The whole point of Dr. Leaf's argument is that at Troy there was a market, or fair, at which the produce of the countries in the east was sold to the Greeks and other people in the west, and that the Trojans derived much profit from this market. The profit from this market they would of course lose if the western people were able to sail up through the Hellespont and do their trade direct with the people along the shore of the Black Sea. The Trojans were, in fact, what we nowadays call "middle-men," and you know how we are always trying to bring the consumer, the person who wants to use the thing produced, into direct touch with the producer, and so to do away with the profit which the middle-man charges and which he again puts on to the price of the thing when he sells it to the consumer. The Greeks were the consumers. They wanted to do away with the middle-men, that is to say with the Trojans, and that, far more probably than the bringing back of the beautiful lady, was why they spent so many years and so many lives in the siege of Troy.
You will remember what we said before about the kind of ships that these people had. They were propelled by rowing, or by sails which were only useful when the wind was nearly directly behind them. They had to put in to some harbourage every night, because they did not dare to go along in the dark, without charts and without compass and without knowledge of how to steer by the stars. Even in daytime they hardly dared to go out of sight of land and of the landmarks which they knew.
The islands in these seas lie so close to each other that it was possible for them to creep along in this way from one to the other and so to the coasts of Asia from Greece. And there was another reason why they could not go long voyages—they had no light cisterns in which to carry fresh water. They had to take it in heavy earthern jars.
This need for water they could supply from rivers which ran out westward through Troy land. They would lie along the coast there, as they traded with the Trojan middle-men, or, possibly, as they waited for a favouring wind to go through the Hellespont, which the Trojans might allow them to do on payment of some toll money, as we should call it, for the permission.
The reasons for thinking that the wish to do away with these Trojans and their market was the real motive of the ten years' war are strengthened when we look at the names of the peoples that came to the help of the Greeks on the one side and of the Trojans on the other. Those that came to the assistance of the Greeks were the peoples along the Mediterranean shores or on the islands; those that aided the Trojans were the peoples from the east. So we have the two set in rather distinct opposition to each other; the Trojans and the eastern people who sent their things to the market at Troy and had an interest in the market being kept up, and the western peoples who wanted the market destroyed.
That is a very prosaic story, is it not, in comparison with the romance about the beautiful lady? It is not the kind of story that Homer or any other bard would care to sing or his listeners would take pleasure in hearing. But I am afraid it is more likely to be the true story of the reason why a practical and intelligent people like the Greeks fought so hard and so long to annihilate Troy. I have said so much about this famous siege because it gives such a good opportunity of setting what are probably the facts beside the fictions which have been founded on them. It teaches us how these poetic stories were made.
The Odyssey
The other great poem attributed to Homer, the Odyssey, is only another chapter, dealing with the adventures of one of the principal Greek heroes, of the story of the siege. It is even more glorious reading than the Iliad itself.
Now, whatever the truth be about the Trojan war, one fact is quite clear and certain from its story, as well as from other evidence, that the Greeks had dealings, constant dealings, with Asia Minor. Therefore their thought, their art, their culture, and all that was most remarkable in their character as a nation, was known in Asia Minor, it was known among all these islands of the Ægean Sea and along the southern, the African, shores of the Mediterranean. Everywhere that it went it was superior to the thought and the culture of the native people, and everywhere it had its effect. I want you to realise that. It was not by reason of the force of their arms, though they were such good fighters, that the Greeks count for so much in our great story, but by reason of the force of their thought, and of their accomplishments.
Some hundred or two hundred years after the siege of Troy we find certain colonies or cities of the Greeks founded along the western shore of Asia Minor. The Greeks living in these cities were called Ionians. Shortly before the coming of Cyrus, the all-conquering Persian, those Ionians had been conquered by that king Crœsus of Lydia whom we saw taking command of that ill-fated alliance formed against Persia. The Persian had now, by the time, 500 B.C., to which we have brought down the story, made himself master of all Asia Minor. The Ionian cities had come under his dominance.
It is amusing to stop now and then in the course of a story to wonder how it would have gone if one or other of the events in it had happened rather differently. Sometimes it seems as if just one event turned the whole course of what happened afterwards.
So here in this great story of ours we may wonder what would have happened to the world if the Persians, pushing their way westward, had not come up against that strong wall of opposition which they found in the Greek phalanx. There was no other power, so far as we know, at this time, in the west, that was at all likely to be able to stop them.
If we look at what happened in the more southward direction of their advance, in Egypt, we shall perhaps be inclined to think that they would not have gone very much farther westward than they did, for the Egyptian story of that time shows that they were not able to establish their power very securely in that country. For nearly forty years after the Persian conquest of Egypt by Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, Egypt was held as a province of Persia, but in 488 B.C. the Egyptians made a successful revolt and threw off the Persian yoke for a time. Three years later they were again subdued by Xerxes, who was then king of Persia, but only fifteen years afterwards they were again revolting, and through the whole of that century, 500 to 400 B.C., they were continually rising against their Persian masters, never quite succeeding in winning their freedom, but constantly giving trouble, never completely subdued. It is evident that the Persians, after their first and most effective conquest, never had a very secure hold over the people of the Nile.
Then, if we turn to look at what was going on farther north, where the Persian cavalry were coming up against that famous Greek phalanx, we shall see good reason why the Persians were not able to give a great deal of attention to making their position good in Egypt. The wonder is that they should have found any forces at all to spare for that enterprise.
The Persian monarch had assumed the title of King of Kings. He claimed dominion over the whole world, as the Persians knew it. It must have been most vexatious to him, and to that great claim and title of his, to find the claim opposed and contested. He had conquered Greeks before—those Spartans whom he had met fighting in the alliance under King Crœsus. He would conquer them again. He would crush them and take possession of their country.
After all that they had accomplished, the conquest of Greece cannot have seemed to the Persians as if it would be a hard matter. Greece, as a single nation, did not exist. There were many Grecian states, but they were always fighting among themselves, each striving for the supremacy. The chief of the fighting states were Sparta and Athens. Each of these would form alliances from time to time with other states to fight against the other. Just at this moment, that is just before 500 B.C., the contention between them was most severe. The forms of the government in the two were sharply opposed. The government of Athens had lately fallen into the hands of the people. The people, the democracy (from demos, the people, and kratos, power) had deposed their king and driven him out of the country. The Spartans, who hated the idea of a democratic government, sympathised with him, and no doubt would have restored him to power had they been able to do so; but he went to Asia Minor, to the court of Darius, who was then king of Persia, and besought his help. The Persian was very willing to give it, but it was not until some years later, in 490 B.C., that the first actual invasion of Greece by the Persians took place. That invasion practically began and ended with what was one of the most famous battles in the world's history, the battle of Marathon.
Marathon
It was fought on a small plain, only some three miles wide, on the seashore, where the Persians had disembarked their forces. And here I would give you a word of warning which must apply to all this story of the glorious days of Greece. The battles—Marathon, Thermopylæ, and Salamis—have become very famous, and rightly famous. They were of importance in the story because they—Marathon and Salamis, at all events, which were Grecian victories—put a stop to that westward advance of the Persians which might have extended we cannot say how far but for those victories. But they were battles in which the forces engaged on the one side or the other were almost ridiculously small in comparison with the armies which we have seen put into the field. They were fought over very small spaces of land or sea, and they were very quickly over.
But though they are rightly famous, for the reason which I have spoken of, a good deal of their fame is due to the splendid way in which their story has been told to us by the great historian Herodotus, and, as you know, the best story in the world can be made to seem very poor if it is badly told; and a poor story can be made interesting by good telling. These people, these Greeks, with their extraordinary accomplishments, had the power of telling stories very well, and the stories really were good in themselves. They were good stories, and stories of important events, but the events are rather apt to appear even more important than they really were, just because their story is told so very well.
That is the word of warning which I want to give you about all these stories of the glorious days of Greece.
In giving you the outlines of the great story of the world, as I am trying to do in this book, there is no space for an account of these battles. You must read about them elsewhere, and all I can do is to tell you how they fit into the big story, where they come, and how it was that they happened. The Greeks, at this battle of Marathon, defeated the Persians and utterly demolished any chance of the success which this first invasion of Greece by the Persians could have had. The Persians returned again to the attack, but it was not until ten years later; and then it was attempted in a different manner.
There had been an effort at the invasion of Greece even before that which was defeated at Marathon. Those Ionian cities along the coast of Asia Minor had revolted against the Persian rule, and had been aided by the Athenians, who were closely related to them. A Persian expedition had set out four years before the Marathon enterprise to punish the Athenians for helping the Ionians in that revolt which the Persians had easily repressed. It set out both by land and sea, with the intention that the fleet should support the land army, but the fleet was caught and shattered in a storm, and although the Persian power was supposed to be established over Thrace and even as far west as Macedonia, their land army was fallen upon and broken up by attacks of the wild tribes on the borders of Thrace without ever reaching Greek territory at all.
But though this expedition, thus planned to act together by land and sea, had been a failure, it was just the same kind of enterprise, only on a far larger scale, that was attempted by Xerxes, then King of Kings, ten years after the Persian overthrow at Marathon. King Xerxes himself was the leader.
Xerxes
I think we may be safe in saying that no forces as large as these, in the number of men enrolled in them, had ever before been collected for a military purpose, and also that no former expedition had ever been planned with so much care and forethought. Xerxes made two bridges for the passing of his army across the Hellespont; he cut a canal through the Isthmus at Mount Athos for the passage of his fleet. The fleet, you see, if you will look at the map, would coast round along the south of Thrace, accompanying the army, till it came to the Peninsula at the end of which is Mount Athos. Xerxes had established stations in Thrace for the supply of his army with food and all needful things as it went along. It was just off Mount Athos that the storm had scattered the fleet of the former expedition that he had sent against Greece. By making this canal, and so letting the ships go through the Isthmus, he avoided the danger of another storm off the end of the Peninsula.
But there were other dangers besides those from the wind and waves, for a fleet in any part of the Mediterranean. Although the Persian monarch might style himself King of Kings, there was another power that ruled the sea at this time, the power of Carthage, that colony of the Phœnicians of which I asked you to take note the first time that it found a place in this story. The Phœnicians, as we have seen, had planted colonies of their own at all convenient places along the Mediterranean shore, and of all these Carthage had grown to be by far the strongest in its numbers. It was regarded as the capital city, the headquarters, of all that half-merchant and half-pirate host which we have seen always going to and fro on the waters of the great inland sea. For fifty years and more before the battle of Marathon was fought it had become a great power, the chief naval power of the world, and it had already come into collision with the Greeks.
For the Greeks, too, as we know, sent out their colonies. They sent them to Ionia, eastward along the coast of Asia Minor, and they also sent them westward, round the heel and toe of Italy, as far as that great island of Sicily lying nearly opposite to where you see Carthage on the African shore. Sicily and the African continent lie at no great distance from each other at the nearest points. And the Carthaginians and other Phœnicians had come into conflict with the Greek colonists in Sicily long before Greece was threatened by the Persians. Xerxes, before making his attempt on Greece, assured himself that his fleet would not be attacked by the great naval power, by making an alliance with Carthage. Phœnician ships were among the best that fought for him. His plans seem to have been laid with every possible care and completeness. The overthrow of Greece, and of that liberty which all Grecian states, in spite of their jealousy of each other and of their incessant quarrels, prized so very highly, seemed certain. It looked as if the King of Kings, who would rule absolutely, according to the Eastern idea, was sure to bring them under his subjection. The danger was so great that for the moment the states of Greece were able to put their jealousies on one side. Athens and Sparta, and the less powerful states with which one or other was in alliance at the time, drew together. It was a terrible moment for them.
The first great battle of the war made it more terrible still.
Command of the united land forces of Greece fell, naturally, into the hands of Sparta. The utmost that they were able to gather was but little over 5000 men, of which no more than 500 were actually Spartans. The smallness of the force may give us an idea of the small population of those city states of Greece.
Thermopylæ
With this gallant body of defenders Leonidas, the Spartan general, encountered the Persian host in the narrow mountain pass of Thermopylæ. It was a situation in which the Persian could make little or no use of his strongest arm, the cavalry, and he was held back, with heavy loss to his soldiers, so much less heavily armed than the Greeks. How that battle would have gone had it been prolonged, we cannot know, for a traitor, one of the great traitors of history, revealed to the Persians another pass across the mountains. They had partly traversed that other pass, and were already threatening the flank and rear of his army, when Leonidas was informed of their movement. He knew his position to be hopeless. He bade the allied troops, who were not his countrymen, retreat and find safety if they could. As for himself and his devoted band of Spartans, they sallied out of the pass, threw themselves on the Persian masses, and went down fighting to the death, an example of gallantry to all future ages.
And Athens, Athens lying, as you see, right before the victors once they had come through the difficult pass—what hope was there for her? None. Her doom seemed certain.
The Athenians saved themselves by a sacrifice that has perhaps only been equalled by the Russians when they burnt their capital of Moscow at the approach of Napoleon's grand army. They quitted their loved city; they left it to be destroyed by the Persians, and moved themselves and their households to islands nearest the coast where they would be under the protection of their ships, which had not yet encountered the Persian fleet. Of these islands one was named Salamis, and between the island and the mainland the Greeks and Persians met in that naval battle which saved Greece. The Persian fleet was utterly defeated. The danger from the sea had vanished. The army of the Persians remained, victorious, in possession of all the territory of Athens. But it had lost the support of its ships.
It was an age of heroes. I do not suppose that any other great victory was due so largely to the genius and determination of one single man as this at Salamis to the Athenian admiral Themistocles. The King of Kings, however, did not behave in any very heroic manner. He scuttled back with the broken remnants of his fleet to his own shores.
Platæa
The following year made the repulse of the Persians complete. Their army was defeated in a great battle at Platæa, and on the very same day the Grecian fleet engaged and again badly beat the fleet which the Persians had managed to reform. But this time it was not the Persian fleet that was threatening the coast of Greece. This second naval fight was off the coast of Asia Minor, by a headland from which the battle had its name—Mycale.
That day made an end of the Persian threat to Greece. It did more; it gave the Greeks a sense that they were a stronger folk than the Persians, if they met in conditions and numbers at all equal. And that feeling of strength always makes a people that can feel it actually stronger. It helped to make their greatness. The result of the battle at Platæa had been very doubtful in the midst of the fight. The Greeks had been saved only by the steadfast courage of the Spartans. But its conclusion was decisive. Persia was a real danger to Greece no more. On the contrary, it is Greece that we now find carrying the war into Asia Minor and freeing those Ionian coast cities from the yoke of Persia. Perpetual jealousies between the states still prevented Greece from extending her power far. The Persian could still set one combination of states against another. The wonder only is that, in the midst of their fights with each other, they were able to engage in schemes of foreign attack at all.
We may be quite sure of one thing, that the Grecian states never could have stopped the advance of Persia if it had not been for the marvellous courage and discipline of the Spartans, and that the Spartans never could have had this marvellous courage and discipline if it had not been for the remarkable character of their institutions and their government. Their great idea was that the individual man or woman did not matter at all. What mattered was the state—that the state should be powerful, should have good soldiers to defend it and to attack its enemies. It was with that purpose in view that all its laws were made. The Spartans lived not for themselves but for the state. Hardihood, therefore, and courage were what they aimed at in themselves and their children, so that the state might be well served. The Spartan punishments for offences against the laws were fearfully severe. So were the punishments of children by their parents, and for a child to cry or utter a sound under such punishment was regarded as a dreadful disgrace to it. "Spartan fortitude" is a proverbial saying even amongst us to-day. It was training of this kind which made the Spartan troops so steadfast in battle and which gave the Spartans on the whole the leadership over the other states.
It was a very noble idea, very self-sacrificing—this of each citizen living not for himself alone but for the state; but these people were not large-minded enough to carry the idea a little farther and see that it would be for the advantage of all Greece if each state could sacrifice its own interests and good for the sake of the whole. They could sacrifice themselves as individuals for Sparta, but they had no idea of sacrificing Sparta for Greece. On the contrary, they were terribly eager to build up the power of Sparta at the cost of Athens or of any other state. They would even ally themselves with the enemy of all Greece, with Persia, in order to do so.
The other states were equally selfish about their own state interests, but their individuals had not the same idea of self-sacrifice for the good of the state; and therefore their states were not so powerful as Sparta, nor their soldiers so brave and well disciplined.
The Athenians, however, were far more cultivated, better artists, musicians, orators, writers and so on, than the Spartans.
The most glorious days of Greece, we may say, reached from 500 B.C. to 350 B.C. I have made it a rule in this story to bother you as little as possible with names, either of places or persons, and only now and then with dates, because too many names and figures always seem to me to confuse a story; but I am going to name now a few of the greatest persons in these glorious days of Greece because they are the persons who have been makers of the world's very best thoughts and best artistic products.
Greek literature
Homer, that great singer, sang—it is much to be doubted whether he ever wrote—-long before this period. There were also Sappho, the poetess, and Alcæus, who wrote in those metres from which we have named our Sapphics and Alcaics. These did not come within the most glorious days. But in that splendid time, and inspired no doubt by its splendour, came Sophocles and Æschylus, writers of the finest tragedies; there was Euripides, who was a tragic writer for the stage too, yet has imagined some of his scenes in a lighter and livelier way than those older and fearfully grim writers of the drama. Later came Aristophanes, the comic dramatist, who brings on birds and frogs as actors in his plays. There was the mighty orator, Demosthenes. Oratory and speech-making were very much studied and practised. Probably there were a large number of speakers whom even to-day we would think extraordinarily fine. There were a host of painters and musicians; but we cannot hear their music and the pictures have perished.
Then there was Socrates, the great philosopher, and Plato, who wrote the dialogues in which Socrates, who was his master, was the chief speaker. Socrates was not a writer. I suppose we can never know how much in the dialogues is Plato's and how much Socrates'. We may suspect that very much is due to Plato, though he gives Socrates nearly all the credit. Later came Aristotle, who wrote about everything—about philosophy, about science, about morality, about natural history, about government. Plato, before him, or Socrates speaking to us by Plato's pen, had been very much interested in the art of government—in discussing the best form of government. But the government which they all discussed was the government of those small city states which we have seen in Greece. They did not concern themselves with government of large nations and empires.
Sculpture
But almost more glorious than any of these were the sculptors, of whom the greatest were Phidias and Praxiteles. The work of the sculptors was employed chiefly in connection with the work of the architects, of the builders of the temples and the public buildings. The temples were splendidly ornamented with the most perfect statues and cuttings in marble that man has ever produced. The architecture of the Greeks was more perfect than that of any nation before or since. We may suppose, as we have seen, that it owed much to the example of that very fine Minoan art which was produced in Crete very long before, and which was carried to the mainland of Greece, and is especially seen in excavations at Mycenæ.
What is most noticeable about the Egyptian, and also about the Babylonian, architecture of temples and tombs is their enormous size. They seem to have tried to impress the imagination of men by buildings of such size that men going in and out of them are no bigger than ants, comparatively. And they succeed in being impressive in this way. They are terrifying. But the Greek works do not terrify. They are works of pure beauty, and it is their beauty which still charms us as no other work of its kind has ever done.
CORINTHIAN ARCHITECTURE (MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES).
CORINTHIAN ARCHITECTURE (MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES).
The sculptures, as I said, are seen chiefly in what remains of the temples, and most of the statues are of gods and goddesses and heroes who were supposed to be super-human; but although they took those divine and half-divine persons as the objects and models of their art, the gods and all that had to do with religion seem to have been of far less importance in the lives of these Greeks than they were in the lives of any of the people whom we have met in the whole course of our story.
The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the peoples of Syria and Palestine, and the Persians all were very much occupied with doing service to their gods, and some of them regulated their lives very much by doing what they thought the gods would wish them to do. With the Greeks, religious ceremonies, or acting as the gods would have them act, hardly came into their lives at all. The persons of Homer's poems pay more attention to the gods than the Greeks of the later time to which we have now come. The former do seem to have had an idea that the chief of the gods, whom they called Zeus, living on top of Mount Olympus with inferior gods and goddesses about him, did interfere with the affairs of men and did punish men who did not do the divine will. But it was a religion that a people so intelligent as these later Greeks could hardly be expected to believe in. They seem to have kept up some pretence of belief, for it was brought as part of a charge against the great philosopher Socrates, on which he was actually condemned to death, that he had spoken impiously of the gods, but we may suspect that this was only used against him by enemies who really had as little respect as he had for such gods as these.
At all events, I do not think that we shall be wrong in saying that these Greeks had no religion at all which made really any difference in their lives until Christianity was brought to them by the Jews, and especially by St. Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles—which means to the peoples that were not of Jewish race.
But they had strong and clear ideas, for all that, of right and wrong, of justice and so on. If they believed at all in a life after death it was of a life so shadowy, and their idea of it was so vague, that it certainly made no difference to their life on earth. The Egyptians were very careful in preserving their dead, in the form of mummies. The Greeks did not treat their dead with quite so much respect. They often burned the bodies, so they had no occasion for immense tombs. A small vase would contain the ashes.
Life of Greek cities
It is interesting to try to imagine the way of life of these people in their city states. We may suppose them to have been a people of very busy active minds, always ready to discuss any new thing, whether it were in art, in philosophy, or science. We may imagine endless discussions going on under the porticoes which gave them shelter from the hot sun. "Stoa," these porticoes or colonnades were called in Greek, and it is from the people disputing there that we get the name of the "Stoic" philosophers. Opposed to them in dispute would be the "Epicureans," or disciples of Epicurus.
These would be disputing, and pupils listening to them, imbibing lessons in oratory and philosophy, and then out in the street might perhaps pass some important person like Pericles, the great statesman, or Alcibiades, or Nicias, the admiral. Any of these would be followed by a great retinue of friends and hangers-on and slaves.
In another part of the city there would be busy shops. Most of the Grecian cities were on the coast; and there would be the port and ships coming and going. Then there would be the gymnasia, where the athletes could be watched, doing exercises, playing games, throwing the javelin or the discus, wrestling, and so on.
Some half of the population of the city would probably be slaves, slaves taken in war or by purchase from their parents in Thrace or other barbarous lands. There was a great slave market in Athens itself, and the sea-faring traders and pirates of whom we have spoken did a little slave-trading among their other business. Probably it was seldom that the slaves were badly treated, and we know that they often were set free and often had quite a good time even while they were slaves. The name "slave" really comes from Slav. It is taken from the name of the Slavonic people, because it was from them that most of the slaves were taken. It is not derived from that Latin word "servus," which is translated "slave," and from which our "serf"—the serfs of the Anglo-Saxons—is taken. A slave might rise to quite high employment, and it is curious to think that the large police force in Athens was at one time composed of more than a thousand slaves from Scythia, that land of wild tribes even farther north and east than Thrace.
It seems that the disputations and all the business were very much the affair of the men only. The women took hardly any part. We have spoken of the poetess Sappho; but this was long before. It is evident that the ladies were more important in the Greek society of Homer's day than they were later. We read of no Greek lady of the glorious days as famous in art or music or literature; and only a very few seem to have been allowed to give their opinions on philosophy or politics. It seems as if they counted for less than they ought to count.
The Greeks were great game-players, especially great at athletic games; and we must not forget that though religion appears to have made little difference in their lives, they were a people who had great respect for old customs and were therefore careful to keep up and perform in proper manner religious ceremonies. In some of them the women took a part.
Even in the very midst of their struggle against the Persians, the Greek states were only with the greatest difficulty able to lay aside their jealousy of each other and to come together to fight; and after that danger from the east had been dispelled they were free to fight with each other, or to quarrel about the leadership. They did fight and quarrel unceasingly for some 150 years. After the final repulse of the Persians, Athens for a time gained the leadership, owing to the disgust of the states at the insolence of the Spartans, who had been leaders before. But Sparta was too strong to be put down easily. At last a combination of the rest of the states under the leadership of Thebes fairly conquered Sparta and took possession of the Spartan territory.
Peloponnesian War
The most famous of this long succession of fights is that between Sparta on the one side and Athens, as the leader, on the other. It is usually called the Peloponnesian War, the Peloponnese being all that part of Greece below the Isthmus of Corinth, and it is chiefly famous because its story has been so wonderfully well told by Thucydides.
Thucydides was a very famous Greek historian. So, too, was Herodotus, who wrote long before him. But Herodotus was more of a story-teller. He was a traveller who wrote about what he saw; and always writes truly when he is telling us of what he himself saw. He has strange tales to tell, about one-eyed men and men who carried their heads under one arm, and so on, which were told him by people whom he met; but he tells them with a warning that he will not vouch for them, because he did not see such things himself.
But he has no idea of telling us the real reason why the stories that he tells happened as they did—the political causes, as we should say, of the events. Any trivial reason seems good enough to him to account for a great war. He would have been quite ready to accept the beautiful lady idea as the reason of the siege of Troy.
Thucydides, on the contrary, looked into the true reasons of the events. He, rather than Herodotus, was the "father of history." There were other fine Greek historians, and notably one, Xenophon, who went with an extraordinary expedition of the Greeks—-10,000 in number—who penetrated, fighting, far into Asia Minor; and then had to retreat again, still fighting, having done very little good. He went and came back with that expedition and wrote the story of it.
But he was not the equal, as historian, of Thucydides, who wrote of the Peloponnesian War, and who wrote, further, of wars which the Greeks, especially the Athenians, had now to carry yet farther afield—or oversea—and not for the first time, to Sicily.
And there, in Sicily, there met together Greeks, Carthaginians, and another people—of a new name, not altogether unimportant in the story—-Latins or Romans from the neighbourhood of that city established on the Tiber.
The story, which I am now trying to carry down to the year 330 B.C. or so, has shifted its scene westward. We have seen how near that island of Sicily lies both to Europe, by way of the toe of Italy, and to Africa, by way of Carthage. It is a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between the two. We must see how the nations met there.
Carthage was one of the colonies founded by the Phœnicians. It was not one of the earliest, but it had the advantage of a good harbour for the protection of the ships of those days. It grew in importance and in numbers of inhabitants, so that it soon became the chief of all the stations of the kind which the Phœnicians had planted, sending their colonists out from their native capital cities of Tyre and Sidon.
Now Tyre and Sidon were captured by that great king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon about a hundred years or so before the Persian attacks on Greece, and the effect of that capture of the two capital cities was to leave Carthage as the most powerful city belonging to the Phœnicians. Carthage, then, from that time, became the capital, the chief city, of this great naval power. It was the headquarters of naval power in the Mediterranean. Greek colonists from many different states of Greece had already spread themselves along the shores of Sicily, and even so far as the shores of Spain and those Balearic Islands (or islands of the slingers) where, as we are told, a boy's dinner was always set up on top of a pole and he was not allowed to eat it until he had knocked it down with a stone from his sling. Naturally, the inhabitants learned to be good slingers.
Now, the Phœnicians were evidently not people of the kind that are contented to sit still. They were energetic, pushing; and of course they came into conflict with the Greek colonies. The principal conflicts took place in, or around, Sicily, where the Phœnicians, as well as the Greeks, had long been settled. It was not until Carthage had grown to considerable power that the Phœnicians could hope to do much against the Greeks, and about that time some of the Greek cities also gained strength for military and naval enterprise by coming into rather closer union with each other.
The constitution of very many of the Greek city states went through the same succession of changes. After the rule of the aristocratic party, that is to say, of the best-born people, who were the rich landowners, there came a time of rule by the democracy, that is to say by the poorer, the common people. This democratic rule was so disorderly that a strong single ruler generally arose out of the disorder and established his power, somewhat as Napoleon I. did out of the disorder of the French Revolution. These rulers, or dictators, were called tyrants in Greece, and the changes of the constitutions in the government of their colonial cities in Sicily went on in exactly the same way as in Greece itself. A strong ruler established over one city would often be able to make good his power over another city near him. Thus began to be formed alliances of cities under the rule of one or of a few leading men; and so the Sicilian Greeks found some strength of their own to oppose to the strength of Carthage.
Historians tell us of such sweeping successes of the Phœnicians in the earliest conflicts that if we were to believe them all we should have to believe that hardly a Greek was left in Sicily. But evidently that is not exactly how it did happen, for it was just while the Persians were threatening Greece that Gelo, one of the greatest of the Sicilian "tyrants," established Syracuse as the capital city of Sicily and the headquarters of his power. The Greek colonists had largely assimilated the native peoples to themselves. There had been marriages between them, and Greek thought had penetrated here as it had everywhere that the Greeks went. So the strength of the Greeks in Sicily did not depend on the colonists. Only the Greek colonists seem to have been far more successful in getting help from the native people than the Phœnician colonists were. The Phœnicians, however, had their friends in Sicily, even among the Greeks themselves, for there were jealousies between the Greek cities in Sicily as everywhere else.
Phœnicians defeated
I told you that Xerxes for the safety of his fleet had made an alliance with Carthage before making his great attack on Greece. It was something more than a mere arrangement that his ships should not be meddled with as they went to and fro. It was an agreement for some more active help than this. Carthage was to attack the Greek colonial power in Sicily at the same time as Xerxes fell upon the mainland of Greece from the east. The two attacks were so well timed that it is said that the battle which decided the result of the Phœnician expedition against Sicily was fought on the very same day as the battle of Salamis which decided the fate of the Persian attack on Greece. And the result of the one battle was the same as that of the other. Gelo completely vanquished the Phœnicians; so completely that Sicily had rest from their troubling nearly all through what remained of that century—that is to say, for ninety years or so.
During that period the arts and civilisation made great advance in the cities of Sicily. Again, as before, it was really the jealousy and fighting of the Greek cities among themselves that brought them under fresh attack by what they called the barbarian power. Again the Carthaginians came upon them. They were disunited, fighting among themselves. The Athenian navy had come to Sicily to take its part in the fighting, as is told in the splendid history of Thucydides. It was fighting which all grew out of that Peloponnesian War which was fought between Athens, as the leading state in the main part of Greece, on the one side, and Sparta, as the great power of the Peloponnese, on the other. The Syracusans, of Sicily, were originally a Corinthian colony, from Corinth, on the Isthmus between the greater part of Greece and the Peloponnese. The Athenian navy came to Sicily in the year 415 B.C., and if it had made a vigorous attack on Syracuse at its first coming it is probable that the city would have fallen. The Athenian admiral, however, delayed; he allowed the Syracusans time to improve their defences, and he had to sit down to blockade the city both by land and sea. A small Spartan force came to the help of the besieged, they put all their own naval power into the struggle, and in the spring of 413 B.C. fought and defeated the Athenian fleet.
They were just in time, for the very next day strong reinforcements arrived from Athens. With this new force the besiegers tried to recover their lost positions, but were defeated. The Syracusans then blocked the mouth of the harbour in which the Athenian ships lay, and after a final struggle both by land and sea, the Athenians were hopelessly beaten; those who survived had a wretched fate as captives.
But even after this great defence and complete victory there were many different and opposing interests in Sicily. Sometimes a city which you would expect to find helping one side, is found fighting on just the opposite side. The story of the whole would be far too long to tell here. The effect of it all was that when a new Carthaginian force attacked the Sicilian Greeks in 409 B.C. the Greeks were weakened and disunited after all these contentions among themselves.
Dionysius of Syracuse
Again, it was a tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, who drew together the Grecian strength, together with that of the native Sicilians, but it was not until half the Greek cities on the island had been lost and their civilisation destroyed. It is evident that Dionysius was a ruler of very much more than common ability. These tyrants who seized the power in so many of the Greek states, both at home and in the colonies, did not generally sit on their thrones very securely or very long, but Dionysius reigned for no less than thirty-eight years. He employed a large number of mercenary troops, both Greeks and others; he had Sparta as an ally, and he sustained four invasions of the Carthaginians. He made alliances with some of the states on the Italian mainland, and made war on others, till he became master of much of the southern region of Italy. But it was for a time only, and the power of Syracuse was never firmly established on any part of the mainland.
After the death of Dionysius there was continual fighting, for and around Sicily, between the Carthaginians on the one side and the Sicilian Greeks, with various and often-changing alliances, on the other. At one moment we see the Sicilians actually carrying the war into Africa, while at the very same moment the Carthaginians are attacking the Sicilians in Sicily itself!
And so the story goes, a story of continual contests, with continually changing results, down to 300 B.C. and later, and gradually we begin to hear more and more of a certain small, and at first quite insignificant, state in Italy, namely, Rome, taking part in the contest. It is a part that becomes greater and greater as time goes on till it fills almost every chapter and page.
But now that we have traced the story of what was happening in and about Sicily, and Carthage, and Italy, down to this date of about 300 B.C., we have to turn back again, first to Greece itself and then to the eastern side of the Mediterranean, for tremendous events have been going on there during the last half-century of this period.
We left it, you will remember, with the Persians repulsed, no longer a serious danger to Greece, yet the Greeks themselves unable, because of their own jealousies and divisions, to make any large conquests in Asia Minor. A new power, of over-mastering strength, suddenly appears in that eastern portion of our picture—the power of Macedon.
The country of Macedon, as you will see on the Greek map, lies northward of Greece. It was inhabited by tribes of the Slavs, or Slavonic people, who lived the agricultural and pastoral life, tilling the soil and having flocks and herds. About 100 years after the battle of Salamis, a baby was born of the royal house of Macedonia. He was given the name of Philip. His childhood was spent at Thebes, in Greece, where he had been sent, or had been taken, as a hostage. When he came to the throne of Macedon he seems at once to have begun to strengthen the army, and to improve its organisation. He had acquired his ideas of what an army should be, as we may suppose, while he was being educated at Thebes. The Macedonian army was formed much on the model of the Greek army, but there were certain differences, and every one of the differences seems to have been an improvement.
There was a phalanx, after the model of the Greek phalanx, and therein was the great strength of the infantry. But the phalanx of the Macedonians was not quite so closely packed (there was more space between one soldier and the next) as the Greek phalanx, and it was able to adopt this more open formation by means of giving to each soldier a longer spear or pike than the Greek soldier had. Thus the Macedonian phalanx was able to move more quickly than the Greek, and also could cover more ground with the same number of men.
Now as to the cavalry. The Greeks, as we saw, were not nearly so well off as the Persians for horses. They had not the unlimited extent of horse-raising country that the Persians had in the lands towards the east. But the Macedonians, on the contrary, were almost as well off in this way as the Persians themselves. Away back in Thrace and Scythia they had these unlimited extents, so their cavalry became a very strong force.
And the same lands which provided them with horses provided them with soldiers also. Philip began to use his great strength of arms by making himself master of the countries on all sides of the kingdom of Macedon, to which he had succeeded. There were many Greek colonies or small cities along the coast of Macedonia itself. These he took possession of with little trouble. Certain of the Greeks at home began to be alarmed by the growth of this power in the north. You may have heard of some famous orations called "Philippics," delivered by the great orator Demosthenes, at Athens. Their name comes from this very Philip of Macedon, because it was in the hope of rousing the Athenians to take strong measures, and to unite with other states to oppose his power, that they were made.
But, as usual, there were jealousies. Athens did at length combine with Thebes to oppose Philip, but by that time he had found allies in Greece itself. He marched south, met the Thebans and Athenians at Chæronea, in 338 B.C., and won a battle which makes a very great difference in our story, for it was so decisive that it practically put an end, once for all, to the independence of Greece. Greece for many years had to do what Macedonia ordered. Philip was given, or assumed, command of all the Greek armies, with a title which has been translated "Captain-General." Commander-in-Chief might describe it nearly as well, and is a title better known to us.
And now, for the first time, we have a really united Greece. But though a united Greece, it was not a free Greece. It was united because it was under the masterful rule of the Macedonians.
But, being united, and joined moreover with the forces of the Macedonians and their allies it probably was the greatest fighting force the world had yet known. There was one direction in particular in which it was likely that it would make its force felt—against Persia.
Alexander the Great
In the midst of the preparation for the invasion of the Persian empire, Philip was assassinated, after reigning for twenty-three years, and was succeeded by his son Alexander—Alexander the Great—then only twenty years old. And Alexander the Great died only twelve years later. He was therefore only thirty-two years old at his death. Yet he had time to win the name of Great; and when you hear his story you will think that it was well deserved, for the story is extraordinary.
It is extraordinary by reason of the immense extent of territory over which Alexander went victoriously and with marvellous rapidity. But the explanation is not very far to seek—it lies in that very powerful army and fighting machine which had been delivered to him by his father; in that, and in the lack of resisting power in the enemies whom it overcame, is the explanation of his success.
The fighting power of the Persian empire had spent itself; and partly it had spent itself in the destruction of the fighting power of the nations with which it had come into touch. In that, as it seems, taken together with the very real strength of Alexander's army, lies the explanation. The Persian power, moreover, apart from its loss in actual fighting, had probably lost much by life in conditions more easy and pleasant than those in the more rugged and barren country from which Cyrus had led the Persians. We have noticed the same change in the character of conquering nations already, and may see it yet again in course of the great story.
As for this particular story which we are telling at the moment, about Alexander and the march of his ever-victorious army, it will be a short story although such a marvellous one. It is short, just because the march had scarcely a stopping-place, scarcely a check, all through.
This Alexander, succeeding to the throne of Macedonia and to all that his father Philip had made of that throne, and to the command-in-chief of the great army which Philip had created, had been educated by perhaps the most wonderful man of that wonderful Greek nation—the philosopher Aristotle. We call him philosopher, but there was no branch of the learning of that time, and it was a time of great learning, which he does not seem to have known perfectly. The additions that he made to every branch of that learning are most astonishing.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. (From the British Museum.)
ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
(From the British Museum.)
We have to look on this young Alexander, then, as being as perfectly trained and taught as it was possible for a young man to be, and as having come into his kingdom with this great army ready to start, with all its plans laid, for the Persian invasion. Let us see what use he made of it. We know its composition—a certain number of Macedonian native soldiers, Greek and other allies; and we know its general way of fighting, with the quickly moving Macedonian phalanx, armed with the long pikes, and the hosts of cavalry on good horses. But he was a very young king. The Greeks seem to have thought they had a chance, on his accession, of freeing themselves from the Macedonian yoke. Even in his own kingdom there was trouble, and some of the tribes in the north rose in revolt. Alexander crushed all these various attempts against his power. Twice he had to march south, to Thebes, that city where he had been as a boy. Once it admitted him at the head of his army without a fight, but on the second occasion, when it had taken arms again against Macedon on hearing a false rumour that Alexander had been killed in some fighting in the north, he came down and razed the city walls and punished the inhabitants with fearful severity.
These home troubles occupied two years of his reign, and in the third year he crossed the Hellespont with his great army and had his first big meeting with the Persian forces on the river Granicus. He was completely victorious.
Battle of Issus
But Darius, the Persian monarch, still claiming the title of King of Kings, was not likely to be content with the result of a single battle. He gathered his strength anew, and again met Alexander in the following year, at Issus, in Syria. This time his defeat was even more decisive than before.
Alexander advanced southward conquering. He took all the Phœnician cities of the coast, though Tyre made an obstinate defence, and swept down into Egypt. Egypt appears to have made no attempt—perhaps it had little wish—to resist him. By this time there were many Greeks in Egypt, and it is likely that they would receive the forces of the Macedonians, among which were many of their kinsmen, almost more as friends than foes. The city of Alexandria, founded by him, or in his honour, takes its name from him.
The Persians, however, were not yet done with. By 321 B.C., two years after his defeat at Issus, Darius had collected an army greater than ever before, and Alexander, coming eastward out of Egypt, met this vast host, said to have been a million strong, at Gaugemela, or Arbela, and in this third and last conflict his victory was decisive. Darius fled eastward, with Alexander constantly in pursuit of him. Alexander took the great cities of Babylon and Susa on his way. The fugitive Darius was assassinated in Parthia, and Alexander's lordship over the ancient empire was complete.
Yet that was not enough for him. He pushed forward into India, across high mountain ranges and wide rivers. What he accomplished there, in the way of conquest, was marvellous, yet it had no big effect on the great story, because his conquests beyond the mountains were not lasting. His wonderful troops, though they must have looked on him as almost supernatural in his ability to lead them on to victory, began to long for their homes, probably to wonder if they would ever see them again after coming so far. He reached the shores of the Indian Ocean, and thence set his face to return homeward.
In Babylonia he stayed awhile, arranging for the government of the immense empire of which he was the undisputed master, and there he died, of a fever which is said to have been brought on, or greatly increased, by intemperate drinking—a death unworthy of his extraordinary achievements and of a pupil of such a master as Aristotle.
And death at thirty-two! The exploits of Alexander and his army are unequalled in the whole course of the story of the world. Yet we must ever remember how much of that immense achievement was due to the genius of his father Philip, who created all the fighting force which the son led so triumphantly. The fame of the son is so glorious that the father's work is rather hidden by it. What Philip might have done, if he had lived, with the great machine of war which he devised we cannot tell, but it is sure that Alexander could not have achieved his conquests as he did but for the machinery which his father had made ready for him.
Death of Alexander
No doubt death came for the great conqueror quite unexpectedly in his thirty-third year, and he had made no arrangements as to who was to be his successor on the throne of the vast empire that he had won. There was no lack of claimants for it. Many of his victorious generals were willing enough, and there was much confused fighting among the victors and the forces under the command of each. One of the principal generals, Ptolemæus, or Ptolemy, was the commander of the armies that held Egypt. In Babylonia and Syria it appears that there was a period of rivalry and struggle between several of the leading generals, until at length one of them, Seleucus, prevailed over the rest, and he claimed to be, and in large measure really was, ruler of Syria and of the East as Ptolemy was ruler of Egypt. The proud title of King of Kings, which the Persian monarchs had assumed, now came to nothing, seeing that there were at least two kings now in this eastern part of the world. Seleucus and his successors, called the Seleucidæ, became established as Kings of Syria, in its new capital city of Antioch; and Ptolemy and his successors, called the Ptolemies, became no less firmly seated on the throne of the ancient Pharaohs in Egypt.
Others of Alexander's generals who became rulers of one or other part of his empire after his death were Antigonus, Lysimachus, and Cassander. Cassander was son of Antipater, whom Alexander had left as his regent in Macedonia to govern the country for him when he went on his wars against the Persians. All these generals and their followers continued fighting, with various results, until the great and decisive battle at Ipsus (not Issus), of which the practical result was that Cassander was established as king of Macedonia and Greece. The battle of Ipsus was fought in 301 B.C., twenty-two years later than the battle of Issus. Seleucus and Lysimachus were the victorious leaders over Antigonus, who was killed during the fight in this battle of Ipsus; and to Lysimachus had already been assigned the kingdom of Thrace.
So now, in 300 B.C., we have Cassander over Macedonia and Greece, Lysimachus over Thrace, Seleucus over Syria and Babylonia, and Ptolemy over Egypt. That is the condition of affairs at that date on this eastern side of the picture. But it had not been brought about without some sharp fighting between Seleucus and Ptolemy, and here, as before, Palestine was like the horseshoe between the blacksmith's hammer and his anvil. It lay right in the path between the two great combatants.
The Jews in Egypt
Alexander, when he went conquering, with little or no opposition, into Egypt, had shown much favour to the Jews. We have seen that many of them had returned, under favour of Cyrus the Persian, from their Babylonian exile, to Jerusalem. The temple had been rebuilt, not without a good deal of interference from their Syrian neighbours; the religious rites had been re-instituted and were strictly observed.
Alexander, it appears, showed consideration to the Jews in Jerusalem. He was, we may presume, a Greek in his religious views—that is to say, that religion made very little difference and had very little part in his life. He would not care what god a subject people liked to worship, so long as they did not oppose him. He took some of the Jews down with him, or had them brought, into Egypt, where there were already some of their nation, and they were given quarters of their own and a synagogue, or place of assembly and worship, in the new city of Alexandria. So here we have yet another step in that dispersion of the Jews which was to bring their religion, on which Christianity is founded, into all parts of the world.
I mentioned too that, rather as the Jewish religion became known throughout the world by the dispersion of those who followed it, so also did the thought and culture of the Greeks become known by the way in which that wonderful people was spread abroad. I have been writing of Macedonians hitherto as though they were a people altogether different from the Greeks, and so in truth, and in origin, they were. But I want you to realise that though they conquered Greece by their force of arms, it was (as always happened whenever Greeks met people of other nationality) the Greek thought that conquered their thought. They began more and more to think in the Greek way. Moreover, their very armies were largely Greek.
Thus it came to pass, in course of time, that the distinction between Macedonian and Greek began to be lost. After all, Macedon was a very near neighbour of Greece herself. There must have been much coming and going between the two. Therefore the "Hellenising" of the world, as you may read it described—which means making the thought of the world like the thought of Hellas, which is another name for Greece—went on very fast and was spread abroad very widely. There is no part of that world which is the scene of our great story which it had not reached and in which it had not made a considerable difference in the lives of the inhabitants. Over a large part of it Greek had become the language in use among the better-educated classes. Seleucus was particularly active in introducing Greeks and Greek customs into the kingdom under his rule.
The possession of Palestine, inevitably, because of its position, had been very much disputed between Seleucus and Ptolemy after Alexander's death, but the dispute was decided by the battle of Ipsus, which seems to have cleared the air all round. Palestine then became subject to Egypt and so remained under successive Ptolemies for more than a hundred years.
Alexandria
The Jews in Judæa, with that love of their own customs which has always been remarkably strong in their nation, held out against the introduction of Greek thought and language, and so on, longer than any of their neighbours, but many Jews, as we have seen, had settled in Alexandria. The first three, at least, of the Ptolemies, who successively reigned in Egypt, showed favour to them; they had synagogues in other cities of Egypt besides Alexandria, and those Jews of Egypt, besides those who were in Babylonia and other parts of Asia, had the habit of coming up to Jerusalem, where was the Temple, to attend their great religious ceremonies. And these Jews brought to Jerusalem the Greek language and thought, so that the Greek influence penetrated there too at last.
Alexandria became a great city for men of letters, learned men and writers, as well a great city of trade and a great seaport. The largest library of the ancient world was collected—and later was destroyed by fire—in that city. And there, probably before 250 B.C., the books of the Old Testament, originally written in Hebrew, were translated into Greek. Possibly not all were translated at that time, but it seems at least certain that the first five books, called the Pentateuch, were done into Greek about that date. Wherever they went the Jews never lost sight of their sacred books. The records of their history and their religious institutions were always with them.
Under the later kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty the government of Egypt was less strongly maintained, the power of Egypt waned, and in 198 B.C. the Egyptians were thoroughly defeated by the Syrians on the banks of the Jordan, and Judæa and Jerusalem came under the rule of the Syrian king. He did not interfere with their religion or their customs, and for a while the change of rulers appears to have made very little difference to them.
Such, then, is the outline which I would have you carry in your minds of the position of those peoples of the story on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, in Egypt southward, and in Thrace, Macedon, and Greece. And now I would ask you to come back again to look at the western side of the picture, for the time has fully come when we should bring more prominently into it a figure which will grow larger and larger until it grows to such a size as to fill in the whole frame, and more than the frame—the figure of world-conquering Rome.
I am afraid you will have suffered disappointment from time to time in the course of the telling of this greatest of great stories. I am afraid that I have been obliged to speak rather slightingly of that beautiful lady for whose sake you will have heard that the Trojan War was fought, the lady about whom Homer sang. I have made my excuses for that disrespectful treatment.
There is another famous lady of whom Virgil, the great Latin poet, sings—Queen Dido, of Carthage. His story goes that Æneas, the Trojan, escaping over-sea after the fall of Troy, was swept by storms into Carthage, where Dido entertained him pleasantly. From her court he went to Italy, and from him the Romans were said to be descended. The Æneid—that is, the story of Æneas—is the name of Virgil's poem in which this tale is told. You may believe as much or as little of it as you like, for there is no evidence at all that it is true; but it is a fine tale, finely told.
Then there is the story about Romulus and Remus and the good old wolf-mother, and the rest of it—all very pleasant too. But I do not think that you need believe any more of that either than you like.
The Gauls in Rome
They are not very ancient stories, nothing like as old as some of the stories about Egypt and Babylonia for which there is plenty of evidence. A thousand years or so B.C. could cover them all. Yet for what was really going on round about what came to be called Rome we have very little evidence until a great deal later. One other pretty tale certainly has some truth in it—the story that the Gauls came down upon Rome, and that the Capitol, or strong citadel, on which the sentries must have gone to sleep, was only saved by the alarm being given by some geese. There may be some doubt as to whether the geese really were there, and were the city's saviours, for it is possible that this too, like other tales, may have seemed to the poets to be a pretty story to tell, and they may have told it to please their hearers without inquiring closely into its truth; but however it may have been about the geese, there is no doubt at all about the Gauls. They were there, and in terrible numbers, and they only consented to go away on being bribed to do so with an immense sum of money. So it is not a very dignified appearance that this great Rome makes on her first appearance in our story—saved from Gauls, in the first instance, by geese, and in the second place by bribes! This happened in 390 B.C.
GALLIC WARRIORS. (From the British Museum.)
GALLIC WARRIORS.
(From the British Museum.)
By Gaul we generally understand France—the Gallic, or Gaulic nation. But Gaul at that time was the name of the country not only of what we now call France, but of a great deal of the north of what we call Italy. So the Gauls had not very far to come to reach Rome. Although the Capitol, the citadel, was saved from the Gauls at this time, the Gauls destroyed the city completely, and after their retirement the Romans set about its rebuilding.
You will see, of course, that I have only told you, so far, who the Romans were not. I have not told you who they were. But I have a very good reason for that. I have not told you, and I am not going to tell you, because I do not know.
Rome has been called the City of the Seven Hills, because it is built on those seven hills which stand above the River Tiber that runs out westward into the Mediterranean Sea. What we do know is that peoples from the neighbouring country came and settled themselves on one or other of these hills. They were peoples of different origins. The most civilised, in the earliest days of this settlement, were from the district called Etruria. They were Etruscans. The Sabines were another of these peoples. And there were Latins from Latium, in which district Rome itself was situated.
These peoples became united into one state under rulers of the Latin race, and that, in very few words, appears to have been the origin of the Roman nation. The Etruscans seem at first to have been pushed off the hills into the plains by the others, and there was frequent fighting between the plain people and the hill people. For their protection from the attacks from the plains, the early kings of Rome built walls round the seven hills; but the Etruscans, though they had given way at first to the Latins and Sabines, must have come back as conquerors. They were a powerful people. They imposed their own kings upon the Romans, and Romans and Etruscans together became the strongest nation in the country.
Probably the Romans never were satisfied with their Etruscan kings, who seem to have governed with great severity. More than a hundred years before the Gauls came upon them, which was in 390 B.C., they successfully rebelled, drove out the kings and set up a republic. The Etruscans strove to restore them, and the struggle went on until a very important victory was gained by the Roman republican armies at Veii. The Romans had never been so strong in Italy before, and although the attack of the Gauls threatened them with destruction only six years later, those barbarians, after a seven months' siege of the Capitol, went back and made no attempt at establishing their power permanently. The Romans rebuilt their walls and their houses. They were engaged in almost perpetual fighting with other peoples, of whom we should notice particularly the Samnites, in one or other part of Italy. Now and again they met with reverses, but on the whole they prevailed and extended their authority over the countries that they conquered. The aid of the Romans was sought by now one and now another people who found themselves pressed by hostile neighbours; and the help was given in consideration that those who were helped should regard their helper for ever after as their master.
Pyrrhus
It was a little later than 300 B.C. that the Greek city states established along the southern shores of Italy found themselves bothered by the attacks of some inland neighbours and called for the aid of Rome. There was one of these cities, however, and the most important, which repelled the assistance of the Roman Republic, jealous of her growing power. This was Tarentum. And just at the moment when the struggle between the Roman forces and this Greek city, which must inevitably have ended in the defeat of the Greeks, was about to commence, Tarentum found a new ally in Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus.