The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (mini ebook reader .TXT) đź“•
The Egyptians were islanders, cut off from the rest of the world by sand and sea. They were rooted in their valley; they lived entirely upon its fruits, and happily these fruits sometimes failed. Had they always been able to obtain enough to eat, they would have remained always in the semi-savage state.
It may appear strange that Egypt should have suffered from famine, for there was no country in the ancient world where food was so abundant and so cheap. Not only did the land produce enormous crops of corn; the ditches and hollows which were filled by the overflowing Nile supplied a harvest of wholesome and nourishing aquatic plants, and on the borders of the des
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swooped down on the Ionian coast—there was at that time no power in
Asia Minor which was able to resist them. They obtained wives,
sometimes by force, sometimes by peaceable arrangement with the
natives. In course of time the coast of Asia Minor was lined with rich and
flourishing towns. The mother country continued to pour forth colonies,
and colonies also founded colonies. The Greeks sailed and settled in
every direction. They braved the dark mists and the inclement seasons of
the Black Sea, and took up their abode among a people whose faces were
almost concealed in furs, who dwelt at the mouths of great rivers and
cultivated boundless plains of wheat. This wheat the Greeks exported to
the mother country, with barrels of the salted tunny-fish, and the gold of
Ural, and even the rich products of the Oriental trade which were brought
across Asia from India or China by the waters of the Oxus to the Aral
Sea, from the Aral to the Caspian Sea by land, from the Caspian to the
Black Sea by the Volga and the Don.
But where Italy dipped her arched and lovely foot in the blue waters of an
untroubled sea, beneath the blue roof of an unclouded sky—where the
flowers never perished, where eternal summer smiled, where mere
existence was voluptuous and life itself a sensual joy—there the Greek
cities clustered richly together—cities shining with marble and built in
fairy forms, before them the deep tranquil harbour, behind them violet
valleys, myrtle groves, and green lakes of waving corn.
When a bank of emigrants went forth they took with them fire kindled on
the city hearth. Although each colony was independent, it regarded with
reverence the mother state, and all considered themselves with pride not
foreigners but Greeks; for Greece was not a country but a people;
wherever the Greek language was spoken, that was Greece. They all
spoke the same grand and harmonious language—although the dialects
might differ; they had the same bible, for Homer was in all their hearts,
and the memory of their youthful glory was associated in their minds with
the union of Greek warriors beneath the walls of Troy. The chief colonial
states were represented at the meetings of the Amphictyonic League, and
any Greek from the Crimea to Marseilles might contend at the Olympian
Games with the full rights of a Spartan or Athenian, a privilege which the
Great King could by no means have obtained.
The intense enthusiasm which was excited by the Olympian Games was
the chief cause of the remarkable development of Greece. The man who
won the olive garland on that celebrated course was famous for ever
afterwards. His statue was erected in the public hall at Delphi; he was
received by his native city with all the honours of a formal triumph; he
was not allowed to enter by the gates—a part of the city wall was beaten
down. The city itself became during five years the talk of Greece, and
wherever its people travelled they were welcomed with congratulations
and esteem.
The passion for praise is innate in the human mind. It is only natural that
throughout the whole Greek world a spirit of eager rivalry and emulation
should prevail. In every city was established a gymnasium where crowds
of young men exercised themselves naked. This institution was
originally intended for those only who were in training for the Olympian
Games, but afterwards it became a part of daily life, and the Greeks went
to the gymnasium with the same regularity as the Romans went to the
bath.
At first the national prizes were only for athletes, but at a later period the
principle of competition was extended to books and musical
compositions, paintings and statues. There was also a competition in rich
and elegant display. The carriages and retinues which were exhibited
upon the course excited a desire to obtain wealth, and gave a useful
impulse to foreign commerce, manufactures, and mining operations.
The Greek world was composed of municipal aristocracies—societies of
gentlemen living in towns, with their farms in the neighbourhood, and
having all their work done for them by slaves. They themselves had
nothing to do but to cultivate their bodies by exercise in the gymnasium,
and their minds by conversation in the market-place. They lived out of
doors while their wives remained shut up at home. In Greece a lady
could only enter society by adopting a mode of life which in England
usually facilitates her exit. The Greeks spent little money on their wives,
their houses, or their food: the rich men were expected to give dramatic
entertainments , and to contribute a company or a man-of-war for the
protection of the city. The market-place was the Greek club. There the
merchants talked their business—the labours of the desk were then
unknown. The philosopher instructed his pupils under the shade of a
plane-tree, or strolling up and down a garden path. Mingling with the
song of the cicada from the boughs might be heard the chipping of the
chisel from the workshop of the sculptor, and the laughter and shouts
from the gymnasium. And sometimes the tinkle of a harp would be
heard; a crowd would be collected, and a rhapsodist would recite a scene
from the Iliad, every word of which his audience knew by heart, as an
audience at Naples or Milan knows every bar of the opera which is about
to be performed. Sometimes a citizen would announce that his guest,
who had just arrived from the sea of Azov or the Pillars of Hercules,
would read a paper on the manners and customs of the barbarians. It was
in the city that the book was first read and the statue exhibited—the
rehearsal and the private view; it was in Olympia that they were
published to the nation. When the public murmured in delight around a
picture of Xeuxis or a statue of Praxiteles, when they thundered in
applause to an ode by Pindar or a lecture by Herodotus, how many
hundreds of young men must have gone home with burning brows and
throbbing hearts, devoured by the love of fame! And when we consider
that though the geographical Greece is a small country, the true Greece-
—that is to say, the land inhabited by the Greeks—was in reality a large
country; when we consider with what an immense number of ideas they
must have been brought in contact on the shores of the Black Sea, in Asia
Minor, in Southern Italy, in Southern France, in Egypt, and in Northern
Africa; when we consider that, owing to those noble contests of Olympia,
city was every contending against city, and within the city man against
man, there is surely no longer anything mysterious in the exceptional
development of that people.
Education in Greece was not a monopoly; it was the precious privilege of
all the free. The business of religion was divided among three classes.
The priests were merely the sacrificers and guardians of the sanctuary;
they were elected, like the mayors of our towns, by their fellow citizens
for a limited time only, and without their being withdrawn from the
business of ordinary life. The poets revealed the nature, and portrayed
the character, and related the biography of the gods. The philosophers
undertook the education of the young, and were also the teachers and
preachers of morality. If a man wished to obtain the favour of the gods,
or to take divine advice, he went to a priest; if he desired to turn his mind
to another, though scarcely a better world, he took up his Homer or his
Hesiod; and if he suffered from sickness or mental affliction he sent for a
philosopher.
It will presently be shown that the philosophers invaded the territory of
the poets, who were defended by the government and by the mob, and
that a religious persecution was the result. But the fine arts were free;
and the custom which came into vogue of erecting statues to the gods, to
the victors of the games, and to other illustrious men favoured the
progress of sculpture, which was also aided by the manners of the land.
The gymnasium was a school of art. The eyes of the sculptor revelled on
the naked form—not purchased, as in London, at eighteenpence an hour,
but visible in marvellous perfection at all times and in every pose. Thus
ever present to the eye of the artist, it was ever present to his brain, and
flowed forth from his fingers in lovely forms. As art was fed by nature,
so nature was fed by art. The Greek women placed statues of Apollo or
Narcissus in their bedrooms, that they might bear children as beautiful as
those on whom they gazed. Such children they prayed the gods to give
them, for the Greeks loved beauty to distraction, and regarded ugliness as
sin. They had exhibitions of beauty at which prizes were given by
celebrated artists who were appointed to the judgment-seat. There were
towns in which the most beautiful men were elected to the priesthood.
There were connoisseurs who formed companies of soldiers composed
exclusively of comely young men, and who could plead for the life of a
beautiful youth amidst the wrath and confusion of the battlefield.
The Persian wars gave a mighty impulse to the intellect of Greece.
Indeed, before that period Greek art had been uncouth; it was then that
the Age of Marble really began, and that Phidias moulded the ideas of
Homer into noble forms. It was then that Athens, having commanded the
Greeks in the War of Independence, retained the supremacy and became
the centre of the nation. Athens had died for Greece; it had been burnt by
the Persians to the ground, and from those glorious ashes arose the
Athens of history—the City of the Violet Crown. To Athens were
summoned the great artists: to Athens came every young man who had
talent and ambition: to Athens every Greek who could afford it sent his
boys to school. The Academy was planted with wide-spreading plane-trees and olive groves, laid out in walks with fountains, and surrounded
by a wall. A theatre was built entirely of masts which had been taken
from the enemy. A splendid harbour was constructed—a harbour which
was in itself a town. All that fancy could create, all that money could
command, was lavished upon the city and its environs—the very
milestones on the roads were works of art.
The Persians assisted the growth of Greece, not only by those invasions
which had favoured the union, aroused the ardour, multiplied the desires,
and ennobled the ambition of the Greek people, but also by their own
conquests. Their failure in Europe and their success in Asia were equally
profitable to the Greeks. Trade and travel were much facilitated by their
extensive rule. A government postal service had been established: royal
couriers might by seen every day galloping at full speed along the
splendid roads which united the provinces of the Punjab and Afghanistan
and Bokhara on one side of the Euphrates, and of Asia Minor, Syria and
Egypt on the other side of that river, with the imperial palaces at Babylon,
Susa, Ecbatana, and Persepolis. Caravanserais were fitted up for the
reception of travellers in lonely places where no other houses were to be
found. Troops of mounted police patrolled the roads. In desert tracts
thousands of earthen jars, filled with water and planted up to their necks
in sand, supplied the want of wells. The old system of national isolation
and closed ports was battered down. The Greeks were no longer
forbidden to enter the Phoenician ports, or compelled to trade exclusively
at one Egyptian town. Greek merchants were able to join in the caravan
trade of Central Asia,
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