The Martyrdom of Man - Winwood Reade (golden son ebook txt) 📗
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Bengal, conquered the Greek province of the Punjab. The rise of the
Parthian power cut off the Greek kingdom of Bokhara from the Western
world, and it was destroyed, according to the Chinese historians, by a
powerful horde of Tartars a hundred and thirty years after its foundation.
We can now return to African soil, and we find that a city of
incomparable splendour has arisen, founded by Alexander and bearing his
name. For as he was on his way to the oasis of Ammon, travelling along
the seacoast, he came to a place a little west of the Nile’s mouth where an
island close to the shore, and the peculiar formation of the land, formed a
natural harbour, while a little way inland was a large lagoon
communicating with the Nile. A few houses were scattered about, and
this, he was told, was the village of Rhacotis, where in the old days the
Pharaohs stationed a garrison to prevent the Greek pirates from coming
on shore. He saw that the spot was well adapted for a city, and with his
usual impetuosity went to work at once to mark it out. When he returned
from the oasis the building of the city had begun, and in a few years it
had become the residence of Ptolemy and the capital of Egypt. It filled
up the space between the sea and the lagoon. On the one side its harbour
was filled with ships which came from Italy and Greece and the lands of
the Atlantic with amber, timber, tin, wine, and oil. On the other side were
the cargo boats that came from the Nile with the precious stones, the
spices, and the beautiful fabrics of the East. The island on which stood
the famous lighthouse was connected with the mainland by means of a
gigantic mole furnished with drawbridges and forts. It is on this mole
that the modern city stands—the site of the old Alexandria is sand.
When Ptolemy the First, one of Alexander’s generals, mounted the throne
he applied himself with much caution and dexterity to that difficult
problem the government of Egypt. Had the Greeks been the first
conquerors of the country, it is doubtful whether the wisest policy would
have kept its natives quiet and content. For they were like the Jews, a
proud, ignorant, narrow-minded, religious race who looked upon
themselves as the chosen people of the gods, and upon all foreigners as
unclean things. But they had been taught wisdom by misfortune; they
had felt the bitterness of an Oriental yoke; the feet of the Persians had
been placed upon their necks. On the other hand, the Greeks had lived
for centuries among them, and had assisted them in all their revolts
against the Persian king. During their interlude of independence the
towns had been garrisoned partly by Egyptian and partly by Greek
soldiers: the two nations had grown accustomed to each other. Persia had
finally re-enslaved them, and Alexander had been welcomed as the
saviour of their country. The golden chain of the Pharaohs was broken.
It was impossible to restore the line of ancient kings. The Egyptians
therefore cheerfully submitted to the Ptolemies, who reciprocated this
kindly feeling to the full. They patronised the Egyptian religion, they
built many temples in the ancient style, they went to the city of Memphis
to be crowned, they sacrificed to the Nile at the rising of the waters, and
they assumed the divine titles of the Pharaohs. The priests were content,
and in Egypt the people were always guided by the priests. The Rosetta
Stone, that remarkable monument which, with its inscription in Greek, in
the Egyptian vernacular, and in the sacred hieroglyphics, has afforded the
means of deciphering the mysterious language of the Nile, was a
memorial of gratitude from the Egyptian priests to a Greek king, to whom
in return for favours conferred they erected an image and a golden shrine.
But while the Ptolemies were Pharaohs to the Egyptians, they were
Greeks to the colonists of Alexandria, and they founded or favoured that
school of thought upon which modern science is established.
There is a great enterprise in which men have always been unconsciously
engaged, but which they will pursue with method as a vocation and an
art, and which they will devoutly adopt as a religious faith as soon as they
realise its glory. It is the conquest of the planet on which we dwell, the
destruction or domestication of the savage forces by which we are
tormented and enslaved. An episode of this war occurring in ancient
Egypt has been described; the war itself began with the rise of our
ancestors into the human state, and when, drawing fire from wood or
stone, they made it serve them night and day the first great victory was
won. But we can conquer Nature only by obeying her laws, and in order
to obey those laws we must first learn what they are.
Storms and tides, thunder and lightning and eclipse, the movements of the
heavenly bodies, the changing aspects of the earth, were among all
ancient people regarded as divine phenomena. In the Greek world there
was no despotic caste, but the people clung fondly to their faith, and the
study of Nature which began in Ionia was at first regarded with
abhorrence and dismay. The popular religion was supported by the
genius of Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey were regarded not only as
epic poems but as sacred writ; even the geography had been inspired.
However, when the Greeks began to travel the old legends could no
longer be received. It was soon discovered that the places visited by
Ulysses did not exist, that there was no River Ocean which ran round the
earth, and that the earth was not shaped like a round saucer with the
oracle of Delphi in its centre. The Egyptians laughed in the faces of the
Greeks, and called them children when they talked of their gods of
yesterday, and so well did their pupils profit by their lesson that they soon
laughed at the Egyptians for believing in the gods at all. Xenophanes
declaimed against the Egyptian myth of an earth-walking, dying
resuscitated god. He said that if Osiris was a man they should not
worship him, and that if he was a god they need not lament his sufferings.
This remarkable man was the Voltaire of Greece; there had been
freethinkers before his time, but they had reserved their opinions for
their disciples.
Xenophanes declared that the truth should be made known to all. He
lived, like Voltaire, to a great age; he poured forth a multitude of
controversial works; he made it his business to attack Homer, and reviled
him bitterly for having endowed the gods of his poems with the passions
and propensities of men; he denied the old theory of the Golden Age, and
maintained that civilisation was the work of time and of man’s own toil.
His views were no doubt distasteful to the vulgar crowd by whom he was
surrounded, and even to cultivated and imaginative minds which were
sunk in sentimental idolatry, blinded by the splendour of the Homeric
poems. He was, however, in no way interfered with; religious
persecution was unknown in the Greek world except at Athens. In that
city free thought was especially unpopular because it was imported from
abroad. It was the doctrine of those talented Ionians who streamed into
Athens after the Persian wars. When one of these philosophers
announced, in his open-air sermon in the market-place, that the sun which
the common people believed to be alive—the bountiful god Helios which
shone both on mortals and immortals—was nothing but a mass of red-hot
iron; when he declared that those celestial spirits the stars were only
revolving stones; when he asserted that Jupiter, and Venus and Apollo,
Mars, Juno, and Minerva, were mere creatures of the poet’s fancy, and
that if they really existed they ought to be despised; when he said that
over all there reigned, not blind Fate, but a supreme, all seeing Mind,
great wrath was excited among the people. A prophet went about uttering
oracles in a shrill voice, and procured the passing of a decree that all who
denied the religion of the city or who philosophised in matters
appertaining to the gods should be indicted as state criminals. This law
was soon put in force. Damon and Anaxagoras were banished; Aspasia
was impeached for blasphemy, and the tears of Pericles alone saved her;
Socrates was put to death; Plato was obliged to reserve pure reason for a
chosen few, and to adulterate it with revelation for the generality of his
disciples; Aristotle fled from Athens for his life, and became the tutor of
Alexander.
Alexander had a passion for the Iliad. His edition had been corrected by
Aristotle; he kept it in a precious casket which he had taken from the
Persian King, and it was afterwards known as the “edition of the casket.”
When he invaded Asia he landed on the plains of Troy, that he might see
the ruins of that celebrated town and hang a garland upon the tomb of
Achilles. But it was not poetry alone that he esteemed; he had imbibed
his master’s universal tastes. When staying at Ephesus he used to spend
hours in the studio of Apelles, sitting down among the boys who ground
colours for the great painter. He delighted in everything that was new
and rare. He invented exploration. He gave a large sum of money to
Aristotle to assist him in composing the history of animals, and employed
a number of men to collect for him in Asia. He sent him a copy of the
astronomical records of the Babylonians, although by that time they had
quarrelled—like Dionysius and Plato, Frederick and Voltaire. It is taken
for granted that Alexander was the one to blame, as if philosophers were
immaculate and private tutors never in the wrong.
The Ptolemies were not unworthy followers of Alexander. They
established the Museum, which was a kind of college, with a hall where
the professors dined together, with corridors for promenading lectures,
and a theatre for scholastic festivals and public disputation. Attached to it
also was the Botanical Garden, filled with medicinal and exotic plants; a
menagerie of wild beasts and rare birds; and the famous Library, where
700,000 volumes were arranged on cedar shelves, and where hundreds of
clerks were continually at work copying from scroll to scroll, gluing the
separate strips of papyrus together, smoothing with pumice-stone and
blackening the edges, writing the titles on red labels, and fastening ivory
tops on the sticks round which the rolls were wrapped.
All the eminent men of the day were invited to take up their abode at the
Museum, and persons were dispatched into all countries to collect books.
It was dangerous to bring original manuscripts into Egypt—they were at
once seized and copied, the originals being retained. The city of Athens
lent the autograph editions of its dramatists to one of the Ptolemies, and
saw them no more. It was even said that philosophers were sometimes
detained in the same manner.
Soon after the wars of Alexander, the “barbarians” were seized with a
desire to make known to their conquerors the history of their native lands.
Berosus, a priest of Babylon, compiled a history of Chaldea; Menander,
and Phoenician, a history of Tyre; and Manetho wrote in Greek, but from
Egyptian sources, a history which Egyptology has confirmed. It was at
the Museum also that the Old Testament was translated under royal
patronage into Greek, and at the same time the Zoroastrian Bible or Zend-Avesta.
There was some good work done at the Museum. Among works of
imagination the pastorals of Theocritus have alone obtained the
approbation of posterity. But it was in Alexandria that
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