria, with its active and mature 
 rulers, was more than a match for the infants who 
 succeeded to the Egyptian throne. However, these 
 royal houses were also connected by marriage. It 
 was an able and worthy princess of the Syrian house, 
 married to the youthful fifth Ptolemy, and mother 
 of his two successors, who brought the famous name 
 of Cleopatra into Egyptian history. Till that time 
 (about 200 B. C.) they had all been Arsinoe or 
 Berenice. 
 
 These later kings, though living at Alexandria 
 as their capital, though patronising Greek letters, 
 and posing as Hellenistic kings, had fallen under the 
 influence of the national reaction, and all built great 
 temples wherein they appeared as the darlings of 
 the Egyptian gods, as themselves Egyptian gods, 
 with Pshent and Uroeus, with the emblems of life, 
 and surrounded by hawk-headed, dog-headed, 
 eagle-headed monsters, such as were commonly 
 portrayed in Egyptian theology. 
 
 With the seventh and ninth Ptolemies the reaction 
 goes even farther. It is with Philometor that we 
 find Jews coming to high official positions and 
 beginning to make themselves felt as politicians;, 
 and presently the strong Egyptian policy of Physcon, 
 and consequent flight of the learned men from the 
 Museum, gave Greek influence a shock from which it 
 never recovered. The ninth Ptolemy even employed 
 an Egyptian to govern Cyprus — an unheard-of thing 
 
EGYPT 83 
 
 in earlier days. When the Romans came to deal 
 with the people of Egypt, they found it a strange 
 and essentially oriental country, which they never 
 could understand or control after the manner of the 
 really Hellenistic kingdoms. 
 
 In the first place, they did not conquer Egypt 
 in a campaign as they did Syria and Macedonia, 
 but it fell gradually, and partly by the soUcitation 
 or bequest of its own princes, under their sway. 
 There had been old commercial relations of a friendly 
 kind between Rome and Egypt. As far back as 
 the second Ptolemy, and in the first Punic war, 
 there had been embassies from Alexandria to Rome, 
 and vice versa, and important trade relations had 
 been established. It was owing to these that 
 Puteoli (Pozzuoli) was made a free port for Egyptian 
 ships, and it was , for centuries the great mart for 
 foreign trade, just as Genoa now is for all Italy. 
 Thus, the .elegancies of Alexandrian household 
 furniture and decoration spread, not only to Pompeii 
 and Herculaneum, but even to Roman palaces, and 
 the worship of Isis, long since adopted from Egypt 
 by the Greeks, became naturahsed in Italian cities. 
 Such was the fusion of creeds and customs produced 
 by the spirit of Hellenism. In the succeeding great 
 wars — the second Punic war with Hannibal, the 
 Macedonian wars, and the conquest of Syria — 
 Egypt had been prudently neutral. Hence on two 
 occasions, when the Egyptians appealed to Rome 
 
84 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 to save them from the attacks of the Seleucids, first 
 of Antiochus the Great, and then of Antiochus IV, 
 the great republic intervened and saved the royal 
 house. It was on the second of these occasions 
 that Popilius Laenas drew the famous circle with 
 his vine stick around the Syrian king, and com- 
 pelled him to decide on the spot for peace or war 
 with Rome. 
 
 In spite of all these friendly relations, and the 
 gradual subjection of Egypt to Rome, the land was 
 always, as I have said, strange, and the emperors 
 made special arrangements for its government. 
 Into these I cannot possibly here enter, but I merely 
 wish to point out how different were the relations 
 between Rome and Egypt and the relations of Rome 
 and Syria, of which I shall speak in my next discourse. 
 While you still find splendid Hellenistic temples 
 and colonnades built at Baalbec, Palmyra, Gerasa, 
 and other sites in the old kingdom of Syria, even the 
 latest temples built or restored in Egypt by Roman 
 emperors down to Decius are strictly Egyptian, with 
 their lotus-flower capitals, their hieroglyphic inscrip- 
 tions, and with that pecuUar colouring so distinctive 
 in Egyptian art. 
 
 It is perhaps idle to consider whether a different 
 pohcy on the part of the Ptolemies would have 
 produced a different result. Certain it is that they 
 failed to Hellenize the country, at least the inner 
 country, and that every succeeding generation saw 
 
EGYPT 8s 
 
 a sharper return to the old ways and habits of the 
 original race. I repeat this, though recent years 
 have shown us not only that they founded one 
 Greek city, Ptolemais in upper Egypt, but that 
 they settled in the Fayyum a large number of their 
 Hellenic soldiers, so as to have there a colony speak- 
 ing and writing good Greek, and reading good 
 Greek literature. But there is ample evidence 
 in the papyri to show that, though intermarriage with 
 the natives frequently occurred, these people were 
 never amalgamated with them, but lived under laws 
 differing from the old code of the country, which 
 was accepted by the Ptolemies in the native courts. 
 The contrast of this province of Alexander's 
 empire to his Macedonian home is very striking. 
 While Macedonia was raised by a few great kings 
 from obscurity to splendour, and with the Roman 
 conquest sank again into deeper obscurity forever, 
 the Macedonian d)masty founded in Egypt was a 
 mere episode in the immense history of that country, 
 and only meant that that wonderful, patient, eternal 
 race had for three centuries submitted to new masters. 
 They had done so many times before, and nearly 
 all their great kings had been foreigners ; they were to 
 do so many times again. And so the importance 
 of Egypt did not disappear at the fall of its royal 
 house with the famous Cleopatra. We can see that 
 not only the ideas of the great Alexander, but the 
 administration of the Ptolemaic court of Alexandria, 
 
86 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 were constantly before the mind of Augustus when 
 he framed the constitution of the Roman empire. 
 We have Egypt prominent again in early Christian 
 times for its monks and its controversies, and remem- 
 ber, monks were known in Egypt centuries before 
 Christianity. Then it becomes brilliant under the 
 Saracens, when they founded Cairo with the ruins 
 of Memphis. And so on to our own day, when 
 the "Egyptian question" is ever before us, and 
 admits of no final solution; or, rather, it is a 
 question eternally being solved by the conquerors 
 of the world, from Nebuchadnezzar to Napoleon; 
 and still it remains a great highway for commerce 
 and for conquest, from the dawn of history to the 
 present day, from King Menes to Lord Kitchener. 
 
 I should perhaps add something upon the relations 
 of Egypt with Greece proper and with Rhodes 
 during the period with which I am particularly 
 concerned. You must remember that the enormous 
 wealth of Egypt, and the fact that the native popula- 
 tion there was disarmed, made it the favourite field 
 for mercenary soldiers. Mercenary service was as 
 fashionable then among Greeks as it was in the 
 seventeenth century throughout Europe; even Spar- 
 tan kings thought it not beneath their dignity to take 
 service of this kind, and there were always many 
 thousand Greeks pursuing this very mischievous 
 and deteriorating profession in Egypt. These 
 armies were usually commanded by ^Etolians or Ar- 
 
EGYPT 87 
 
 cadians, and we know that these captains amassed 
 great fortunes, and at times even endangered the 
 monarchy by the insolence of their power, and by 
 their waste of public money. 
 
 There was another class of Greeks who also 
 looked to Egypt as their paymaster — the artist class. 
 Pictures and statues were constantly being bought 
 and sent there. Aratus of Sicyon was a sort of agent 
 for the king of Egypt, and used his dealing in art as 
 a pretext for dealing in politics. The famous tomb 
 of Sidon,' which commemorates the victories of 
 Alexander, is almost certainly the work of Greek 
 artists in the pay of the Ptolemies; for the king of 
 Sidon was high admiral under the first Ptolemy. 
 It was for him or some of his companions who had 
 fought imder the conqueror, that this splendid 
 monument was prepared. 
 
 It was this superiority in money over Macedon 
 which made Egypt always so popular in Greece, 
 so that Aratus and his league regarded the Ptolemy 
 as their support and protector against the Antigonid. 
 It was with subsidies of money that Egypt kept up the 
 agitation against Macedonia. 
 
 There was only one class whom the Ptolemies 
 were most anxious to settle in Alexandria, in order 
 to increase the glory of their university, and in this 
 they failed. The philosophers always regarded 
 Athens as their proper home, and no offers of money 
 
 ' Now in the museum of Constantinople. 
 
88 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 would induce such men as Zeno, the great founder 
 of the Stoics, to settle in Egypt. Other celebrated 
 men, who were invited and entertained there, 
 returned as soon as they could, and left the wealth, 
 luxury, and turbulence of Alexandria for the "Aca- 
 demic shades" of Attica. It was not till centuries 
 had elapsed that the mystic visions of the East were 
 reconciled to the dialectics of Plato in Alexandria, 
 and produced the latest bloom of Greek philosophy 
 in the hybrid system of Plotinus. 
 
 It is most melancholy, and very curious, that we 
 have not a single picture of social and literary life at 
 Alexandria all through its great period. What would 
 we not now give for a letter from Cicero on such a 
 topic ? But such men either did not visit Egypt, or if 
 they did, like Strabo, they tell us nothing that we want 
 to know. Dion Chrysostom, in his oration to the Al- 
 exandrians, rather attacks their vices than describes 
 their ordinary life. The great scene in Polybius of 
 the accession of Ptolemy V, and the murder of the 
 favourites of his father, is indeed a vivid picture, but 
 it is a picture of Alexandria mad, not of Alexandria 
 sane. There are a few stray anecdotes of the jeal- 
 ousies and squabbles of the learned at the Museum; 
 there is the famous scene of Theocritus' Adoniazusa, 
 in which two women go to the feast of Adonis, but 
 this latter, if I mistake not, was copied from Sophron, 
 and may possibly be really Syracusan, not Alexan- 
 drian, in colour. There are many bald statements 
 
EGYPT 89 
 
 that the town was splendid; there is the wonder of 
 the hero in a Greek novel, who finds at night the 
 sun "distributed in small change" by the lamps in 
 the streets. But all these things touch only the out- 
 side, and only touch it. We must wait for some new 
 papyrus to reveal to us what many men praise or 
 blame, but nobody describes with intelligent insight. 
 
SYRIA 
 
THE SELEUCID DYNASTY 
 
 1. Seleucus I 312-281 
 
 2. Antiochus I (Soter) 281-262 
 
 3. Antiochus II (Theos) 260-246 
 
 4. Seleucus II (Kallinikos) - . - - 246-227 
 
 5. Seleucus III (Soter) 227-223 
 
 6. Antiochus III (the Great) - - - - 222-187 
 
 7. Seleucus IV (Philopator) .... 187-176 
 
 8. Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) .... 175-165 
 
 9. Demetrius (Soter) 165-150 
 
 10. Alexander Balas 150-145 
 
 Interregnum 
 
 Antiochus Sidetes 138-129 
 
 The rest is confusion. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 SYRIA 
 
 In treating so large a subject in a single lecture I 
 must avoid all small details, and above all perplex- 
 ing you with the various Antiochuses and Seleucuses 
 who make up the pedigree of the Syrian royal house 
 — a pedigree by no means so interesting as those of 
 the other two kingdoms, for history has preserved 
 to us nothing worth mention save of two, Antiochus 
 III and IV; the former the king who warred with the 
 Romans and was defeated at Magnesia (190 B. C), 
 the latter (Epiphanes) his elder son, who succeeded 
 his younger brother, and who is famous not only 
 for the circle of Popilius Laenas, but for his perse- 
 cution of the Jews, and the prominent place he thus 
 occupies in the book of Daniel. But if the kings of 
 Syria are obscure, their kingdom is by far the most 
 important and interesting in the Hellenistic world 
 from many points of view. 
 
 I have already told you that the two great strug- 
 gles in which Macedon was now engaged were that 
 with the northern barbarians and that with the over- 
 cultivated Greeks. Egypt had only internal enemies 
 to fear, and, though often struggling for the pos- 
 session of Cyprus and Cyrene, was secure from 
 invasion or dismemberment. It was the deep sever- 
 
 93 
 
94 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 ance of the native population from all that was Greek 
 which ultimately drew away that kingdom from the 
 rest of Alexander's empire, and so demoralised the 
 ruUng class that Ptolemaic Egypt succumbed to 
 Rome from the mere internal decay of its rulers. 
 
 All the conflicts which Syria had to endure were 
 at the same time Hke and unlike those of her rivals. 
 The very name Syria is a sort of absurdity, seeing 
 that the empire founded by Seleucus had Babylon 
 for its natural centre, and included the "upper 
 provinces," Parthia, Bactria, Ariana, and indeed 
 part of India, till the first great war of Seleucus with 
 Sandracottus determined that Hellenism was not 
 to include the valley of the Indus. But quite apart 
 from these remote Asiatic provinces or kingdoms, 
 the so-called kingdom of Syria included or claimed 
 Mesopotamia, Persia, Media, most of Asia Minor, 
 Coele-Syria, and Palestine, so that we have here, 
 not a definite conquering race like the Macedonians 
 in their own land, or a still more definite conquered 
 race Hke the Egyptians in their own land, but a 
 heterogeneous conglomerate of peoples, held together 
 by a Macedonian satrap and his small garrison. 
 
 It is true that most of these regions had long been 
 accustomed to obeying, more or less loyally, a 
 sovereign residing at Babylon or Susa or Persepolis, 
 so that they were not shocked at a king of a strange 
 race whom they seldom saw. Indeed, it shows how 
 secure the Seleucids felt on this point that they 
 
SYRIA 95 
 
 settled themselves, not in the midst of their vast king- 
 dom, but at Antioch. This poUcy was adopted, 
 even before the first Seleucus, by Antigonus, the 
 first of Alexander's generals who held this group of 
 provinces till Babylon was seized by Seleucus in 
 312 B. C. 
 
 Why was this particular situation chosen first by 
 Antigonus for his capital Antigoneia, then by Se- 
 leucus for his capital Antiocheia, only a few miles 
 farther down the O routes ? 
 
 In the first place, Antioch was in the very thor- 
 oughfare from the old and well-known crossing of 
 the Euphrates to reach the Mediterranean. There 
 are deserts separating all Palestine and Syria from 
 Mesopotamia, and only in this particular place is 
 the transit both short and easily practicable. Hence 
 from this inner angle of the Mediterranean to Thap- 
 sus or Zeugma on the Euphrates there has always 
 been one of the highways of men. It was necessary, 
 above all things, to hold this route now, for the new 
 kingdom was to be Greek or Hellenistic — European, 
 if you Uke — and not oriental, and was to draw its 
 official language, its soldiery, its whole culture, so 
 far as possible, from the West. 
 
 So Seleucus and his descendants declared them- 
 selves as kings upon the Mediterranean with large 
 inner provinces — Asia, in fact — to feed and support 
 them, just as the Ptolemies were kings of Alexandria, 
 with Egypt and the Red Sea and Libya — Africa, in 
 fact — to supply them. 
 
96 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 As regards the particular site, I see curious sug- 
 gestions, both of likeness and of contrast, with the 
 other most notable cities of the Greek world — Athens 
 and Alexandria. Of course, Alexandria was the great 
 new thing, but the Syrian port was not at the mouth 
 of its river, for this obvious reason that the Orontes 
 below Antioch was the main drain of a great city, 
 bringing all the pollutions of men into a tideless sea. 
 Hence Seleucia, the fortified port, was placed about 
 five miles north of the river mouth. The history 
 of Antioch is unfortunately known to us only in 
 stray moments, most of them moments of disaster 
 or humihation. We know that it owed a great deal 
 of its splendour to the two principal Seleucids, Anti- 
 ochus III and IV, who built new quarters, and did 
 all in their power to magnify and beautify this city. 
 The suburb Daphne was from this time on perhaps 
 the most famous resort of pleasure-seekers in the 
 world, so that this Antioch even came to be called 
 "Antioch near Daphne," to distinguish it from its 
 homonyms in Asia Minor and elsewhere. 
 
 Having now considered the capital, we may pro- 
 ceed to consider the provinces; for though this capital 
 was so splendid, and though we know that the early 
 Seleucids put some store on literature and science, 
 yet Antioch was not an art centre, but a centre of 
 pleasure. Under Antiochus Epiphanes we hear of 
 the splendid processions and feasts which rivalled 
 the great mummeries of Alexandria. 
 
SYRIA 97 
 
 But as regards Syria itself, Coele-Syria, and 
 northern Palestine, we may safely assert that no 
 outlying country in Alexander's empire was ever so 
 thoroughly Hellenized. We know this by many 
 Macedonian names of towns and the renaming of 
 countries; we know that Greek was spoken com- 
 monly all through this region, and when we come 
 to consider the ruins of great cities founded then or 
 refounded under Roman rule, we find them not 
 oriental or foreign, but strictly Hellenistic — or 
 Roman-Greek, as it is vulgarly called. Baalbec 
 and Palmyra, Gerasa and the Decapolis, represent 
 Hellenistic culture, and direct imitation of Antioch. 
 
 There we find the Syrian population thoroughly 
 loyal to the Seleucids, and no revolution ever seems 
 to flourish there. We may say almost the same of 
 Mesopotamia, where the first Seleucus had long 
 reigned, and where before him Alexander the Great 
 had made a great impression. There was, indeed, 
 under Antiochus III, or rather shortly after his suc- 
 cession when he was still but a boy, an insurrection 
 under Molon and Alexander in Media and Persia, 
 who easily defeated the generals he sent against them, 
 and appeared a most dangerous opposition to the new 
 king. But as soon as he went in person against them, 
 their whole force melted away, for, says Polybius, 
 their soldiers thought it "foul scorn" to fight against 
 their hereditary king. Thus we may say that on 
 this side of the second great desert, which severed 
 
98 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 the various parts of this ill-cemented kingdom — I 
 mean west of the great desert of Persia — the oriental 
 inhabitants, whether Aryan or Semitic, were quite 
 loyal. Seleucia on the Tigris was their capital — 
 now the great successor of Nineveh and Babylon. 
 
 But let us look farther east and north. 
 
 The first limitation of Alexander's empire came 
 from the region of India, where Chandragupta (San- 
 dracottus) made himself a great oriental kingdom 
 which was essentially non-Hellenistic. Even here, 
 however, a knowledge of what the Macedonians had 
 done produced its effects. There was always, we may 
 be sure, a Macedonian agent or minister at the court 
 of Chandragupta, and we are quite sure, from the 
 inscriptions of Afoka, his successor, who adopted 
 Buddhism, that Buddhist missionaries were sent 
 to preach their doctrine to all the Hellenistic kings 
 of the West. We have no detail of their number or 
 of their success, but when you consider that they 
 must have preached in Syria' two centuries before 
 Christ, the strange likenesses in the story of the bkth 
 and hfe of Buddha to that of the Ufe of Christ as- 
 sume a new and deep interest. 
 
 We are told that Seleucus made peace with 
 the Indian king on the basis of ceding provinces 
 and taking an Indian wife, while Chandragupta 
 gave him that enormous park of elephants where- 
 with he crushed his great rival, Antigonus, at Ipsus 
 (301 B. C). 
 
SYRIA 99 
 
 It was not till more than half a century later 
 (about 247 B. C.) that the next great revolt took 
 place in the East. It was from that date that the 
 Parthian Arsakids dated the rise of their sovereignty. 
 These people, as you know, became gradually 
 stronger and stronger, and though subdued or kept 
 in check by Antiochus the Great, they were never 
 reunited to the Hellenistic kingdom of Syria, and 
 later on they became the heart of the oriental oppo- 
 sition to Roman extension. 
 
 Yet how deeply Greek ideas and culture here 
 penetrated we know from the story of the death of 
 Crassus. A strolling company of Greek players were 
 performing the Baccha at court when the news came 
 in of the Roman defeat, and the raging Bacchante 
 came on the stage with the actual head of the great 
 adversary. But these Parthians were blocked out 
 from Hellenism and so was the still more remote 
 province of the empire Bactria (Balkh), where we 
 should hardly have suspected that any Greek influ- 
 ences remained, were it not that the beautiful coins, 
 and the names of their kings upon these coins, show 
 that they assumed Greek titles and copied the coinage 
 of the Hellenistic empires. 
 
 Thus then you see two great facts: (i) the gradual 
 breaking off of eastern provinces from the Seleucid 
 empire, which was ill-cemented in many ways, and 
 moreover severed by two gigantic deserts; and (2) the 
 revolting provinces or kingdoms, though distinctly 
 
loo THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 oriental in the main, were modified considerably by 
 the influence of Alexander's conquest. If it be true 
 that this fusion of people brought Buddhist teaching 
 into Galilee, who can estimate its vast significance ? 
 
 Let us now turn to Asia Minor, the other ex- 
 tremity of the vast kingdom of Seleucus. Here the 
 power which asserted itself as a separate kingdom, 
 and had a great effect upon the pohtics and the art 
 of the world, was the city and afterward the kingdom 
 of Pergamum. Originally the seat, not of govern- 
 ment, but of treasure, its strong position made it 
 the natural spot for a resolute governor (Philetaerus) 
 to assert his independence, and when the greater king- 
 doms were disturbed. King Lysimachus of Thrace 
 warring with Syria for the rule in Asia Minor, 
 the first satrap steered his way between the contend- 
 ing parties. His greatest successor, the first Attalus, 
 from whom the whole dynasty is called Attalid, ruled 
 long and brilliantly, having not only defeated all 
 the attempts of the Seleucids, but having earned 
 the gratitude of all Asia Minor by a great victory 
 over the Galatians, who were both terrifying and 
 plundering all Asia. During a reign of forty-five 
 years he consolidated the wealth and position of Per- 
 gamum so as to make it something distinctive in the 
 history of Hellenism. 
 
 A careful study of the relations of the Pergamene 
 kings to their city and people disclose to me clearly 
 the peculiar character of the Hellenistic sovereignties 
 
SYRIA loi 
 
 SO popular in that age of the world. Pergamum was 
 a regular Greek city, with its assembly, its council, 
 its annual officers, its right of treaty with other free 
 states apparently untouched. The first Attalid 
 never pretended to be king over them, but was 
 merely an officer of a distant prince, keeping treasure 
 for him in the fortress, and conamanding a garrison 
 there. Presently he asserts his independence, and 
 shows it by declaring the independence of Pergamum 
 as a city-state. Hence he is hailed as the "benefac- 
 tor" of the state, presently as the "founder" of its 
 liberties, and its "defender." Even when he as- 
 sumes the title of king, it is an abstract title, not the 
 King of Pergamum. He keeps armies and conquers 
 outlying territory, but he never interferes, except by 
 way of advice, with the deliberations of the city. Of 
 course, his advice is that of a superior, with power 
 to enforce it, but theoretically he stands outside the 
 constitution as a powerful and ever-present friend. 
 The whole conception seems to us a strange hypoc- 
 risy, which deceived no one; yet how jealously did 
 the Emperor Augustus copy this very poHcy ! 
 
 I thought it right to enter upon this digression 
 because my sketch of the Hellenistic world would 
 not only be incomplete, which it must be, but false, 
 which I hope it will not be, if you did not hear some- 
 thing about these second-rate states, which were 
 always striving to keep the balance of power among 
 their formidable neighbours. 
 
I02 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 Of course, there was a great contrast between the 
 eastern and the western revolj^gainst Syria. The 
 eastern were national, the western political; for 
 Syria, or rather the kingdom of Antioch, affected 
 Hellenism thoroughly, as much as Pergamum or 
 Byzantium. But the restless nature of the Asiatic 
 Greeks, and their love of local liberties, still more 
 their fancy for the nobler title of "free cities," made 
 them bad subjects in the sense that Greeks have 
 always been bad subjects of any power. 
 
 I have left, however, for the last in the series of 
 revolts far the most interesting and important — 
 that of the Jews, resulting in a national dynasty and 
 a consoUdation of a distinct national type. 
 
 Let me review for a moment the history of the 
 Jews from the Babylonian conquest down to this 
 famous struggle. When they had returned from 
 their captivity and rebuilt their temple, it was natural 
 that the many Jews who had not come back, from 
 various motives, should nevertheless look with sen- 
 timental pride to their old reUgious capital and 
 regard it as a sort of spiritual centre. This was the 
 famous diaspora, of which we hear so much, and 
 which gradually came to support the temple by send- 
 ing yearly offerings, hke the Peter's pence sent from 
 Ireland and other countries to Rome. These for- 
 eign Jews were in many respects more devout than 
 the Palestine people, especially when the favour of 
 Alexander brought Hellenism into good repute 
 among the latter. 
 
SYRIA 103 
 
 We find the educated classes gradually dividing 
 themselves into a worldly, cultivated, cosmopolitan 
 party, which thought it enough to believe the letter 
 of the five books of Moses, and adopt free-thinking 
 along with Greek culture beyond it; and the stricter 
 people, who with Ezra had given deeper meaning 
 and development to their faith, had adopted the 
 Prophets and the fuller interpretation of the Law, 
 and above all were exclusive as to all foreign culture. 
 You will have recognised in the former the aristo- 
 crats and people of dry Mosaic orthodoxy, the 
 Sadducees; in the latter, the Pharisees. During the 
 first century of Hellenism the influences of both 
 Egypt and Syria were such that the Sadducees 
 had their own way in Jerusalem. We are told by 
 Josephus that Greek games and exercises were com- 
 ing into fashion, that the Jewish youths were assum- 
 ing the ephebic dress, and that everything seemed 
 to portend a rapid Hellenization of this clever and 
 practical race. With the decay of the Egyptian 
 royal house, and the rise of Antiochus the Great, 
 Palestine passed permanently out of Egyptian hands, 
 and became annexed to Syria, so that henceforth it 
 is to Antioch they look as their capital, and no longer 
 to Alexandria. It is, however, most characteristic 
 of how far the Jewish domestication in Egypt had 
 gone, that they proposed to the seventh Ptolemy, and 
 carried out, the scheme of estabhshing an imitation 
 temple with its worship near Heliopolis, so as to 
 
I04 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 save the trouble and expense of their many pilgrim- 
 ages to Jerusalem, now the province of another 
 kingdom. The practice, however, of both Ptolemies 
 and Seleucids had been to require of the Jewish 
 high-priest, who was practically their satrap, a 
 definite yearly tribute, and for the rest to allow the 
 Jews to abide by their own customs and laws. All 
 ambitious Jews learned Greek, and went to study man- 
 ners, and spend money, at Antioch or Alexandria, and 
 there seemed every prospect that gradually Palestine 
 would follow the example of Syria, and conform to 
 the habits of the many Greek cities settled along the 
 coast, and in groups at the upper course of the 
 Jordan. The hterature which remains to us shows 
 clearly this progressive influence of Hellenism. 
 
 But there came a crisis when one madman was 
 the instrument of Providence in staying all this 
 natural development and in restoring to its pristine 
 preciseness and vigour the definite and now indelible 
 nationality of the Jews. When the Romans came 
 to know them, there is not a word of what Josephus 
 tells regarding their Hellenistic tendencies. The 
 crisis was the reign of Antiochus IV, the Antiochus 
 Epiphanes of history, the "abomination of desola- 
 tion" in the prophet Daniel, whose persecutions 
 roused the national resistance, and established the 
 Maccabees on the throne of Jewish Palestine — all 
 these things you will find told and estimated in my 
 Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman 
 Conquest. 
 
SYRIA 105 
 
 And now that we have gone through in brief 
 detail the principal features of the kingdoms of 
 Macedonia, Egypt, and Syria, as part of Alexander's 
 Hellenistic empire, I think I shall best occupy our 
 remaining time with some remarks upon the general 
 features of Hellenistic life, in which I shall resume 
 and repeat some of the points to which I have 
 already called your passing attention. 
 
GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON 
 HELLENISM 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 
 
 If we consider in its large features what the 
 early Hellenistic period has done for us in literature, 
 we may divide its action into the care and preserva- 
 tion of Hellenic masterpieces, and the production 
 of works of its own. As regards the former, there 
 can be no doubt that the creation of the great cosmo- 
 pohtan library at Alexandria, and the great trade in 
 books which came thence, were the greatest acts of 
 protection ever done for the greatest literature the 
 world has seen. And not only were all the master- 
 pieces of the Golden Age sought out and catalogued, 
 but the chief Hbrarian made it his business to pubUsh 
 critical studies on the purity of the texts, and to see 
 that the Alexandrian text represented the best and 
 soundest tradition. Recent discoveries on papyri, 
 commencing with the scrap I found in the Petrie 
 papyri, show, e. g., that the current texts of Homer 
 were very loose and various, so that the critics of 
 Alexandria, especially the famous Aristarchus, had 
 much to do in pruning, and in rejecting unauthorised 
 additions and repetitions. The Homer we now have 
 is that purified edition. What we now read is prob- 
 ably shorter by one-sixth than the pre-Alexandrine 
 texts. As regards the lyric and tragic poets, we may 
 
 109 
 
no THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 be sure the same care was exercised, though the varia- 
 tions and additions and corruptions which occurred 
 in the texts of the widely diffused and much-recited 
 Homer could hardly occur in the early lyric poets, 
 where the very strict metre preserved the poet's words 
 and made the interpolation of stray lines gener- 
 ally impossible. It is a credible tradition that the 
 second Ptolemy borrowed from Athens the original 
 stage copies of the great tragedians on the huge 
 deposit of one hundred talents of silver, and that 
 he abandoned the money and secured the originals, 
 sending back copies to the city. So there was col- 
 lected at this wonderful library all that was rare 
 and precious, ordered and catalogued by competent 
 scholars. I go a step farther, and say that, though 
 we have no explicit record telhng us the fact, there 
 must have been some regular permission to copy 
 books in the library, and, multiplying them by slave 
 hands, to disperse them by way of trade all over the 
 Greek-speaking world. Let me cite to you one piece 
 of evidence which I think conclusive. We have 
 now got to know one Greek-speaking district — an 
 outlying and remote district of Egypt — the Fayyum. 
 By the researches first of Mr. Petrie, then of Messrs. 
 Grenfell and Hunt, we have unearthed in the walls 
 of coffins, in rubbish heaps, or even laid beside the 
 dead, during a period not merely post-Christian 
 or Roman, but reaching back to the second Ptol- 
 emy, all manner of fragments of writing, which 
 
GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM iii 
 
 show us that not only the great masters — Homer, 
 Pindar, Euripides, Demosthenes, Menander — were 
 household books, but all manner of the more out- 
 of-the-way authors — the Contest of Homer and 
 Hesiod, the more difficult lyric poets, works on 
 metric and on chronology — all had filtered into this 
 outlying province, and had become part of the 
 people's education. If these things happened in 
 the Fayyum, how much more easily would the 
 export of books take place directly from Alexandria 
 to all the old Hellenic coasts ? 
 
 I say, then, that not merely for the preservation, 
 but for the diffusion, of Hellenic literature, the work 
 of Alexandria was a permanent education to the 
 whole Greek-speaking world; and we know that in 
 due time Pergamum began to do similar work. The 
 very words "paper" and "parchment" are the echo 
 of " papyrus " and " Pergamene," thus perpetuating to 
 modem Europe a record of the benefits of Hellenism. 
 
 But men who devote themselves to preserving 
 books are not the men likely to produce books, 
 unless it be books of learning; and of such there were 
 plenty. The Greek notes we call scholia, preserved 
 in some manuscripts of our classical texts, show us 
 the care and skill with which the Alexandrian schol- 
 ars published explanations and commentaries upon 
 the great masters.' 
 
 * There was found among the Petrie papyri (and smce lost) a short letter 
 asking for the loan of notes upon the Iliad. The scraps of commentary we 
 have found show us the practical nature of these notes. There was also a 
 received system of critical signs, which have survived in two or three texts. 
 
112 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 But returning to literature, there is no doubt that 
 the most fashionable poets and prose writers of 
 Alexandria — the Robert Louis Stevensons and the 
 Rudyard Kiplings of their day — were not of the level 
 of the Golden Age. Yet withal, as I already have 
 told you, we have from Alexandria Theocritus, and we 
 have the love-novel. ' I will here add a word upon two 
 more of these poets, whom I had then passed by. 
 The first is Aratus, who was indeed a Hellenistic, 
 but not an Alexandrian, poet, whose didactic work 
 on the astronomy of use for navigation, and on the 
 signs of the weather of use for farming, has survived 
 to us complete. The poem in itself is calm and 
 prosy, nor would it command any modem inter- 
 est, had not one of the greatest artists the world 
 has ever seen — the poet Virgil — used it as the model 
 for the signs of weather in his exquisite Georgics. 
 He has translated faithfully and closely enough, but 
 by his marvellous alchemy has transformed the 
 Greek silver into Roman gold. 
 
 Nor is this the only debt that Virgil, and through 
 him the whole world of European Uterature, owes to 
 the Hellenism of Alexandria. We still possess the 
 Argonautics of ApoUonius the Rhodian — a pedant- 
 poet of the same generation. In the midst of pages 
 of tedious prolixity, which have forever damned the 
 popularity of the work, occurs the great episode of the 
 meeting and love at first sight of Medea and Jason. 
 
 ' Above, p. 70 
 
GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 113 
 
 The treatment of this world-wide, but never world- 
 worn, theme is so wholly fresh, so wholly un-Hellenic, 
 that it requires no subtle criticism to see in it the 
 broad light of the oriental love-novel which had first 
 dawned in the East upon the companions of 
 Alexander. It is no longer the physical, but the 
 sentimental, side of that passion which interests the 
 poet and his readers. The actual marriage of the 
 lovers is but an episode, in which the surrounding 
 anxieties and the unhappy omens take the foremost 
 place. Whether Virgil, in painting the love of Dido 
 for ^neas, had any closer model to copy we may 
 never know. But it is now a commonplace of criti- 
 cism that the episode has been inspired by the 
 spirit, if not the letter, of Apollonius. There are 
 the same psychology, the same portrait of the all- 
 absorbing sentiment, the same chastity of language 
 where a Hellenic poet would have been naturalistic. 
 The world has neglected this third book of the Argo- 
 nautics as if it were a poem of no importance, and 
 it is not for me to do more than record my dissent. 
 But even were my judgment astray, surely the poet 
 who attuned the dehcate instrument on which 
 Virgil rendered his pathetic melody has done no 
 ordinary service to mankind.' 
 
 Time fails me to speak of the other Alexandrians 
 from whom lesser Roman poets — Tibullus, Proper- 
 
 » I refer the reader for further details to my History of Creek Literature, 
 where there is a chapter on Theocritus and Apollonius. 
 
114 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 tius, Catullus — drew whatever quasi-inspiration they 
 possessed. The most remarkable poem of the best 
 of these — Catullus — is the Atys. We have no direct 
 clue or indication that it is borrowed from the Greek. 
 And yet there is no man who has studied the obliga- 
 tions of Latin to Greek poetry who is not convinced 
 that it must have been derived from some Hellenistic 
 original. 
 
 If you will learn fully what that age of Hel- 
 lenism produced, look at the huge catalogues of 
 Susemihl (Liieratur der Alexandrinerzeit) and Vol. V 
 of Croiset's Litteraiure Grecque. And yet, astonishing 
 to relate, both these books omit all mention of our 
 greatest and best specimen of Syrian Greek — I mean 
 the books of the New Testament. Here, if any- 
 where, you will see the force of Hellenism in inter- 
 penetrating and moulding the culture of a very foreign, 
 a very stubborn, race. I shall not dwell on Paul of 
 Tarsus, for though born a Jew and always in spirit a 
 Jew, he had enjoyed the education of a great centre of 
 Greek learning — the schools of Tarsus. But consider 
 the language of the synoptic gospels. Here we have 
 the ordinary Greek of Palestine and Syria written 
 by men who seem to have laid little claim to be liter- 
 ary artists. They write a dialect simple and rude in 
 comparison with Attic Greek; they use forms which 
 shock the purists who examine for Cambridge 
 scholarships. But did any men ever tell a great 
 story with more simplicity, with more directness, 
 
GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 115 
 
 with more power ? Take, for example, the opening 
 chapter of St. Luke's gospel. Can any artist from 
 Theocritus down show us an idyll of more perfect 
 grace? Take the narrative of the Passion. Who 
 has ever told great sorrow with simpler pathos, 
 with more touching modesty, with more native 
 dignity ? Believe me against all the pedants of the 
 world, the dialect that tells such a story in such a 
 way is no poor language, but the outcome of a great 
 and a fruitful intellectual education. Such was the 
 education that Hellenism brought to the Syrian world. 
 Let us now turn to art, and ask what was the 
 influence of Hellenism upon the nations which it 
 drew within its mighty influence. Of the recognised 
 fine arts the two most subtle and subjective are lost 
 to us — music and painting. The hand of time has 
 been against us, and we have only stray fragments 
 which give us not even adequate suggestions. The 
 wall-painting of Pompeii, and in a few of the Pala- 
 tine rooms at Rome, is not the work of artists, but 
 of operatives, and is as defective in drawing as are 
 most of the clay figurines of similar date from Tana- 
 gra and elsewhere. The remains of Greek melodies, 
 of which we understand the notation, are not only to 
 us exceedingly ugly, but so queer and strange that 
 no musician can attempt to restore a single bar, 
 where there is a gap or fracture in the inscription. 
 But let us take up sculpture and architecture. And 
 first of all let us reduce to its proper value the vulgar 
 
ii6 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 phrase which assigns to Greek art a golden and a 
 silver age. The hfe of Alexander was supposed to 
 be the dividing line. Lysippus the sculptor, who 
 had the privilege of reproducing the king's form, 
 was the last of the real masters. Among the many 
 falsehoods I was taught about Greek art when I 
 was young, that was one of the most flagrant. Go 
 now to the Louvre in Paris, and walk through that 
 famous collection of Greek and Grseco-Roman 
 sculpture. Two masterpieces will forever stand out 
 from the rest in your memory. The first is the Nik^ 
 of Samothrace, that figure of victory that once stood 
 on a marble prow heralding the success of King 
 Demetrius the Besieger with her trumpet. The 
 other, in the place of honour in its gallery, surrounded 
 by a crowd whose comments admiration is wont to 
 hush, is the Venus of Melos. Both are works of the 
 so-called silver age — one of them as late as the 
 Roman domination of Greece. Need I add that 
 at Rome the very inferior Apollo Belvedere and 
 the Laocoon, truly works of a silver age, yet have 
 fascinated centuries of men ever since the Renais- 
 sance ? 
 
 In recent years we have much fresh evidence of 
 the diffusion of this noble art into the East. The 
 great glory of the museum at Constantinople is the 
 famous tomb of Sidon, which so amazed its dis- 
 coverers that they called it the tomb of Alexander 
 the Great. That, of course, was absurd. But as 
 
GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 117 
 
 to its age there is no doubt. It commemorates in its 
 noble reliefs the conflicts of Macedonians, Greeks, 
 and Persians, and was evidently intended to honour 
 the tomb of some companion of Alexander, probably 
 the Sidonian king Philocles, who was high admiral 
 to the first Ptolemy. We have never found any 
 sepulchral monument of such consummate beauty. 
 
 But if the date had not been thus fixed, we should 
 have seen another recurrence of the controversy 
 which rages over every new masterpiece in marble 
 or in bronze which is recovered from the earth or the 
 sea. Is it Hellenic or Hellenistic? Is it of the 
 fourth or the third century before Christ ? Can there 
 be any better proof than this, that Hellenism had not 
 only spread a knowledge of, and a taste for, great 
 plastic art throughout the nearer East, but that it 
 also raised up no mean successors to the great men 
 of genius whose work in marble and in bronze has 
 never since been rivalled, not even by all the study 
 and all the resources of modern civilisation? 
 
 The case is far simpler with architecture. We 
 may say broadly that the Corinthian style is exclu- 
 sively Hellenistic and Roman. All the great remains 
 in that style, from the splendours of the Olympian 
 temple at Athens to the colonnades at Palmyra — all 
 are essentially the product of Hellenism. Nay 
 more, the restorations of old buildings in that age 
 are so artistic that in many cases — as, for example, 
 at the temple of Eleusis — we are still in doubt 
 
ii8 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 whether the work is archaistic or archaic; whether 
 it be the original execution of Mnesicles, the con- 
 temporary of Pericles, or a far later Hellenistic, nay 
 possibly Roman- Greek, restoration. 
 
 As regards the refinements and the luxuries of 
 everyday life, we may confidently assert that this 
 age advanced with great strides. Hellenic and 
 Macedonian household furniture was so simple as to 
 be almost rude, and we can quite appreciate the 
 astonishment of Alexander when he burst in upon 
 the splendours of the Persian court, even under can- 
 vas, in the midst of a campaign. "This indeed," 
 he cried when he saw the purple and the plate, "is 
 dining like a king ! " So in Egypt the antique refine- 
 ments of a civihsation of thousands of years must 
 have impressed the Macedonians, whose hfe had 
 been spent in rude camps and campaigns, and we 
 may be sure that all manner of small conveniences 
 in daily hfe were added to the so-called necessities 
 of an advancing culture. The implements of toilet 
 found at Pompeii show what the middle classes of 
 Italy had attained when in near contact with Helle- 
 nistic refinement. 
 
 Recent discoveries have shed new light on the 
 achievements of Hellenism in pure science and in 
 practical business. The longer we study the mathe- 
 matical books of the Greeks, most of them dating 
 from this epoch, the more we are persuaded that 
 they knew vastly more than we learn from their 
 
GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 119 
 
 explicit statements. It was only of late ye^rs that 
 Mr. Penrose discovered the delicate and complicated 
 system of curves applied to the building of the Par- 
 thenon, which does not contain in its plan a single 
 straight line. There must have been large mathe- 
 matical knowledge in the mind of this Hellenic 
 Wren; we know from the fragments of Pythagorean 
 lore that the science of numbers occupied the deepest 
 attention of that early sect. We know also that the 
 somewhat clumsy notation of quantities in Attic 
 accounts, which is very analogous to the Roman 
 figures, was replaced by the much simpler alphabetic 
 notation, wherein all the accountants of the Fayyum 
 papyri make up their sums. Historians of Greek 
 mathematics, in ignorance of this new notation, have 
 said marvellous things concerning the impossibility 
 of multiplication and division, and the necessity of 
 using the primitive abacus with its counters. We 
 have never yet found a Greek abacus, and shall not 
 find one till we dig up an infant school. The papyri 
 deal in very large and complicated computations 
 which range from the use of millions down to series 
 of minute fractions, and though they do make mis- 
 takes, their counting is as accurate as average work 
 of the present day. It would lead us too far to give 
 you the details proving these statements. They 
 will presently be published by my friend, Professor 
 Smyly, who combines an exceptional knowledge 
 of Greek papyri with a very complete training in 
 mathematics. 
 
120 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 Not only in pure science, and in practical sci- 
 ence, but in the whole management of affairs by 
 departments, by a series of graduated officials, by 
 keeping careful minutes, by all the machinery now 
 used in business houses, and in state bureaus — in 
 all this the Hellenistic age had reached quite a high 
 level. Need I add that banking, the keeping of 
 money out on interest, the payment of bills and 
 draughts on bankers, were all perfectly understood 
 and practised in Greek Egypt two centuries before 
 Christ ? If all this attainment had not been lost or 
 hopelessly blurred in the Dark Ages, what centuries 
 of time would Europe have saved in her painful 
 progress toward civilisation ? 
 
 On the change in the political ideals of the age I 
 have already said a good deal in my discourse on 
 Xenophon. According as Greek conquests and 
 Greek culture spread over a vast area, the old city 
 constitutions with their tiny states were found 
 wholly inadequate. Two solutions were possible; 
 either large confederations or monarchies. The 
 natural question for any American to ask is this: 
 How was it that a confederation among free states 
 did not commend itself universally, as opposed to 
 monarchy — an idea to which almost all the Greeks 
 had been for centuries hostile ? The answer is very 
 direct and simple, and will come home with peculiar 
 force to those who have Uved through a great crisis 
 in the history of these United States. When a num- 
 
GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 121 
 
 ber of independent states enter a league or confedera- 
 tion and enjoy its benefits, has each one of them a 
 right to carry on separate negotiations with foreign 
 states; or, if that be not permitted, has it a right to 
 secede? To these two questions the Greeks gave 
 but the one answer. Each contracting state pre- 
 serves its inherent right to treat with any power it 
 chooses, and every such state has also the right to 
 secede from its confederation. Even when states 
 bound themselves by promises to maintain joint 
 action, all Greek sentiment was against coercing 
 disobedient members. It might be done by force, 
 but it was never done as a matter of argument 
 upon the rights of the case. This condition of the 
 Greek mind wrecked all confederations in the long 
 run and left as the only other imperial solution the 
 acquiescence in a monarchy with sufficient military 
 force to keep its subject cities in order. From a 
 material point of view, these monarchies had the 
 power to carry out conquests, and so open up 
 new provinces to Greek commerce and Greek enter- 
 prise. Moreover, there were many city-states, 
 especially in Asia Minor, which were bordered by 
 wild mountaineers, or semi-savage tribes, from whom 
 they required protection. A strong monarch could 
 subdue, or At least repress, the raids of these people, 
 and so the subjects of a king found themselves far 
 safer then the members of a league. These con- 
 verging reasons, not to speak of the briUiant example 
 
122 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 set by Alexander the Great, determined the Helle- 
 nistic world, still jealous for the internal liberties of 
 every Greek city, to acquiesce in the sundry "bene- 
 factors" and "saviours," by which titles they justified 
 to themselves the submission to personages who 
 differed only in outward circumstances from the 
 tyrants that were the bugbears of Hellenic life. 
 
 Yet one more reflection, and I conclude. The 
 brilhancy of city hfe, the comforts and conveniences 
 with which the citizens became supphed, the privi- 
 leges which they obtained, gave to all this epoch of 
 men a strong tendency to migrate from the country 
 into the towns. So it was that to Hve Acw/itTjSoV, in 
 villages, Hke the pagani of the Romans, came to 
 suggest boorishness and want of refinement. In the 
 book of Revelations, which concludes our New Tes- 
 tament, the ideal of the future is no longer the Ely- 
 sian fields, but the New Jerusalem come down from 
 heaven, a city with walls and gates and splendid 
 streets. This, and not fair glades and trees and 
 streams, was the conception of the highest happiness 
 produced by average Hellenism. But with the 
 change there was also a loss of simplicity and inno- 
 cence such as has always been the boon and privilege 
 of country Uf e, and this was felt by a few superior 
 minds. The old adage, "God made the country, 
 but the devil made the towns," is best of all illus- 
 trated by Dion Chrysostom in his famous oration 
 (VII) About Poverty, which you will see fully re- 
 
GENERAL REFLECTIONS ON HELLENISM 123 
 
 hearsed in my forthcoming Greek Life from Polyhius 
 to Plutarch; and so it came to pass that strong and 
 fresh barbarians from their wild fields and forests 
 were able to overthrow all the refined but effete 
 town civiUsation of the Graeco- Roman empire. 
 
HELLENISTIC INFLUENCES ON 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
LECTURE VI 
 HELLENISTIC INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 
 
 In these modem utilitarian days, when it is put 
 upon us to prove what was formerly taken for granted 
 with regard to the Greeks, and we are asked to show in 
 what respects modern culture is still indebted to them, 
 it may be well to make an excursion for once into the 
 domain of theology, into that precious preserve which 
 is supposed the peculiar apanage of the Jews. In 
 the minds of modern Christians Hellenism has been 
 too often associated with heathenism; its art has been 
 considered the handmaid of false gods, and an im- 
 pure mythology; the sermons and letters of St. Paul 
 have been understood as the protest of a converted 
 Jew against the Greek influence that then dominated 
 the world; and there are not wanting those that 
 point to the Italian Renaissance to show that the 
 revival of Greek letters brought with it a violent 
 reaction against the strict dogma and practice of the 
 Christian church. I will now therefore inquire what 
 effects the contact with Hellenistic thought, religion, 
 and civilisation had upon the Christian faith. 
 
 You may have been taught perhaps that here the 
 contact was somewhat remote; that the Jews, a dis- 
 tinct nation, notorious for their hatred of foreigners, 
 127 
 
128 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 developed this faith by the teaching of Christ among 
 themselves, and that it was not till after a great 
 struggle that the completed Christianity was extended 
 to the Gentiles. And you might quote in favour of 
 that view that the first Gentile notice taken of the 
 Christians — the early persecutions, for example, 
 by Nero — merely regarded them as a pecuhar sect 
 of Jews, adding to the unsocial and intolerant char- 
 acter of that race new vices pecuHarly their own. 
 The separation of Jew and Gentile seems so strong 
 in the New Testament that you may be inclined 
 to doubt any serious influence from the Greek 
 side. 
 
 If you will look into Josephus, and read his account 
 of Palestine from the death of Alexander down to the 
 days of Herod the Great, that is to say, for the two 
 centuries preceding the Hf e of Christ — you will change 
 that opinion. As the Jews had once been on the 
 highway between the great mihtary powers of Egypt 
 and of Mesopotamia, and had suffered deep influence 
 from both, so now they lay between Ptolemaic Egypt 
 and the Hellenistic kingdom, of Syria, subject to 
 encroachment from both. In particular, the Seleucid 
 kings who reigned at Antioch had settled what were 
 called free Greek cities in lower Syria, along the 
 course of the Jordan, and Egypt had done so along 
 the sea; so that Palestine was studded with many 
 centres of Greek Hfe. All ambitious young men 
 among the Jews began to learn Greek, and seek 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 129 
 
 promotion at the Syrian or Egyptian courts, where 
 they often rose to high office and consideration. 
 And so there came to be formed at Jerusalem a 
 Hellenistic party, who thought that the Jews should 
 assimilate themselves to the Greeks, in opposition 
 to the national party, led by the Pharisees, who held 
 fast, not only to the law of Moses, but to the tradi- 
 tions which had grown up in the schools, such as we 
 have them in the Talmud. I have no time here to 
 follow out in detail this conflict, but will merely point 
 out to you that, close to the time of Christ, Herod the 
 Great had been a great Hellenizer of his subjects. He 
 had not only estabhshed a Greek theatre and amphi- 
 theatre at Jerusalem, but had rebuilt the Jewish 
 temple magnificently in Greek style, as he also 
 rebuilt many great temples for the Greeks of Asia 
 Minor and the ^gean islands. With him stood 
 that division of the Jewish nobility, known as the 
 Sadducees, who were ready to obey the mere law 
 of Moses, but repudiated all the later developments 
 of the Jewish faith, and with them the belief in 
 spirits and in angels and in a future Hfe. 
 
 In this temper of the governing class it is easy to 
 see how great would be the influence of the Greek- 
 speaking people settled in Palestine. All the higher 
 civilisation, all the art, all the science, lay with them. 
 They were the intermediaries between the Jews and 
 the rest of the cultivated world. How important 
 this was to Christianity is not a matter of inference. 
 
I30 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 but to be seen clearly from our Lord's own words, 
 particularly as we find them recorded in the gospel 
 of St. John. Jesus teaches, in the first place, that his 
 religion is no longer a national reUgion, confined to 
 a special people, centred in a special shrine, but 
 intended for all men and all countries, when the 
 woman of Samaria puts forth the antiquated view, 
 and insists upon the importance of her place of wor- 
 ship.' 
 
 There is another passage in the same direction, 
 but even of more importance and this again in the 
 gospel of St. John, the most spiritual but by far the 
 most Hellenistic of our gospels.'' Who were these 
 Greeks? Plainly those of the free Greek cities 
 estabUshed in Palestine and hitherto standing aloof 
 from the Jewish rehgion. What Christ then meant 
 to say was plainly this: "It is only when Greeks 
 come to acknowledge my gospel that it will indeed 
 spread over the civilised world." And so from 
 the very beginning, though we may believe that in 
 
 ' "Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, 
 when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship 
 the Father. . . . i, God is a Spirit : and they that worship him 
 must worship in spirit and truth."+-John 4:21, 24. 
 
 2 " Now there were certain Greeks among those that went up 
 to worship at the feast: these therefore came to Philip, who was 
 of Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked him, saying, Sir, we would see 
 Jesus. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: Andrew cometh, and 
 Philip, and they tell Jesus. And Jesus answereth them, saying, 
 The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified." — 
 John 12:20-23. 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 131 
 
 Galilee and among his intimates our Lord spoke 
 Aramaic, and though we know that some of his last 
 words upon the cross were in that language, yet his 
 public teaching, his discussions with the Pharisees, 
 his talk with Pontius Pilate, were certainly carried on 
 mainly in Greek. I need not dilate upon the details 
 of a question you will find fully discussed in many 
 theological works. It is not without significance that 
 the author of the first gospel was at the "receipt of 
 custom," where he must necessarily have used 
 Greek to deal with his Roman masters. And so we 
 find the first explanation of the gospel of Christ, not 
 intrusted to the simple fishermen who attended him, 
 but handed over to Mark, then to Matthew and Luke 
 — more educated men, who wrote at second hand, 
 advised by the original witnesses; nor is it till late 
 in the first century, and after much training in the 
 Greek world, that the apostles come forward and 
 write epistles, and these uniformly in Greek. 
 
 Meanwhile the propagation of the gospel to the 
 Gentiles is intrusted to Paul — a man versed not only 
 in the Greek language, but in Greek philosophy; 
 and, far from insisting upon the radical difference 
 of the Greek notions of religion from those of the 
 new Christianity, he is at pains more than once to 
 tell his Greek hearers that the faith he advocates 
 is not so much a new religion as an explicit and clear 
 revelation of truths in accordance with the theology 
 and the morahty which the best of the Greeks had 
 
132 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 taught. Read the two passages: Rom. i : 16-20^ and 
 Acts 17 : 24-28.^ But before I go into the doctrine of 
 this latter passage, I must complete what I have said 
 about the language. It is not enough to say that 
 Greek was the current language of Christianity; 
 it may fairly be said that it was the only language. 
 Even the quotations from the Old Testament were 
 now accessible in the Septuagint, and we know 
 that is the version commonly used in the New Testa- 
 ment. There is no evidence whatever that any 
 other tongue (save Aramaic to certain Jewish audi- 
 ences by men whose native speech was Aramaic) 
 
 I "For I am not ashamed of the gospel: for it is the power of 
 God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, 
 and also to the Greek. For therein is revealed a righteousness of 
 God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous 
 shall live by faith. For the vn-ath of God is revealed from heaven 
 against all ungodhness and unrighteousness of men, who hinder 
 the truth in unrighteousness; because that which is knovm of God 
 is manifest in them; for God manifested it unto them. For the 
 invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly 
 seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his 
 everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse." 
 
 = "The God that made the world and all things therein, he, 
 being Lord of heaven and earth, dweUeth not in temples made 
 with hands; neither is he served by men's hands, as though he 
 needed anything, seeing he himself giveth to aU life, and breath, 
 and all things; and he made of one every nation of men to dwell 
 on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed 
 seasons, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek 
 God, if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he is 
 not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and 
 have our being; as certain even of your own poets have said. For 
 we are also his offspring." 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 133 
 
 was used for at least a century after the foundation 
 of Christianity. 
 
 Some of you may, however, be anxious to cry out 
 to me : What about the gift of tongues ? What about 
 the crowd on the day of Pentecost ? Well, you ought 
 all to be familiar with the important fact that this 
 miracle of speaking in tongues was intended as a 
 manifestation of miraculous power, not as a practical 
 engine for converting the world. It is plain from 
 the very narrative in Acts, chap. 2, that the multitude 
 which came together, being "devout men living at 
 Jerusalem, Jews, out of every nation under heaven," 
 had a common language, in which they communicated 
 and expressed their astonishment; and it was in this 
 language, probably Greek, that St. Peter addressed 
 them all. He has no difhculty in being understood. 
 When we further examine the preaching of the gospel 
 according to the Acts and Epistles, we are struck with 
 the absence of all use of this apparently powerful 
 engine for missionary labour. Never do we hear of it 
 being called into use. There was no more obvious, 
 nay more crying, need of using the gift of tongues, 
 which St. Paul says he possessed in a very high de- 
 gree, than when he was shipwrecked on the island of 
 Malta, and a venomous serpent fastened upon his 
 head. He shook it off and felt no hurt. But the 
 natives, who had at first thought him a malefactor 
 pursued by the vengeance of the gods, suddenly 
 thought him some divine person. Here, then, was 
 
134 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 a rare opportunity for preaching the gospel to these 
 poor heathen. But no, St. Paul leaves them in their 
 ignorance, and proceeds forthwith to preach to the 
 Roman governor of the island, who of course under- 
 stood Greek. 
 
 But far more important, nay, decisive, is St. Paul's 
 I Cor., chap. 14,' which therefore needs no further 
 
 '"Follow after love; yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but 
 rather that ye may prophesy. For he that speaketh in a tongue 
 speaketh not unto men, but unto God; for no man understandeth; 
 but in the spirit he speaketh mysteries. But he that prophesieth 
 speaketh unto men edification, and exhortation, and consolation. 
 He that speaketh in a tongue edifieth himself; but he that prophe- 
 sieth edifieth the church. Now I would have you aU speak with 
 tongues, but rather that ye should prophesy: and greater is he 
 that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues, except he 
 interpret, that the church may receive edifying. But now, 
 brethren, if I come unto you speaking with tongues, what shall I 
 profit you, unless I speak to you either by way of revelation, or of 
 knowledge, or of prophesying, or of teaching? Even things 
 without life, giving a voice, whether pipe or harp, if they give not 
 a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped 
 or harped ? For if the trumpet give an uncertain voice, who shall 
 prepare himself for war ? So also ye, unless ye utter by the tongue 
 speech easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is 
 spoken ? for ye vsdll be speaking into the air. There are, it may 
 be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and no kind is without 
 signification. If then I know not the meaning of the voice, I 
 shall be to him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh 
 will be a barbarian unto me. So also ye, since ye are zealous of 
 spiritual gifts, seek that ye may abound unto the edifying of the 
 church. Wherefore let him that speaketh in a tongue pray that 
 he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prayeth, 
 but my understanding is unfruitful. AAThat is it then ? I will 
 pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 135 
 
 comment. The use of tongues not being once 
 alluded to as a missionary engine, I say, then, Greek 
 was not only the vehicle, but the exclusive vehicle, 
 of the new religion. 
 
 But why, you will ask me, have I been at such 
 pains to insist upon this point ? Does it matter 
 what language Christianity adopted, beyond the 
 
 I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding 
 also. Else if thou bless with the spirit, how shall he that filleth 
 the place of the unlearned say the Amen at thy giving of thanks, 
 seeing he knoweth not what thou sayest ? For thou verily givest 
 thanks well, but the other is not edified. I thank God I speak 
 with tongues more than you all : howbeit in the church I had rather 
 speak five words with my understanding, that I might instruct 
 others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue. 
 
 "Brethren, be not children in mind: yet in malice be ye babes, 
 but in mind be men. In the law it is written. By men of strange 
 tongues, and by the Ups of strangers will I speak unto this people; 
 and not even thus will they hear me, saith the Lord. Wherefore, 
 tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to the unbe- 
 lieving : but prophesying is for a sign, not to the unbelieving, but 
 to them that believe. If therefore the whole church be assem- 
 bled together and all speak with tongues, and there come in men 
 unlearned or unbelieving, will they not say that ye are mad ? 
 But if all prophesy, and there come in one unbelieving or unlearned, 
 he is reproved by all, he is judged by all; the secrets of his heart are 
 made manifest; and so he will fall down on his face and worship 
 God, declaring that God is among you indeed. 
 
 •'What is it then, brethren ? When ye come together, each one 
 hath a psalm, hath a teaching, hath a revelation, hath a tongue, 
 hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying. 
 If any man speaketh in a tongue, let it be by two, or at the most 
 three, and that in turn; and let one interpret: but if there be no 
 interpreier, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak 
 to himself, and to God." 
 
136 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 importance and convenience of having the current 
 language of the Old World for its instrument ? Any 
 other person desiring to spread his knowledge over 
 the world at that time would have adopted the same 
 means; it is therefore not essential, but accidental, 
 to Christianity. 
 
 It seems to me that this is a very incomplete and 
 inadequate view of the importance of Greek to Chris- 
 tianity, and that the adoption of that language was of 
 far deeper import than that of mere convenience. 
 
 In the first place, the learning of Greek did not 
 mean the mere picking up of a foreign language 
 through servants or common people. It always 
 impUed mental training, the reading of Homer and 
 other classical authors, the study of some formal phi- 
 losophy. It was distinctly an education. Even in the 
 golden days Isocrates tells us that not he that is born, 
 but he that is educated, is a true Athenian. And so 
 whenever in Josephus, in Polybius, in any author of 
 that day, the knowledge of Greek is mentioned, it is 
 coupled with the attainment of a certain culture, quite 
 different from that of the rest of the world — and not 
 only different, but accepted by nations widely differ- 
 ing, as the best, and as a common, culture. We talk 
 now of European culture, because English, French, 
 Germans, and the rest meet on common ground, have 
 similar intellectual traditions, and use the same kind 
 of arguments. Such was the Hellenistic training of 
 that day; it was the common ground on which Roman 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 137 
 
 and Jew, Macedonian and Syrian, could meet and 
 hold intercourse. 
 
 Let me further insist that this civilisation was so 
 perfect that, as far as it reached, men were more 
 cultivated, in the strict sense, than they ever have 
 been since. We have discovered new forces in 
 nature; we have made new inventions; but we have 
 changed in no way the methods of thinking laid 
 down by the Greeks. None of us has ever replaced 
 Aristotle's logic, or EucUd's geometry, or the analysis 
 of Greek grammar, all of which were current in the 
 Greek world before the rise of Christianity. These 
 people had attained, for the first time in the history 
 of the human race, methods of rational argument 
 which have never been superseded. For which 
 reason, what they have thought out can hardly ever 
 become antiquated, save in small details. Their 
 books are far more modern than all the productions 
 of Europe of the Middle Ages, when Greek was 
 forgotten. 
 
 I said just now that the Hellenistic world was more 
 cultivated in argument than we are nowadays. 
 And if you think this is a strange assertion, examine, 
 I pray you, the intellectual aspects of the epistles of 
 St. Paul, the first Christian writer whom we know 
 to have been thoroughly educated in this training. 
 Remember that he was a practical teacher, not Hkely 
 to commit the fault of speaking over the heads of his 
 audience, as the phrase is. Remember, also, that 
 
138 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 the people he addressed were not the specially 
 intellectual classes, but, with rare exceptions, the 
 middle and lower people. With these facts before 
 you, take up any of his epistles or open letters, 
 intended for such a public, and tell me whether you 
 are not surprised at their intellectual calibre. The 
 arguments are so subtle, the reasoning so close, that 
 the average man or woman of today does not follow 
 them without considerable effort. 
 
 It was my duty for many years to lecture a class of 
 theological students in Trinity College on the epistle 
 to the Romans, so I can speak from long practical 
 experience in this matter. I can tell you that the 
 ordinary college student in Ireland — where men are 
 not wanting, I can assure you, in intelligence — found 
 it well-nigh impossible to reproduce Paul's arguments 
 in any form which showed that he had grasped them, 
 and very often these young men and I wondered 
 together what manner of audience it could be to 
 which such instruction seems to have been simple 
 enough for their practical needs. It is certainly 
 now on the level of the highest university teaching 
 that we possess. ' 
 
 ' I think it right to observe here that American education, 
 which I have observed and discussed in many places and with 
 many competent people, appears to me above all things deficient 
 in its ignoring of common logic as a mental training for every 
 average student. Looking back over forty years' experience of 
 teaching in an old and successful university, I think the logic 
 which we make a compulsory part of our education does more 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 139 
 
 By reason, therefore, of his training in the Greek 
 schools — we might call it the university — of Tarsus, 
 which at that time had a good reputation, you find 
 yourself deahng, not with an Egyptian priest, a Bud- 
 dhist sage, or even a Hebrew prophet, who spoke 
 with the imperfect logic of poetry, substituting 
 authority and miracle for argument, but with a 
 trained dialectician working by rational discussion, 
 and fit to take his place in any theological school of 
 the present day. Such thinking can never grow anti- 
 quated; such culture can never be superseded. And 
 if it were for this reason only, Christianity is fit to 
 retain its hold upon men in the twentieth century, 
 and to withstand many of the objections of mod- 
 em science and of new-fangled philosophy. Can 
 you not imagine with what promptness Paul would 
 have fitted himself for the controversies of today, 
 and taken his place among our foremost thinkers ? 
 There are not a few recent objections that would 
 have seemed familiar to him. 
 
 I contend, therefore, that the pecuhar modemness, 
 the high intellectual standard, of Christianity as we 
 find it in the New Testament, is caused by its contact 
 with Greek culture. 
 
 It would be strange, indeed, if such contact had 
 not also shown itself in the form of Christian doc- 
 practical good than anything else we teach, for it helps men and 
 women in every walk of life to distinguish between good and bad 
 reasoning, and so saves them from falling victims to plausible 
 impostors in science, in theology, and in business. 
 
140 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 trines, in Christian ways of approaching the great 
 mysteries of life. Is it likely that the Christian 
 teachers could adopt the tongue and the dialectic 
 of Plato and not agree with him in the great intel- 
 lectual and moral struggle against false views of the 
 world and false theories of conduct? Is it Hkely 
 that the Christian system would not profit by the 
 Attic Moses as well as by the Hebrew lawgiver ? 
 
 But even if nothing further could be traced to 
 Greek training, the reasonableness of the New Testa- 
 ment, the simplicity of the writers, is the feature 
 which distinguishes our canon from the many 
 spurious additions which were rejected by the early 
 church. If you will consult the apocryphal gospels 
 and Acts, which I take to represent the less educated 
 or oriental side of religion in those days, you will 
 find them to deal in unnecessary miracles, to parade 
 the abnormal and the occult. Compared with 
 these the books of the canon are exceptional in their 
 broad, open-air, noonday simplicity, and their desire 
 to bring everything to the test of fair evidence. This 
 is the rationahstic spirit in the proper and useful 
 sense. 
 
 But think not that this spirit excludes mysteries. 
 Far from it. Consider for a moment St. John's meta- 
 physic — the doctrine of the Logos proposed at the 
 opening of his gospel. This, so far as I know, is a 
 purely Hellenistic conception, derived ultimately from 
 Plato — the idea that the word expresses the Divine 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 141 
 
 Reason, which is incarnate in the second person of the 
 Trinity — the identification of Reason with its natural 
 expression, so that the necessary utterance of God's 
 will is through the word of his personification in the 
 flesh. This profound theory is most undoubtedly 
 foreign to the Semitic side of our rehgion, perfectly 
 strange to Pharisees and Sadducees, but imported 
 from the Greeks. 
 
 So much for speculative theology. What can 
 we find as regards practical life? We find that 
 among other systems of conduct the Greeks had 
 elaborated one, the Stoic, in which St. Paul was edu- 
 cated, which has so many points in common with 
 Christianity that, even if it did not adopt them from 
 the Stoics, we must recognise that the truth was 
 revealed to the Greeks independently of the teaching 
 of St. Paul. In the gospels and in the personal teach- 
 ing of Christ, there is but little which reminds us of 
 this noble but stem system. When we come to Paul's 
 writings, not only the thinking, but the phrases, are 
 frequently Stoic. Thus his whole sermon at Athens 
 paints Christianity as Uke as possible to the creed of 
 his Stoic hearers. He even approaches closely to the 
 pantheism which marks that system. Nor is this 
 likeness confined to a particular sermon, reported, per- 
 haps, not verbally by St. Luke. There are so many 
 points of contact between the most popular advocate 
 of Stoicism, Seneca, in that generation, that books 
 have been written arguing that the Roman sage 
 
142 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 must have been intimate with the writings of the 
 Christian missionary. But this is unnecessary. Both 
 were educated in the same school, and had learned 
 the same commonplaces. Read the account in 
 Cicero' of the ideal wise man, the sage in the moral 
 sense, as the Stoics understood it, and you will 
 recognise at once whence Paul took his famous pas- 
 sage in 2 Cor. 6:9, 10.^ 
 
 But before I analyse this notion of the ideal wise 
 man, let me point out to you some other Stoic 
 notions, which coincide most remarkably with those 
 
 " De Fin., iii, 75 : " Quam gravis vero, quam magnifica, 
 quam constans conficitur persona sapientis! .... Rectius 
 enim appellabitur rex, quam Tarquinius, qui nee se nee suos 
 regere potuit; reetius magister populi quam Sulla, qui trium pesti- 
 ferorum vitiorum, luxuriae, avaritiae, erudelitatis, magister fuit; 
 reetius dives quam Crassus, qui nisi eguisset, nunquam Euphra- 
 tem nulla belli eausa transire voluisset. Recte ejus omnia dicun- 
 tur, qui scit uti solus omnibus; recte etiam puleher appellabitur, 
 animi enim lineamenta sunt pulchriora, quam eorporis; recte 
 solus liber, nee dominationi eujusquam parens, neque obediens 
 eupiditati; reete etiam invictus, eujus etiam si corpus constringa- 
 tur, animo tamen vincula injici nulla possint. Neque expeetet 
 ultimum tempus aetatis, ut tum denique judicetur beatusne 
 fuerit, quum extremum vitae diem morte eonfecerit, quod ille 
 unus e septem sapientibus non sapienter monuit. Nam si beatus 
 unquam fuisset, beatam vitam usque ad ilium a C3T0 exstruetum 
 rogum pertulisset. Quod si ita est, ut neque quisquam, nisi bonus 
 vir, et omnes boni beati sunt, quid philosophia magis colendum, 
 aut quid ut virtute divinius ? " 
 
 = ".... as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and 
 behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet 
 always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having 
 nothing, and yet possessing all things." 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 143 
 
 of Christendom. First, there was the unity of the 
 human race, all ruled by the same Providence. As St. 
 Paul puts it: "there is no longer Jew or Gentile, bond 
 or free," all are in the same sense servants of God. 
 This, as you know, was directly contrary to the 
 Jewish creed of a pecuhar people. In the second 
 place comes the doctrine of the dignity of the individ- 
 ual man, wholly opposed to all the notions of oriental 
 despotism. The Stoic wise man was absolutely 
 free, though the tyrant might bind him; happy, 
 though the tyrant might torture him. The poorest 
 slave, the most complete barbarian, if he attained 
 this spiritual emancipation, was more royal than his 
 sovereign, more independent than his master. And 
 you will see how thoroughly this expresses the spirit 
 of the early Christians, in spite of all their humility. 
 The inestimable value of each human soul, which is 
 worth more than all the material world, is there main- 
 tained with trenchant clearness. 
 
 This strong individuahsm is not more important 
 than the vital doctrine that human virtue is active, 
 and consists in doing good, in promoting God's 
 will practically in the world; not, as many eastern 
 systems had preached, in mere contemplation and 
 passive resignation. This, as you know, has been 
 always and now is the contrast of eastern and western 
 Christianity. Even now the Greek church has not 
 attained the same ideal of active piety that we have; 
 and this our advantage is in no small degree owing 
 
144 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 to the spread of Stoic ideas in the western empire, 
 where the philosophers of that school came to hold 
 the place almost of a local clergy, preaching the vir- 
 tues which Christianity sanctioned, and the purity of 
 life which Christianity enforced.' 
 
 Still more striking was the Stoic theory that unless 
 a man reformed his whole life by an ideal principle, 
 all isolated attempts at good were worth nothing. 
 The fool, as they called the unregenerate, could do 
 nothing good; the wise or regenerate could do no 
 wrong. He was saved from sin and error, and had 
 attained perfection. There was even a controversy 
 among the Stoic doctors, and this three centuries 
 before the time of Christ, whether the change from 
 the spiritual darkness of the ordinary man to the 
 Stoic light was gradual or must be sudden, and there 
 were told among them many cases of instantaneous 
 conversion. 
 
 These doctrines, as you will have at once per- 
 ceived, are not so much the doctrines of general 
 Christianity as those of Protestantism, and you know 
 that St. Paul has been often called the apostle of 
 Protestantism. This clear and bold, though perhaps 
 narrow, view of justification by faith only, the sudden 
 passage from darkness to light, the exclusion of all 
 attempts at virtue outside the pale of this convic- 
 tion — all has been inherited by the modem Protes- 
 tant from the ancient Stoic far more directly than 
 
 ' This is admirably set forth in E. Renan's Marc Aurhle. 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 145 
 
 most men imagine. We can trace it historically, 
 with but few gaps in the obscurity of the Middle 
 Ages, from the rugged mountains of CiHcia, the 
 original home of Stoicism, to the equally rugged land 
 of the Scotch Covenanters. Among the bold 
 mountaineers of Cihcia, celebrated in their heathen 
 days for facing death instead of slavery, where whole 
 city populations committed suicide when pressed 
 by Persian, by Greek, by Roman besiegers, this 
 congenial doctrine found its home, till from Isauria, 
 the wildest part of these highlands, came the Emperor 
 Leo to sit on the Byzantine throne and open his 
 crusade against images. It was this Protestant or 
 Stoic spirit that dictated the whole iconoclastic war, 
 and when the adherents of this dynasty were driven 
 out, they took refuge in Wallachia and Moldavia, 
 whence they passed, or their spirit passed, into 
 Moravia and Bohemia, where in due time arose John 
 Huss and Jerome of Prague; and from these early 
 reformers Protestantism spread to Germany, Eng- 
 land, Scotland, and thence with the Pilgrim fathers 
 to North America — all the spirit of Stoicism, so 
 strong in Paul, and so strong in the Scotch Calvinist, 
 that it is difficult to find any closer spiritual relation- 
 ship asserting itself over diversities of race and lan- 
 guage across wide gulfs of space and time. 
 
 I know very well that all the special steps of this 
 progress are not easily proved. But a long consid- 
 eration of the matter has only confirmed me in adopt- 
 
146 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 ing this hypothesis as the most reasonable to account 
 for the facts. The spiritual relationship of Stoicism 
 and Protestantism I think no candid inquirer will 
 be disposed to deny. From contact with the Greeks, 
 therefore, Christianity obtained this support, that 
 an ideal long known to the western world, the Stoic 
 ideal, was found to correspond with it, so that the 
 preaching of the apostles was in this respect not out 
 of harmony with the wants and the aspirations of the 
 higher and better minds of that age. 
 
 But, admitting the value of this noble and prac- 
 tical ideal, you may think that the tendency toward 
 scientific precision and the moral tameness in the 
 Greek mind would militate against the great enthu- 
 siasms preached by the Gospel and countenanced by 
 the eastern rehgions. To the Greek you will justly 
 say the habit of rational discussion was everything, 
 and he would be most unlikely to admit miracles, 
 or mysteries, which are nevertheless essential to 
 Christian dogma. This is to some extent true; the 
 Greeks were essentially rationalists; but you would, 
 indeed, show Httle appreciation of the genius of the 
 race if you were satisfied with such a statement. 
 I will not urge what is very important — that at 
 Alexandria, and indeed in the later or Hellenistic 
 period of Greek life, this rationalising people came 
 in contact with oriental mysteries, and readily 
 adopted, from these older creeds, cults, and worships 
 wherein the hidden and the supernatural played the 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 147 
 
 principal part. The contact, for example, of Greece 
 and Egypt produced a great change in the worship 
 of almost all the Hellenistic world — Serapis and Isis 
 displaced the Hellenic gods, at least in practice. The 
 doctrine of the Trinity was developed by the Greek 
 Christians in contact with similar dogmas among 
 the Egyptians. But all those influences I think it 
 fairer to attribute to the people from whom they 
 cam?, and to treat them in that connection. There 
 is no difficulty, however, in showing you that the 
 feeUng for mystery, the pecuUar instinct in man, that 
 religion is no mere bargain with the gods, but some- 
 thing deeper and more poetical — this feeling, with- 
 out which we cannot imagine any saving faith, was 
 well known and thoroughly appreciated by the 
 Greeks, pure and simple, and the Greeks of the 
 best epoch. 
 
 There were, as most of you know, solemn mys- 
 teries celebrated every year in the very heart of 
 civilised Greece, at Eleusis, near Athens, in which 
 the sorrows of the goddess Demeter and her benevo- 
 lences to men were commemorated. These mys- 
 teries, which were not a soUtary occurrence in 
 Greece, attained in the best period of Greek history 
 a wide celebrity, and initiation was open to all who 
 satisfied the spiritual conditions, even women and 
 slaves. I have myself seen the excavated temple, 
 where, in contrast to other Greek temples, a vast 
 chamber was provided for a great congregation which 
 
148 THE PROGRESS OF HELLENISM 
 
 met together to witness the rites — mysterious, awful, 
 secret — whereby man was raised to sympathy with 
 the sorrows of divine beings. So well, indeed, was the 
 secret kept that, as is the case now with Freemasonry, 
 not one of the vast number of initiated people has 
 told us what he saw and heard, and even in the early 
 Christian controversies no renegade from the faith 
 of Demeter and Cora was found to divulge the 
 mystery. Nevertheless there are not wanting many 
 heartfelt expressions of the immense spiritual bene- 
 fits to be obtained by this exceptional service.' 
 
 "Much that is excellent and divine," says Cicero 
 (de Legg., II, 14), "does Athens seem to me to have 
 produced and added to our Kfe, but nothing better 
 than these mysteries, by which we are formed and 
 moulded from a rude and savage life into humanity; 
 and indeed in the mysteries we perceive the real 
 principles of Hfe, and learn not only to live happily, 
 but to die with a fairer hope." 
 
 How far these subHme ideas may reach into 
 modem life, with what vicissitudes, under what 
 difficulties, I will illustrate, in conclusion, by a 
 strange passage in Irish history. If you look at any 
 mediaeval map of Europe, you will find in Ireland 
 but one place noted as of world-wide interest — the 
 Purgatory of St. Patrick at Lough Derg in the wilds 
 of Donegal. It is a little rocky island on this lonely 
 lake, which is surrounded with solitary moors, and 
 
 ^Rambles and Studies, pp. 186 ff. 
 
INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIANITY 149 
 
 studded with other islands deep in heather and 
 plumed with splendid ferns. We first hear of this 
 place of pilgrimage from a knight who went there 
 about 1200 A. D., and with the help of a monk 
 described his experiences — his being laid in a cave 
 to sleep, where he saw the horrors and wonders of 
 the next world, and scarce escaped with his Hfe from 
 this terrible ordeal. His account is so closely 
 similar to what we hear of the Eleusian mysteries 
 that there can hardly be doubt that the one came, 
 by some obscure maze of tradition, to influence the 
 other. This narrative took hold of all Europe, and 
 especially, I think, of Dante, when composing his 
 Purgatorio; it brought hundreds of pilgrims through 
 danger and discomfort to remote Ireland, and 
 offered the wild natives such opportunities for extor- 
 tion that Pope Alexander VI sent a legate to visit 
 it about 1490, who describes his adventures in an 
 extant letter to Isabella d'Este, and it was suppressed 
 by the pope in 1494. Nevertheless it has survived 
 not only this, but the fury of the Protestant Reformers, 
 who in 1628 devastated the shrine, destroyed the 
 small artificial cave, and threw the carved stones 
 into the lake. For even now, in July, four thousand 
 pilgrims wander to this lonely retreat and endeavour 
 to carry out the penance and vigils once suggested 
 by the Eleusinian mysteries, but now modified by 
 the priests of the Church of Rome into a semi-pagan 
 Christianity. 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 AcH-EAN League, 48. 
 
 Alexander: dissemmates Hellenism, 
 
 32', successors of, accustomed to 
 
 rule, 35-, used small armies, 39. 
 Alexandria: population of, 67; 
 
 world's debt to, 68; literature of, 
 
 6p-, museum and library of, 71; 
 
 no record of literary and social life 
 
 at , 88. 
 Alexandrian: work of, scholars, 109. 
 Antioch: importance of, 95. 
 Apollonius: influence of, 113. 
 Architecture: Hellenistic, 117. 
 Art: fusion of different schools of, 
 
 possible, 75; Greek, in Egypt, 87", 
 
 mfluence of Hellenism upon, 115. 
 Artillery: developed by Alexander, 
 
 38. 
 Athens : remained the home of Greek 
 
 philosophy, 87. 
 
 Banking, lao. 
 
 Barbarians: change of Greek atti- 
 tude toward, 14. 
 Bible (sec under New Testament). 
 Business: advance in methods of, 
 
 Cavalry: use of, by Alexander, 37. 
 Celts: invasion of, 42. 
 Christianity: influences of HeUen- 
 
 ism on, 127; relation of Stoicism to, 
 
 142. 
 Culture: high standard of, reached 
 
 by average people, 137- 
 Cyropmdia: praise of Persian ideals, 7. 
 Cyrus: the later ideal of Xenophon, 
 
 Democracy: attitude of Xenophon 
 toward, 16 ff.; Greek, checked by 
 Macedonian garrisons, 47- 
 
 Dialect: writers of — Sappho, Theoc- 
 ritus, Herodotus, 8. 
 
 Economy^ On Household: picture of 
 Attic hfe, 8. 
 
 Egypt: mercenaries from, 12 ; Rela- 
 tion of, to Hellenism, Lecture III, 
 65; easily defended, 66; civilisation 
 of, neglected by Greece, 74; not 
 Hellemzed, 75, 84; influence of 
 priests in, 76; foreign policy of, 78; 
 tenacious of nationality, 85; influ- 
 ence of, on Greek reUgion, 147. 
 
 Flowers: appreciation of, 10. 
 
 Greece: position of, in the empire, 
 46; flattered by Rome, 51; freed 
 by Rome, 52; dissatisfied with 
 Roman rule, 54; conquered by 
 Rome, 57; relation of, to Egypt 
 under the Ptolemies, 86. 
 
 Greek: the chief bond of Alexander's 
 empire, 40; used by Christ, 130; 
 language of Christianity, 133; 
 knowledge of, imphed culture, 136. 
 
 Hellenedom: corresponds to Hel- 
 lenic, 3. 
 
 Hellenic: literature, how preserved, 
 log; diffusion of, hteratiu"e, iii. 
 
 Hellenic ISM, 4. 
 
 Hellenism: corresponds to "Hel- 
 lenic" in Grote, to "Hellenistic" 
 in Droysen, 3; to both in Bevan's 
 House of Sdeucus, 4; the "sflver 
 age" of Greek art and literature, 4; 
 beginnings of, 5; General Reflec- 
 tions on. Lecture V, 109; achieve- 
 ments of, in science, 118; brings 
 advance in refinements of life, 118; 
 preference for city hfe character- 
 istic of, 122; Influence of, on Chris- 
 tianity, Lecture VI, 127. 
 
 Hellenistic: adjective from Hellen- 
 ism, 4; hterature of, period, 112; 
 architecture, 117. 
 
 Herod the Great: a HeUenizer, 129. 
 
 Homer: HeUenistic criticism of, 109. 
 
 ^S3 
 
INDEX 
 
 IS4 
 
 IsocRATES: on Attic culture, 6; ad- 
 vocates conquest of Persia, 15; 
 hails Philip as leader of the Greeks, 
 31. 
 
 Jews: development of, 102-, progress 
 of Hellenism among, ceases, 104. 
 
 Library: work of Alexandrian, log. 
 
 Macedonia : and Greece, Lecture II, 
 31; not a unit, 34; governed by 
 feudal lords, 35; retains its identity 
 in the empire, 41 ; character of kings 
 of, 42 ; barrier against barbarian 
 invasion of Greece, 45 ; divided into 
 four republics by Rome, 58; dis- 
 appearance of, as a nation, 59; 
 made a Roman province, 59. 
 
 Mercenaries: Greek, 5; Egyptian, 
 12; women captives of Greek, 14', 
 Greek, characteristics of , ly; Greek, 
 in Egypt, 73, 86. 
 
 Monarchy: spread of, 22. 
 
 Music: Greek, 115. 
 
 Mysteries: of Eleusis, 147. 
 
 New Testament: exhibits influence 
 
 of Hellenism, 114. 
 Novel: origin of the modem, 70. 
 
 Palestine : progress of Hellenism in, 
 
 128. 
 Parthians : origin of, 99. 
 Paul: used Greek, 41; imbued with 
 
 Greek culture, 131; influence of 
 
 Stoicism on, 141. 
 PERGAUtTM: history of, loo. 
 Persia : conquest of, planned by 
 
 Agesilaus, advocated by Isocrates, 
 
 IS- 
 Phalanx: pmrpose and character of, 
 
 36; not favored by Alexander, 37. 
 Philip: organizer of the phalanx, 36. 
 
 Politics: change of ideals in, 120. 
 Polity: of the Athenians represents 
 
 Xenophon's opinion, 16; On the 
 
 Lacedemonian, 19. 
 PoLYBius; favors union of Greece 
 
 and Rome, 56. 
 Ptolemies : rule of the, 72 ; the later, 
 
 become thoroughly Egyptian, 82. 
 
 Race fusion: slow, 14. 
 
 Romans: mmoticed by the Greeks, 12. 
 
 Rome: flatters Greece, 51; interferes 
 in Greece, 51; relation of, to Egypt, 
 83. 
 
 Scholars : work of Alexandrian, 109. 
 
 Science: in Hellenistic period, 118; 
 mathematical, 118. 
 
 Sculpture: so-called "silver age" of 
 Greek 116. 
 
 Septuagint: importance of, 80. 
 
 Socrates: attitude of, toward patri- 
 otism, 6. 
 
 Sparta: imfitted todiile Greece, 19. 
 
 St. John : influence of Greek philoso- 
 phy on, 140. 
 
 Stoicism: influence of, on Christi- 
 anity, 142. 
 
 Syria: great rival of Egypt, 79; con- 
 quered by Ptolemy, 80; and Hellen- 
 ism, Lecture IV, 93; character and 
 extent of, 94. 
 
 Tyrants : pourtrayed in the Hiero of 
 Xenophon, 24; character of, 49-, 
 in Greek cities encouraged by Mace- 
 donian policy, 50. 
 
 Xenophon: the Precursor of Hellen- 
 ism, I-ecture I, 3; On Household 
 Economy, 8; attitude toward hunt- 
 ing, 9; travels of, n; Polity 0/ the 
 Athenians, 16; on Greek tyrants, 
 24; on monarchy 26. 
 
immmm