How Theseus slew the Minotaur and found his way out of the Labyrinth by a clue given him by Ariadne, the king's daughter, who had fallen in love with him, is all a further fancy that grew up out of the solid facts of the Labyrinth and the bull-fighting.

It is very wonderful that these ancient people should have been able to make their power felt so far from their home island, because of the difficulty in crossing the open seas. Their ships were propelled by the oars of rowers and by the wind in the sails when the wind was in their favour—that is to say, was blowing in the direction in which they wanted to go. The sails of modern sailing vessels are so arranged that our ships can sail up into the wind, as it is called. They can go in a direction at right angles to the direction of the wind very easily, and even when it is a little opposed to them, by means of setting the sails so as to catch the wind side-ways. But there is no evidence that the Minoans were able to do this, and we know that in far later days of our story no such device was used. They had a squarish-shaped sail attached to the mast, more like our lug-sail than any other kind of rigging that is used now. And yet, with these poor appliances, they went to Egypt, to Syria, and to Sicily, and no doubt farther west again. And they went in numbers, for otherwise they would not have been able to subjugate the native people as we know that they did at Athens.

The pirates

We may suppose that they went for a double purpose—for trade and also for piracy, to take forcible possession of what they wanted wherever they found it. In those days, and for a long time afterwards, it does not seem as if they had any idea that it was contrary to what was right and just to take anything that they were able to take from another nation. Any idea of what we call international justice was very little thought of, if thought of at all. They could, and they did, make laws among themselves which surprise us by their justice, but these laws were for each nation itself. We have seen the idea of a single god, supreme over a whole nation, held at times by them, but even that did not mean that they had an idea of a single god supreme over the whole of the world. He was a national god only, and if the idea of the divine law was thus national only, it was not likely that they would have the idea that any laws made by man were to be obeyed beyond the limits of the nation by which they were made.

So we may be sure that these ancient Minoans were what we should call pirates. They swept the sea in their ships attacking and capturing the ships of other peoples wherever they found them, and landing and making forays on the mainland much as the Vikings of Norway did around our own shores at a far later date. And this state of things in the Mediterranean is worth particular attention because these pirates, of one nation or another, will be found actively at work all through the pages of this great story of mankind. The Mediterranean was not freed from them until a very recent date.

Now, that piracy, together with the style of architecture and the making of smaller works of art which they practised, are the two great facts to remember about this wonderful civilisation of the ancient Minoans. For just about the year 1500 B.C., at which we left the story of Egypt, or a little later, some terrible catastrophe overtook the Minoans. What happened we do not know. It has been guessed that they suffered an invasion and a complete overthrow by the Dorians, a people who had come down from the north and had taken possession of that southern part of Greece which is called the Peloponnese. But nothing is certainly known, except that the Minoans did suffer a very complete overthrow, that their power was shattered, their splendid buildings were destroyed, and they seem to vanish out of the story altogether. Their conquerors were evidently a people far less civilised and accomplished than they. Antiquaries tell us that there were at least two distinct stages in the making of buildings and works of art under the Minoans before this last catastrophe, but after that there is no building, no art work, worth accounting for. It all went.

But they had left the mark of their genius in the buildings at Mycenæ and elsewhere, and they had established the habit of piracy in the seas about their island.

So now, I think, we have the frame set in which we may place the picture. We have these ancient Egyptians leading the kind of life that I have tried to show you. We have the Babylonians and Assyrians along those other river-courses established as a great power in the east, and we have the Minoans, very shortly to be overthrown and to disappear, scouring the seas in their ships and having all the power along the coasts. And between them, in the very midst, is that country of Syria and Palestine which—especially Palestine, because it is south of Syria—lies right in the course which the great empires must traverse when they come to grips with each other. Palestine is the country through which they must pass whether for trade or for war with each other. You can imagine what a terrible position that must have been. Syria and Palestine, as you know, were peopled by Semitic tribes, to which race the Babylonians also belonged originally. But the divisions and differences, both between the Babylonians and the others, and between these others, among themselves, were many and of various kinds. Some must have regarded each other as almost of the same kindred. Others must have seemed quite strange and foreign. It was a great mixture.

And for the moment, in or about 1500 B.C., the Israelites as a nation are not in Palestine at all. They are in the land of Goshen, undergoing that oppression of which you know. Within 300 years or so they will make their Exodus and begin their forty years of wandering in the wilderness, to re-appear in the story, under the leadership of Joshua; conquering the Canaanites and so establishing themselves right in the most dangerous position of all, in Palestine, on the highway between the two great empires.

CHAPTER VI

THE MEETING OF THE EMPIRES

It rather looks as if the casting out of the Hyksos, the foreign "shepherd kings," made the Egyptians realise that they must combine and unite and not go on fighting among themselves, if they meant to be strong enough to resist the attacks of their neighbours. Whether that was the reason or not, the records seem to show that just at this time there began to be far less fighting between the big landowners; and the king, Pharaoh, began to have more power in his own hands, and to be able to give effect to his will, by means of his vizier or prime minister, and the rest of his officers over all the country.

Thus more strong by being united, the Egyptians drove out the Hyksos. They also took forcible measures against the African tribes that were pressing them on the south, and established their power right up to the fourth cataract on the Nile, a long way farther south than the boundary of the more ancient empire. Against Nubia, farther south again, and against Libya, on their west, they fought effectively, and thus we may suppose that they made themselves more safe than they ever had been before from invasion by these African peoples.

There were two great kings of the name of Thothmes or Tethmosis, of this eighteenth dynasty, under whom most of these big achievements were done—Thothmes I. and Thothmes III. The second Thothmes reigned for a year or two only. Thothmes I. led the Egyptian armies up through Palestine, overcame Syria, and went as a conqueror as far east as the Euphrates, where he set up a column, with an account of it all, to commemorate his victories.

But Thothmes III. was a more splendid Pharaoh still, and under him Egypt came to the height of its military power. Syria had revolted; so he marched north and utterly defeated the Syrians at Megiddo. Then he turned east and fought his way across the Euphrates, where he set up a column to his own glory beside that of Thothmes I. It is recorded of him that he had presents given him by the king of Babylon, and even by the king of the Hittites—that people from the north who had established themselves in Asia Minor and who were constantly giving trouble down in Syria.

The Elamites

And as for Babylon itself, there can be little doubt that at this time it was in the midst of troubles. It was pressed upon thus, as we see, by the growing power of Egypt on the west. Then on the eastern side it was continually being troubled by that powerful nation, the Elamites, whose capital was Susa. I do not want to bother you much about these Elamites, though their power was great and their civilisation an old civilisation. They were important enough to Babylon, because they were constantly giving trouble, very much as the stronger African tribes gave trouble to the Egyptians. But apart from this they do not occupy any very big part in the great story. They were not exactly what we should call world-makers, and it is only the world-makers that we are taking as the actors in our story. They came rather near being world-makers in the great sense, for there was a moment when they seriously threatened to subjugate Babylonia, but the Babylonians just succeeded in defeating them.

And then, of course, there were the Assyrians in the north, already quite independent in reality, though Babylon still claimed a suzerainty over them.

So now continually, for hundreds of years, the story goes on repeating itself in the same way over and over again. The Assyrians begin to get more and more power in the east and they are constantly coming into conflict with the Egyptians who are constantly fighting to retain their hold on that Syria which the wars of the two Thothmes had made an Egyptian province. Syria lies north of Palestine: and Palestine, being nearer to Egypt, was still more insistently claimed by the Egyptians as theirs. You may realise how difficult the position was for these Semitic tribes in Syria and Palestine, between the two empires. The tribes were not united among themselves, so that we can easily imagine (and we know that it actually did so happen) that they tried to save themselves by making alliances with, or admitting themselves as subject to, now one of the big empires and now the other. That is the way the story went for hundreds of years there. The Children of Israel, as you know, were not in the Palestine story at the moment. It was about 1500 B.C. that the very great Pharaoh Thothmes III. came to the throne, at the time when the Israelites were in the land of Goshen. It was not until two or three hundred years later that Moses led them (in Exodus) into the wilderness.

Let us give the date of 1250 B.C. to the Exodus. It will then be about the year 1200, or a little before, that the Israelites must have made their way, conquering, across Jordan and into the land of Canaan.

Now, how did it happen that a people thus still called the Children of Israel could have become so numerous and so powerful as to be able to win these victories?

The promised land

In answer to the first question we may say that it was very many years since the coming of Abraham from Chaldæa—more than a thousand years. That gives time for a very large increase in numbers. Then those years of desert wandering might very likely have made them hardy. They had, too, as we know, deep faith in their "god of battles"—the Jehovah—and in the divine promise that they should win this land. And, finally, just at the moment when they came up out of the desert and began their campaign against the peoples of Canaan the great empires happened, as it seems, to have become rather exhausted by their continual strife together, and the tribes of Palestine themselves had been so crushed between the two that perhaps they had not much power of resistance left.

And since there was all this perpetual fighting, it is interesting to see in what manner and with what weapons the fighters fought. The inscriptions tell us a great deal about them.

The people from the east seem to have learnt the use and value of horses in battle earlier than the Egyptians, and fighting from chariots seems to have been an earlier custom than fighting on horseback. It is said that there are no pictures or carvings of an earlier date than the Hyksos showing any of the Egyptians riding on horses, but in the eighteenth dynasty they had their cavalry—that is to say, their mounted soldiers on horseback—as well as their fighters in chariots. The chariots were not very elaborate. They were two-wheeled. The boarding came up fairly high in front, to the height of a man's elbows or thereabouts as he stood upright, but sloped away at the sides towards the back; and the back was often quite open. We see a pair of horses or even three abreast in some of the gravings of the chariots.

The men in them, as I say, stood upright. Often there were two, of whom one was for the driving and the other for the shooting, which was nearly always with the bow and arrow. I suppose we may say that the bow and arrow was their great weapon. Slings were used, as you will know from the story of David and Goliath, but the disadvantage of the sling, as compared with the bow and arrow, except for skirmishing troops, is quite obvious. The slinging requires the twirling of the sling, with the stone in it, round the head, before the stone can be sent frying out; it requires plenty of room, or else, in the twirling, you may easily break the next man's head! So it is only of value to troops in "open formation," that is, with spacious room between one man and the next. It does not do for close formation. The bow and arrow is a far more convenient weapon for this kind of fighting.

Weapons and armour

I have said that we often see gravings of one man driving the horses—the charioteer—and of the other using the bow. We also sometimes see that, in horseback fighting, one man, riding on one horse, would lead and control another horse, on which would be riding a man who would then have both his hands and all his attention free for shooting with his bow and arrow. That is not always, nor perhaps most often, what we find. The more usual way was for the rider to control the horse with his own hand on the reins as best he could while he shot his arrows as he had opportunity and time. And they were fine riders, turning round in the saddle—if they had a saddle; but often they are shown riding bareback, and never, till much later, with stirrups—and shooting backwards, over the horse's tail, as he gallops away.

The battle-axe was a very common weapon; and a short sword and a club, sometimes with a stone fixed in its head to give weight to the blow, are also shown. The long spear appears to have come into common use only gradually, and is not seen in the earliest pictures of the fighting, though we do see short spears, for throwing.

It was not at all uncommon for the fighter on foot to have a man with him who carried a large shield, which covered them both. I imagine that an arrangement of that kind is meant when we read, as we do in the Bible, of the "shield-bearer." For a man to carry a shield of such size as this with any ease, it had to be a light shield, and we know that the shields were commonly made of osier, like our baskets, and covered with the skins of oxen or other beasts.

In the earliest times they seem to have worn very little armour, to protect them from arrow or sword strokes, on the body; but helmets, at first soft and padded, but later of metal, to defend the head, were in early use, and they were usually made with a peak at the top and sloping sides which would make a blow glance off them. Bronze, as we have seen, was the metal which they first learnt to work, but as they learnt to make weapons of iron, which was harder and could be worked to a sharper edge, bronze went out of use.

By the time of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, when the great empires began to meet in serious fighting, it is likely that both knew something about the arrangement of their armies into separate bodies of infantry and cavalry, and of the one supporting and helping the other in somewhat like the modern manner.

This, then, would have been their way of fighting when they met in the open field. It was a different matter when they came to the assault of great cities, especially such as Babylon and Nineveh, which were surrounded and protected, as we know, by walls of vast height and thickness. The walls of Nineveh, for instance, were so broad, even on the top, that three chariots could be driven along them, one beside the other, and of course the width at the bottom must have been very much larger. They had the material very ready at hand for the making of these immense walls—in Babylonia and Assyria at all events. They had abundance of clay, and for the greater part of the walls they used the sun-dried bricks. But for the lower parts, which had to bear the weight, they probably used harder bricks, burnt in the kilns, for there are engravings of soldiers with some kind of battering-ram hammering at the bricks from the lower part of the wall of a city which they are attacking. The diggers would be protected, by a shield held over their heads, from the missiles sent down from the wall above.

Against a walled city

Then they had ladders for the scaling of these walls when they made the attack. But of course the attackers down below would be at a great disadvantage compared with the defenders on top of the wall. They would have a much better chance if by any means they could hoist themselves up to something like the same height as the defenders. And this they contrived to do by making movable towers of wood, on wheels, which could be pushed along by men who were more or less protected by the towers themselves from the people shooting at them from the top of the wall. On the towers would be bowmen who would shoot at the men on the wall, the shooters in the tower being protected by the walls, except in so far as they had to show themselves in order to shoot their arrows or throw their short spears.

A BATTERING-RAM.
A BATTERING-RAM.

Another way that they had of hoisting themselves to the same height as the defenders was to build a mound outside the walls. I suppose the earth, as they threw it up, would protect the builders against the arrows shot from the wall. And then, when they had raised the mound high enough, they would sometimes wheel their towers to the top of this, and so it may be that, from the towers on top of the mound, they may actually have had an advantage in height over the defenders on the walls. That would give the opportunity for their own fellow-soldiers below to set up the ladders and attempt the scaling of the walls.

In that way, or in some ways like that, they attacked the walled cities. You may have read words in the Bible that puzzled you about "bringing a tower" against a city, or "casting up a bank" against it, or some such words, and you may now know what they mean. They mean the making of these movable towers for the attack, and throwing up the mounds to bring the attackers to the same height as the defenders. It must have been a much more exciting kind of warfare than the pounding away with artillery at long range of many miles, as is done in war now. It was more like the modern trench war, with bombs and hand-grenades, when the trenches are close up to one another.

That is a kind of general picture of the way in which you may imagine these people making war on each other, constantly making war, in Mesopotamia and in Syria and in Palestine, for hundreds and hundreds of years. And I would remind you yet again that, except when the Egyptians were taking a hand in it, it was warfare among nations that were nearly all of the same original stock or race. The Hittites, from the north, were a different people; but most of them had very much the same ideas and the same ways of life; probably they could understand each other's language, so that really when the war had passed over them for the time being the people who were left in the country, looking after their flocks and their herds and their crops, would not see much difference between living under one power or under another. Probably it made very little change in their lives. And that may explain, what otherwise seems almost impossible to understand, how they could survive, how they could go on living at all, in the midst of this perpetual fighting.

We know that the conquerors showed very little mercy. Women and children were massacred or carried off into captivity, to be kept as slaves. But after all that dreadful misery had passed over the land the remnant that remained would go on much as before. Nothing in the whole story is much more wonderful than the way in which the Syrians, for instance, revolted again, very soon after being conquered and subjugated by the first Thothmes; and the endurance of the Jews under the repeated conquest of their country is one of the marvels of history. It is difficult to understand how it was that they were not entirely destroyed as a nation, and that they are among us, and in every country of the world, as people of a very distinct character and nationality to-day. This tenacity and endurance of the Jews has had a very great effect in making the world such as it is now that we are living in it.

The Philistines

One of the reasons why the Children of Israel under Joshua were able to get a hold on the land of Canaan is that the Philistines had already made their appearance there. The country of these Philistines was a narrow stretch along the south-eastern edge of the Mediterranean, running down to the border of Egypt. It seems surprising that the Israelites should owe any good thing to the Philistines, because we always find the two peoples at bitter war with each other; but it appears that just before the time of the Israelites' coming up from the southern deserts the Philistines had been making matters very difficult for the Egyptians in what the Egyptians called their province of Palestine, and that this province and the province of Syria also, a little to the north, were not really under any effective Egyptian rule at all at the moment. The tribes were not united together, and were weak in their disunion.

These Philistines were a warlike people. It is not known precisely of what race they were. Some have thought that they were settlers from Crete, which held, as we saw, rule over the sea. Other scholars suppose them to have been, like most of the peoples of that region, a branch of the great Semitic tree which we have seen spreading so widely. But wherever they came from, there they were established along this sea-coast, a people ready to fight by land or sea, ready to go trading, too, no doubt, in their ships, if they could make profit by it—a bold, enterprising people.

And there was another people, settled along another strip, farther north, of the same coast—the Phœnicians. Almost exactly the same account is to be given of them. They, too, were great sailors and navigators, great traders, great pirates. We do not hear so much about them just at this point of the great story which we have now reached: the Philistines play a bigger part in it for the moment. But the Phœnicians, you will see, are far more important really, for in a few hundred years the Philistines are little more heard of. The excellence of the Phœnicians as navigators made a big difference to the story.

When the Israelites succeeded in pushing their army thus into Palestine, westward of the Jordan river, their victory was by no means complete. It was a long while before they got the better of those Philistines near the coast, and at one time it looked very much as if the Philistines would conquer them. We may suppose that they did not come up out of the desert with much of the equipment necessary for the attack of walled cities, such as I have just described that necessary equipment to be.

Israel and Judah

The result of that was that even in the midst of the country which, for the most part, they conquered, there still remained certain strong cities in the hands of their enemies. Perhaps, as they had taken the pasture lands, and all that they most wanted, and as they saw that the capture of these strong places was almost beyond their power, they came to some kind of agreement with the citizens to leave those citizens in possession of the cities, provided they were left in peace elsewhere. However that may be, it is certain that some of those strong fortresses remained untaken by them, and it happened that they were so placed as to divide the country which the Israelites had overrun into two parts. The tribes of Judah and of Simeon settled themselves in the country southward of this line of fortresses, as we may almost call it. The rest of the tribes settled to the north.

I draw your attention to that, because it helps to explain what happened later when the division took place into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The tribes of Judah and Simeon, living in what came to be called Judæa, of which Jerusalem was the capital, were children of Israel, and of Abraham, just as much as those who belonged to the kingdom of Israel so called.

It is a little confusing; and to save further confusion it will I think be as well that I should now write of these Israelites (including the inhabitants of Judæa) as Hebrews. The exact original meaning of the name Hebrew is not very clear, but it was used at a very early date, and we may use it conveniently to designate the whole of the tribes that were led through their wanderings in the desert by Moses and Aaron, and that came up and crossed over Jordan, under Joshua, and settled in Canaan.

CHAPTER VII

THE JEWS AND THE ISRAELITES

If you will take a look on the map at all this country of Palestine and Syria you will see how it is cut up by mountains, the Lebanon range and others running down along it. One result of this must have been to make it difficult for the tribes that were settled there to unite and come together to resist the attacks of enemies from without.

In order to understand this great story properly you must bear in mind all through how much of it happened as it did because of the geographical position—that is to say, because the rivers ran just where they did run and because the deserts and the seas and the mountains lay just as they did lie round about the richer and more pleasant land. Between the mountains lay plains and valleys where the flocks might pasture. Canaan, you know, in the Bible is described as a land "flowing with milk and honey." Those are words meant to give you the idea of a rich, pleasant land, generally; but perhaps they mean a little more besides. "Flowing with milk" suggests a land where cows for milking would do well, and as for honey, we are told by people who have gone hunting there that the dogs often come out of the grass and the wild flowers quite yellow with pollen—the pollen that the bees carry home with them on their thighs. It is a great country for bees and honey.

But it was also, when the Hebrews first made their way into it, a great country for Philistines. They were not pleasant neighbours. The early chapters of the story of the Hebrews in Canaan are very much taken up with fights against the Philistines. The duel between David and Goliath is almost the best of the chapters; but the Samson story is very good reading too. At one moment the Philistines very nearly got the better of the Hebrews altogether; but then it seems as if the danger made Samuel, the greatest of the Judges, realise that if the people were to be successful against their Philistine enemies they must be united under one head. It was very largely by Samuel's act that Saul was appointed, and anointed with the sacred oil, as king—the first king of the now united tribes.

You know the rest of that story, very likely: how they gradually got the better of these strong enemies, how Saul slew his thousands and David his tens of thousands, and how, under David's son, Solomon, they came to the highest point of splendour and riches and power that they ever reached. The capital city was Jerusalem in Judæa, the more southern part of the kingdom. It is not to be supposed that in the fulness of its power this united kingdom had anything to fear from fortress cities of enemies in their midst. We may imagine all of them wiped out, because we know that Solomon's ships went freely to the coasts of Phœnicia, that cedar wood was brought from the splendid cedar forests on Mount Lebanon, that the wealth of Africa, in gold, ivory, apes and peacocks came to him by caravan through Egypt or by sea.

Nevertheless the union lasted only a very short while. Under Solomon's sons the kingdom was divided. Rehoboam sitting on his father's throne in Jerusalem and Jeroboam reigning over the kingdom of Israel in the north. We begin, about this time, to be tolerably sure about the dates, and the date of this division into the two kingdoms is given as 937 B.C.

The divided kingdom

So there they were—Israel, bounded by Syria on the north, and with Assyria pressing on from the west and coming now to the height of its power; Judah nearer to Egypt and with the Assyrian power threatening it scarcely less than Israel in the west. The first trouble from the big empires between which they lay fell on Judah, from the Egyptian side. Shishak, the Pharaoh of Egypt, made Judah pay tribute to him, after coming with a conquering army, and apparently some of the Israelite tribes had to pay tribute also. But Israel as a whole did not come under his power.

As the story goes on we find the two kingdoms engaged in small wars both with each other and with the neighbouring small nations. There was continual fighting between the northern kingdom and Syria farther to the north again. The moment of Israel's greatest strength was in the reign of Omri, who founded its capital, Samaria. But Syria was a more numerous and powerful nation than Israel without the aid of Judah; and Ahab, the Israelitish king, was a vassal of Benhadad, king of Syria, whose capital city was Damascus. Ahab aided Benhadad in defending Syria from the attack of Shalmaneser II. of Assyria, but the allies were badly beaten, and Israel had to pay tribute to Assyria. She won back her independence for a short time, when Assyria had other business to attend to, but just so soon as Assyria had leisure to deal seriously with Israel and Syria again, Samaria was taken. The Assyrians left them no opportunity for further revolt. As a nation, Israel disappears out of the story from the year of the fall of Samaria, 722 B.C.

Assyria was now in the full tide of her power. Once the vassal of Babylon, she had now made Babylon a vassal of hers. Judah had escaped the fate of Israel by prudently taking sides with Assyria.

SENNACHERIB IN HIS CHARIOT.
SENNACHERIB IN HIS CHARIOT.

Egypt was not likely to be very pleased with this interference on the part of Assyria with people whom she looked on as her tributaries. Judah and the neighbouring small states must have been terribly perplexed to know which was their wisest line to take—submission to Assyria or to Egypt. Egypt, at the moment, was under a powerful dynasty of Ethiopian, or what we should call negro, race. She began to move against the aggressive Assyrians, and under Hezekiah Judah decided to take the Egyptian side. A powerful combination was formed against Assyria, which her vassal Babylon joined, as well as some of the peoples along the Mediterranean coast, the Philistines and Phœnicians. But as yet Assyria was too strong or too clever in her fighting methods for them all. The Egyptian army, with the various allied forces, was seriously beaten, and Jerusalem was saved only by the payment of a very heavy tribute to Sennacherib, the Assyrian king.

The fall of Assyria

The power of Assyria was very great, and the Jews may well have thought that they would find safety under her protection. Yet within less than a hundred years, Assyria, as a great power, had ceased to exist, and Judæa had once more to suffer for her alliance with the beaten side. Sennacherib's victory over the Egyptians was in 701 B.C., and his son Ezar-haddon invaded and occupied Egypt and held it for some ten years. But Assyria soon began to be pressed by a wild and war-like people, the Scythians, coming from the north. Then the Babylonians, allying themselves with the Medes, a nation whose country lay on the north-west of Babylonia, attacked Assyria from the south, and while all this confusion and fighting was going on in the east, Pharaoh Necho of Egypt thought the moment good for trying to get back the old Egyptian provinces of Palestine and Syria.

By the year 608 B.C. the Babylonians were besieging Nineveh, the great capital city of the Assyrians, and Necho was marching up into Palestine. Syria and Palestine, still faithful to the eastern empire, opposed him, but were utterly defeated in a battle at Megiddo. Once more Judah suffered by being on the losing side. In 607, a year later, Nineveh was taken and its fortifications razed to the ground by the victorious Babylonians. The mighty Assyrian empire was no more.

The explanation of this rapid fall of a people that had been so powerful seems to be that it was a power that depended entirely on its army, that the whole nation was occupied in war, and that there were no reserves, no population from which the armies could be recruited and made strong again, when once those already in the field began to be shaken. It was, as we should say, entirely a military state. To the peoples of Syria and Palestine we may suppose that it made little difference whether Assyrians or Babylonians were the great power in the east. However that may have been, they were still, like the horseshoe that a blacksmith is making, "between the hammer and the anvil." It was now, as it had been a thousand or more years before, between the hammer of Babylon and the anvil of Egypt that they lay.

Nor, as we may suppose, did this change of power in the east appear to make the position of Egypt very different. The Egyptian king may well have thought that it gave him the better opportunity for extending his own authority eastward and northward. We have seen how, in former years, Thothmes, and again Thothmes III., advanced victoriously as far as Carchemish, on the Euphrates. Each set up a column there as a monument to his victories. But neither got much farther.

And now again, in this later time, the Egyptian king pressed up victoriously, and again the Babylonians met him and gave him battle, at the very same point—Carehemish.

If you will take a look at the map you will see, perhaps, why it was that these names of battle-places occur again and again. Twice already we have had great battles at Megiddo. Three times Carehemish seems to have been the turning-point in a campaign. If we understand the geography, the way the land lies, the rivers, mountains, plains and forests, we see the reason. In the first place, an army coming up northward from Egypt would find a few strong cities perhaps, such as Gaza and Ascalon, in the south, but after these were passed it would come to a plain country which gave the inhabitants no great opportunity of making a strong defence till it came to the river Kishon, on which is the city of Megiddo. There begins a wooded and mountainous country excellent for defence by a less strong force against a stronger.

Then, if that line of defence was broken through, the natural way—for it was the way that both traders and fighters went—would be north eastward up through Damascus and so on till you came to the Euphrates, a great river, in itself a formidable defence, and there stood the city of Carehemish. That explains why these two, Megiddo and Carehemish, were the places of the great battles.

Nebuchadnezzar

I suppose that the greatest of them all, in its effect on our story, was the third Carehemish battle which, in the year 605 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, fought against the king of Egypt. For the victory of Babylon was so decisive that from this time forward, for a long while, there seems to have been very little question about which power was the greatest in the world. It was Babylon.

While Assyria and Babylon had been fighting together, Pharaoh Necho, as we have seen, had taken advantage of their trouble and had conquered the Jews and some allied forces at Megiddo, and as a consequence of that victory Judah had once again become subject to Egypt. Yet again, then, when Nebuchadnezzar won his great battle at Carchemish, the Jews were on the side of the loser. Even after Carchemish, they seem to have inclined to the Egyptian, rather than to the Babylonian alliance, perhaps because Egypt was the nearer neighbour. And they retained that characteristic, which we have seen all through the story, of being a stubborn people, with a spirit not easy to subdue. In 597 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar found them giving trouble, and punished them by taking many of the inhabitants, including the king and Ezekiel the prophet, to Babylon.

But even so, within ten years the Jews that were left in Jerusalem again tried to form alliances against Babylon, and this time the great eastern power seems to have resolved to make a final end of the business. Jerusalem was attacked by a siege, and so resolutely defended that it held out for nearly a year and a half; but in the end it had to yield. Its defending walls and many of its chief buildings were overthrown, and, most dreadful of all in the eyes of the Jews, their holy temple of Jehovah was destroyed by fire after being robbed of its valuable and sacred vessels.

The date of the Fall of Jerusalem is 586 B.C. Surely it must have seemed to the unhappy people, in spite of the hope of return which even Jeremiah, the prophet of all this terrible calamity, held out to them, that they were wiped out as a nation. The might of Babylon must have appeared too great ever to be overthrown.

I have said so much about the Jews and their misfortunes, although they were a people of so little apparent importance in comparison with the great empires on either side of them, because all that happened to them, small nation though they were, has been really of the very greatest importance in making the story of the world what it is. It is through them, and by reason of these disasters, and others of the same kind of which I will tell you soon, that they were scattered all over the world. And being thus scattered, and holding to their traditions and to their religion with a tenacity which no other people in the whole story ever has shown, they took those traditions and that religion everywhere.

The religion of the Jews

And here I would draw your attention to a fact about the Jews and the Jewish religion which we are rather apt to forget. We are accustomed to speak of Jews and Christians as if they were entirely opposed to each other in every possible way, as if the one was absolutely the opposite of the other. And so, in one, and perhaps the very most important, point of the Christian religion they are, because the Jews deny the divine nature of Christ which is the very chief point in the Christian religion. But, for all that, we must never forget that it was on the Jewish religion that the Christian religion was founded. It was the religion that came into the minds and hearts of men who had been trained up in the Jewish religion. The early Christians were Jews, for the most part. Christ Himself was a Jew, brought up in the Jewish religion, and we know that He said He came to "fulfil," not to destroy. He was, on His human side, the last of those Hebrew prophets of whom the first, in point of time, was Amos.

It was on the Jewish religion as its stock that the Christian religion was grafted, as a gardener grafts a new branch into an old stem and the new takes up the sap from the old. There was another branch later grafted on the Jewish religious stem, besides the Christian—a very different branch, the Mohammedan religion. When we consider what an immense effect Christianity in the first place, and Mohammedanism in the second, have had in the making of this world-story, we shall see, I think, that we are right in attributing a great importance to what happened to the Jews, from whom came these other religions, as well as their own, which they still hold now. What happened to them was thus much more important in the story than what far stronger powers did, such as the Hittites, who possessed all Asia Minor and threatened Egypt, or the Elamites; who nearly overthrew the Babylonians, or the Syrians, who at one time were far stronger than either Israel or Judah, or even both of them together.

The Bible

We know that the Jews won their intense faith in Jehovah, their national god, only with difficulty. They were of the same race as the tribes about them who worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth, and they were constantly inclined towards that pagan worship, as we know from the Bible. But in the end the higher religion won, and their religion was intensely real to the Jews. It was a very big thing in their lives. They believed that Jehovah punished them in this life for the wrong things that they did, such as oppression of the poor, or unjust dealing, and they believed that he punished the nation for wrong things that the nation did. They had not the belief of the Egyptians in reward and punishment in an after-life.

And they considered their god as an exacting, a "jealous" god. He would punish them if they worshipped in the so-called "groves," which were often posts or stones set up on the "high places" to the pagan gods, or if they were slack in his worship, or in making sacrifice to him.

All these peoples had, in common, a belief in winning the favour of the gods by sacrifice. The more precious to them the thing sacrificed, the more value they deemed it would have in the sight of the gods; and that is how it is that we see them at one time actually sacrificing their own children, as the most valuable offering that they could make. The instance of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac will occur to your minds.

And wherever they went, into whatever land of exile they were carried by their conquerors, they would take with them those sacred writings, that record of their history, that story of the creation of the world, and that code of their laws and of their religious customs, which, with very much more that they had not got, we now mean when we speak of the Bible. Wherever they went they had this holy record assuring them that they were the chosen people of Jehovah. Among the influences which enabled them to keep so distinct from the nations into whose midst they came, we must surely place very high the influence of the Bible—that is to say, of so many of its books as had been written at that time.

The might of Babylon, as I have said, must have seemed so great to the Jews, carried away into exile, that it never could be overthrown. And yet, within less than fifty years from the siege and capture of Jerusalem, Babylon itself was taken by a power of such overmastering strength that the Babylonians only once afterwards, and to no effect, attempted to regain independence.

This extraordinary "judgment," as the Jews regarded it, was executed by the hand of the Persians under their great leader Cyrus.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PERSIANS AND THE GREEKS

The Persians are a people that up to this point come into the story hardly at all. Suddenly, out of the East, they come right into its very centre and are the principal actors in it for a century or two.

After the break-up of the Assyrian power, the strongest nation in the alliance that had done that breaking was the nation of the Medes. The Medes and Persians were of the same race, different altogether from the Semitic. They were of that great race called Aryan, or Indo-European, that came from the high lands in the centre of Asia. Probably their numbers so increased that they had to find new country. They pressed down southward and westward, towards the sun and the more fertile lands. They were hardy and accustomed to moving about. It was no hardship to them to make migrations. They moved with their wives and children, flocks and herds, and all their small household goods. A great number pressed down into India. Another big stream flowing towards the west came as far as the Babylonian eastern border.

These Aryan people from the north-west were great riders. It is thought that they introduced the horse to the Babylonians, and that from the Babylonians it came to Egypt.

The country of Elam had been invaded, and its power shattered, by the Assyrians shortly before the break-up of their own empire, and this shattering, together with the fighting between the Assyrians and the alliance formed against them, gave the Persians (who inhabited a country to the east called Iran, and especially the part of that country called Persis) the chance of getting possession of Elam. This they did, and established themselves in Susa, the old capital city of the Elamites. Persia was actually the vassal of Media, until Cyrus, who was the Persian king at Susa, led a revolt against them. Within three years he had conquered and taken their capital, and Media was now a subject state to its own late subject, Persia.

Thus they were, then, established in their power along the Eastern boundary of Babylonia, which had now become the master empire by the defeat of Assyria. Nevertheless Cyrus, at the head of the Persian army, took this mighty Babylon without a battle! But he had to fight some hard battles first. It seems that the Medes had made treaties with their allies of Babylon and Egypt which the Persians did not feel disposed to pay attention to. This aroused such opposition to the Persians that an alliance of Babylonians and Egyptians with Crœsus, king of Lydia in Asia Minor, and with the Spartans, was formed against them.

Spartan mercenaries

Notice particularly those Spartans. Sparta was the southern state of Greece, and this is the first appearance of Greece in our story. It is very notable. These great nations of the East already thought so well of the fighting qualities of the Greek soldiers, and especially of the Spartan soldiers, that it was worth their while to bring them over and pay them to fight for them. There seems to be little doubt that they were mercenaries, that is to say, soldiers who were paid to fight and who fought for pay. But the alliance was of no avail. Within the space of a few months, in the summer of 546 B.C., the whole of Asia Minor was in the Persian hands, right away to the Mediterranean shore. It was not until six years later that Cyrus had leisure to attend to Babylon itself; but when he did attend to it the resistance was not great. The Babylonian king's allies had been broken. Cyrus took Syria and Palestine also in his own reign, and after his death his son Cambyses pressed on down into Egypt and conquered that ancient land likewise. The victorious career of the Persians was only checked when they came against the Ethiopians and Nubians in farther Africa.

The Persian conquest

Even the shore of the Mediterranean did not stay their progress. They won many of the Greek islands, including Cyprus and Samos. The empires of Egypt and of Babylonia had been great, but this was greater than both of them together. And those two had been rivals. This of Persia seemed to be without a rival. It is little wonder that the Persian ruler assumed the title of King of Kings. He ruled right away into India. He ruled all that seemed to matter or to count for anything; and it had all been accomplished in not much more than twenty years from the time of the first revolt of Cyrus against the lordship of the Medes. How was it done?

That is a question which must be answered in different ways. No one answer is enough. There were several causes which worked together for this astounding success of the Persians. But one of the chief causes, if not the chief of all, was Cyrus. We cannot doubt that. Throughout the whole of this greatest of great stories which I am trying to tell you we shall not meet with an actor bigger and more glorious than this Cyrus. I doubt whether we meet with another quite as big. For not only were the extent of country and the power of the nations that he conquered extraordinarily great, but he made a very extraordinary use of his conquests. He must have been a great leader of men, a man whom others were ready to obey and follow; and he must have been a great general, according to the ideas of what generalship and the manœuvring of armies meant at that time; but besides all that he must have been a very wise man and a very good man. There can be little doubt that he was far more merciful to the people that he conquered than any other conqueror that has come into our story yet. He treated them with far greater kindness. That is proof of his goodness.

Then he was very content to leave them their own institutions, including their religions, so long as they were obedient to him as their over-lord. That shows his wisdom, for it meant that the people he conquered were content to be under him. Under Cyrus, the Jews who were in exile at Babylon were allowed to go back to Jerusalem, and he gave orders which helped them to the re-building of the Temple there. It is thought that it was partly by the help of these Jews in Babylon that he was able to take that strong city, as he did, without a fight. But it is said that he had to divert part of the stream of the Euphrates in order to do so; and it is certain that he had already broken the Babylonian power before he took the capital.

He was able to show this kindness and consideration for the religion of other peoples, because his own religion and that of his Persians was a very enlightened one. I think we shall not do wrong in calling it the most enlightened religion of all that we find before Christ came. It was the religion called Zoroastrianism, from the name of its founder, Zoroaster, who is also called Zarathustra. It was the religion of those Indo-European people of whom we have seen one part pressing down south into India and another part pressing westward. Zoroaster is thought to have been the author of the most ancient portions of what is called the Zend-Avesta, which means the Avesta, or Sacred Writings, written in the language of Zend. Zend belongs to the Aryan group of the Indo-European family of languages, from another branch of which our own native English language has been derived.

Zoroaster

Zoroaster taught that there is one great and good god, Ormuzd, but that there is also another supernatural being, Ahriman, the spirit of evil. It is accordingly as men do the will of Ormuzd, that is to say, do good acts, that they will have a happy life after death. If the good acts a man has done in life here are more in number and importance than his bad acts he will go to paradise; if the bad acts are more than the good he will go to hell and suffer everlasting punishment. Justice, acting justly, was what Zoroaster recognised as the most important thing of all.

You will see at once how near this very ancient belief comes to that which we hold now, and how much more enlightened it is than other religions which we have noticed. It contains the idea of one god supreme over all the universe—not only supreme for a single nation or for one portion of the earth.

Fire, that mysterious, useful, kindly thing by which man warms himself, by which he cooks his food, and which, nevertheless, is capable of such horrible destruction, seems to have been associated closely with the power of the good god, Ormuzd. Fire was therefore a sacred element.

The cow, another kindly thing, because of its use to man, was also sacred. In the religion which Zoroaster was brought up in the cow had been sacrificed to ward off evils—with the idea, already noticed, that the more precious to man the thing that he sacrificed, the more favour his sacrifice would win with the gods. Zoroaster taught that it was impious to kill the cow.

It was with this fine and enlightened religion in their hearts, then, that Cyrus and his Persians came conquering the western world. They conquered, but they treated those that they conquered with justice, according to the great teaching of Zoroaster. As they believed in one god over all the earth, they might permit the worship of that god to be carried on according to the various customs that they found where they went, so long as those customs were not altogether base and evil.

And these Persians were a kindly people. That is one of the causes of their victories. In the great story we find this often repeated—that a people living in a mountainous country, in a severe climate, and in surroundings which make their lives difficult and their food hard to get, come down on the inhabitants of a country where the soil is more fertile, the climate milder, and life altogether easier, and drive these easy-going people out before them as if they were sheep running away before wolves. It is a happening which teaches the lesson that the strongest, the most effective, kind of men are those that are accustomed to hardship.

But it is quite clear from all we have seen that those whom the Persians thus conquered were practised warriors. They were constantly fighting. The Persians, however, seem to have come upon them with a kind of fighting to which they were not altogether accustomed. The difference between their methods was chiefly that the Persians were so much quicker in movement. They were fine archers, and they were very fine horsemen. It was this last, their horsemanship, which seems to have been one of the great secrets of their success. They had archers both on horse and on foot, but on horse especially. Their method was to dash down upon the enemy in a swift attack, the cavalry opening out to let the archers on foot shoot their arrows. Then, when they had harassed the enemy with this swift charge, it was not their way to come to close quarters with him, at all events at the first onset, but rather to retire as quickly as they came on, to re-form, and to come back to the attack again.

The enemy, on their retirement, if he did not know their way of fighting, was rather apt to think that they were retreating altogether and were giving up the attack. Then the enemy was inclined to start off in pursuit. That was exactly what suited the Persians, for it meant that when they returned for the next attack they found the enemy more broken up than before and less able to resist. It was by repeated onsets of this nature that they got the formation of an opposing army knocked to pieces; and then, in a final attack, this time pressed closely home, they might, and they generally did, defeat him.

But if it was thus a new style of fighting that the Persians brought with them from the east, they also found themselves encountering a mode of defence against their attack which was strange to them. And this mode of defence came from the west.

In that allied army which we saw the Persians defeating in Asia Minor—the army led by Crœsus, king of Lydia—the Persians were victorious. They were so decisively victorious that Crœsus himself was taken prisoner by them, and the whole strength seems to have been knocked out of the alliance by that single blow. And in the defeated army we saw that there were soldiers from Sparta, which is, as you see on the map, in that most southern and almost detached part of Greece which is called the Peloponnese. The Spartans, therefore, were Greeks, and the Greeks were among those that had the worst of it in this great battle. But, for all that, it was a Grecian mode of fighting that made the best of all defences against the Persian way of attacking. This mode of defence is what was called the "phalanx."

City states

You have to understand that the word Greece in those days did not mean a single nation so much as a collection of small states settled close beside one another. The peoples of the different states were for the most part of the same race, no doubt, just like the Semitic peoples in Syria and Palestine. But they differed from each other in their customs and their ways of government far more than the Semites did. They were very often fighting among themselves and, again like the Semites, found it very difficult to let their jealousy of each other die down and to unite together for defence against a foreign foe. The Spartans were the most warlike of all the Grecian states. Their government was conducted in such a way as to make all the males in the country fighters.

Their idea of fighting was as different as possible from that of the Persians. They had few horse-soldiers. They were drawn up for battle in a close deep formation, I suppose like what we should call "a solid square," and it was this solid square that was called the phalanx. The troops were heavily armed, with shield, sword, and, most important of all for receiving the charge of cavalry, with long spears. You can imagine what a solid defence this would make against the lightly armed cavalry of the Persians. The arrows would not cause very serious loss to the armoured and shielded Greeks, and when the Persians did finally push their charge home the spears would so receive them that it would be like charging a gigantic porcupine.

GREEK WARRIOR.
GREEK WARRIOR.

These heavily armed soldiers of the Greeks were called hoplites. After a while the phalanx was assisted by lighter armed and more swiftly moving troops called peltasts, but the solid phalanx was always the great strength of their armies. The peltasts were never regarded as of equal importance with the hoplites, though they were very valuable assistants to the phalanx. The Greeks, living in a comparatively small country with the sea on either side of them, had not the same chance of getting horses for a numerous cavalry as the nations that had all Asia or all the north-eastern parts of Europe to draw on for their supply.

This phalanx of the Greeks is a very important feature in the great story. It was chiefly, as we may suppose, by reason of their adopting this formation and making such splendid use of it, that they were sought after, as we know that they were, by other nations to come to the assistance of their own armies. There grew up in Greece a class of what we may call professional soldiers, ready to hire themselves out for pay, to fight on any side that would make it worth their while to do so. We find them thus, as what we call "mercenaries," fighting sometimes for the Egyptians, sometimes against them. Some of them we even find fighting for the Persians. And they scarcely ceased fighting among themselves. The Persian empire extended to Egypt, and to all the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, but it was not powerful enough to prevent much fighting between the peoples subject to it. It could not, however, prevail much against Greece, in spite of the divisions between the Greek states.

Our story now, say after 500 B.C., or thereabouts, is concerned very much with the vain attempts of the Persians to subjugate the Greeks—to get them under their yoke. And again I must remind you, to get the picture at all clear and full, that the Mediterranean was continually being ravaged by the ships of pirates and traders—ready to be peaceful merchants if it paid them better to be so, or to attack other shipping or coast towns if they could do so with success.

The Peoples of the Sea was the old name for these raiders and traders, who were of all nations, sometimes combining together, and making themselves into quite a powerful navy, with headquarters in Crete or another of the many islands. The most powerful, as a nation, of any of these sea-raiders were the Phœnicians. They planted many settlements along the coasts, either on islands or on easily defended projecting headlands of the main shores. Such places were of value to them for their ships to run into when beset by storms or by enemies. The most important in our story was their settlement at Carthage. This Carthage will play a very big part later on.

But now we must take a look at the very remarkable part which Greece was playing at this moment, 500 B.C. or so, and had played for some years and was to play for many to come. I expect you will have wondered that I have not spoken about Homer and the famous Siege of Troy, and other great men and great events which happened long before this time. Troy began to be besieged very shortly after 1200 B.C. Homer lived at some time between 800 and 900 B.C. We have left them far behind.

The reason why I did not pick them up and fit them into their place in the story when we came to the years of their happening is that the part played by Greece in the making of this great story—that is to say, in the making of the world—is different from the part played by any other people. It is such a different part that it is almost another story, although it does really fit into the great story and is a very important part of it.

The other great peoples that we have been talking about, the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians, conquered vast countries, founded vast empires. The Greeks did nothing of this kind. They were fine and accomplished soldiers, as we have seen, but the various states were too disunited for them to be able to bring their forces together or to keep them for any length of time together.

The genius of Greece

But for many centuries they were by far the most accomplished people in the world; their artists, both painters and sculptors, were far ahead of the rest; their thinkers went deeper and with more clear insight and wisdom than any others into the many problems and puzzles that life and the world set for us; they had finer sculptors, finer orators, finer poets, probably they had finer musicians; we have seen that they had a finer battle formation.

In fact, in cleverness and in all the arts and sciences the Greeks were not only superior to all those about them, but they were superior to all that have been since—even to ourselves, though we have had all these years in which to learn. We have learnt to make trains go, and the telephone and poison gases, and guns that will shoot twenty-five miles, and other things of that kind. But we are not the equals of the Greeks of 500 B.C. in art, oratory, poetry or philosophy. Had it not been for the Greek philosophers we cannot tell what our philosophy might have been, for it is built up on the foundations they laid; but we may doubt whether it would have been nearly as far-seeing or as interesting.

And that is really the most important part that the Greeks took in the making of the story—a part quite different from that of the great empire-makers, and yet, as I think you will agree, a bigger part than any of theirs. For it made, or did a great deal to make, the thought of the world what it is to-day. It did a great deal to make the thought of the world what it was all down the pages of the story, say from 1200 B.C. onwards. I mean that it made men think about things—about art and philosophy and music, and about life in general—as they do think. Had it not been for the Greeks we should be thinking differently, and probably not nearly so wisely, about all these things. That is the greatest work that the Greeks have done in the world.

You may remember that we said the disasters which befell the Jews, and their scattering throughout the other nations, made them able to take their religious ideas with them, and to sow those ideas, as it were seeds from which plants should spring, amongst those nations into which they were driven. Something like the same kind of scattering happened to the Greeks, and so enabled them to carry their ideas over a great part of the world. Of their own accord they would, no doubt, have carried them far. If you look at the map of Greece, you will see that not only has the country the sea on three sides of it, but that it is cut up, and cut into, by a wonderful number of bays and gulfs of the sea, so that it would have a very great length of seashore if all were added together. Naturally that meant that the Greeks were great sea-goers. They were a great "maritime" people, as we should say—from mare, which is Latin for sea. A good deal of their excellence in art we may suspect that they derived from those ancient Minoans whom we saw masters of Crete very long ago. The Minoans, as the Minotaur legend showed us, were masters of Athens also. They were the great sea-power in very ancient times. They left evidences of their art at Mycenæ in Greece. The Greeks, following the Minoans in art, perhaps followed them also in the skilful management of ships. We know, at all events, that they went far and wide on the Mediterranean in ships, certainly as great traders, probably often as pirates, and, whether the one or the other, taking their thoughts, their arts, their culture with them.

The expansion of the Greeks

But besides this—beside these expeditions which they went of their own will, and beside the further spread of their culture, which their soldiers, going out to fight for hire, would carry with them—some or other of the Greeks were from time to time in the course of the story obliged to fly over-sea, obliged to save themselves from the pressure of enemies coming down on them from the north.

It is exactly what we saw happening in Babylonia that happened here too in Greece. It is exactly what happened again and again in the great story—the peoples from a wild barren country come pressing down upon peoples living in a more fertile one. Out of Thrace, which you will see on the map lying to the north of Greece, down through Macedonia and Thessaly, came wild warlike tribes pressing on the peoples of the more fertile south. Various reasons for their movements are given by the Greeks who left their native country and settled, some in the islands, some in Asia Minor. In some instances it was admitted that they went under pressure of enemies; but that is not a reason which would be very pleasant to their pride. Other reasons were recorded, but probably this was really the most common.

In their sailings to and fro, and tradings, they would learn about the countries on the Mediterranean shores. Even if they had not full knowledge of it before, they would have learnt all that they needed to know about the western shore of Asia Minor in the course of the ten years which are assigned to the Siege of Troy.

Ilus was father of Tros, king of Troy, and the Greeks called Troy Ilium, after Ilus, rather than after the son Tros from whom the name Troy came. And the Iliad is therefore the story of Ilium, otherwise called Troy. This splendid poem is attributed to Homer as its author, but what Homer probably did was to recite, or to sing to the accompaniment of the lyre, these stories, which were only written down years afterwards. We may imagine him something like the bard or the troubadour. How much of his own invention he added to the story we cannot know.

The story, as we have it from him, is that Queen Helen having been taken from her home, with her own willing consent, by Paris and carried to Troy, the Greeks went after her and tried to get her back. They tried for the whole ten years which are ascribed to the Siege of Troy. Helen was the most beautiful lady in the world, and the Iliad is certainly one of the most beautiful poems.

But can we believe the story?

The Greeks were a singularly intelligent people. Does it seem the act of any intelligent people to go on fighting for ten years in order to get back even the most beautiful lady in the world? And if they were at all intelligent they would certainly be apt to reflect that she would not be likely to be equally beautiful at the end of the ten years as she was at the beginning.

The Siege of Troy

A very learned Grecian scholar, Dr. Walter Leaf, has written a book about the Siege of Troy which tells the story in a much less romantic and poetical but a much more probable way. And I want to tell that story, as he tells it, very shortly to you, because it gives such a good idea of the way that men were living along the shore of Asia Minor at that time, say 1200 or so B.C.

Troy, you will see if you look at the map, stands, or stood, nearly in the north-western corner of Asia Minor, its territory reaching up to the shore of that narrow sea-channel which used to be called the Hellespont and is now called the Dardanelles. Any Greek ships wishing to go for trade through the Hellespont must pass close along the coast of Troy land, so close that any people who had the command of the land could sally out and interfere with their passage. The current flows out westward through the Hellespont, and the wind usually blows from north-west, against the ships going eastward.