lived among the peaks which surround the plateau of Iran and
that is why we call them Aryans. Others had followed the

setting sun and they had taken possession of the plains of
Europe as I shall tell you when I give you the story of Greece

and Rome.
For the moment we must follow the Aryans. Under the

leadership of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) who was their great
teacher many of them had left their mountain homes to follow

the swiftly flowing Indus river on its way to the sea.
Others had preferred to stay among the hills of western

Asia and there they had founded the half-independent communities
of the Medes and the Persians, two peoples whose

names we have copied from the old Greek history-books. In
the seventh century before the birth of Christ, the Medes had

established a kingdom of their own called Media, but this
perished when Cyrus, the chief of a clan known as the Anshan,

made himself king of all the Persian tribes and started upon
a career of conquest which soon made him and his children the

undisputed masters of the whole of western Asia and of Egypt.
Indeed, with such energy did these Indo-European Persians

push their triumphant campaigns in the west that they soon
found themselves in serious difficulties with certain other Indo-

European tribes which centuries before had moved into Europe
and had taken possession of the Greek peninsula and the islands

of the AEgean Sea.
These difficulties led to the three famous wars between

Greece and Persia during which King Darius and King
Xerxes of Persia invaded the northern part of the peninsula.

They ravaged the lands of the Greeks and tried very hard to
get a foothold upon the European continent.

But in this they did not succeed. The navy of Athens
proved unconquerable. By cutting off the lines of supplies

of the Persian armies, the Greek sailors invariably forced the
Asiatic rulers to return to their base.

It was the first encounter between Asia, the ancient
teacher, and Europe, the young and eager pupil. A great

many of the other chapters of this book will tell you how the
struggle between east and west has continued until this very

day.
THE AEGEAN SEA

THE PEOPLE OF THE AEGEAN SEA CARRIED
THE CIVILISATION OF OLD ASIA INTO

THE WILDERNESS OF EUROPE
WHEN Heinrich Schliemann was a little boy his

father told him the story of Troy. He liked that story
better than anything else he had ever heard and he made

up his mind, that as soon as he was big enough to leave home,
he would travel to Greece and ``find Troy.'' That he was the

son of a poor country parson in a Mecklenburg village did
not bother him. He knew that he would need money but

he decided to gather a fortune first and do the digging afterwards.
As a matter of fact, he managed to get a large fortune

within a very short time, and as soon as he had enough money to
equip an expedition, he went to the northwest corner of Asia

Minor, where he supposed that Troy had been situated.
In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high

mound covered with grainfields. According to tradition it had
been the home of Priamus the king of Troy. Schliemann,

whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than his knowledge,
wasted no time in preliminary explorations. At once he began

to dig. And he dug with such zeal and such speed that his
trench went straight through the heart of the city for which he

was looking and carried him to the ruins of another buried
town which was at least a thousand years older than the Troy

of which Homer had written. Then something very interesting
occurred. If Schliemann had found a few polished stone

hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery, no one
would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such objects,

which people had generally associated with the prehistoric
men who had lived in these regions before the coming of

the Greeks, Schliemann found beautiful statuettes and very
costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a pattern that was

unknown to the Greeks. He ventured the suggestion that
fully ten centuries before the great Trojan war, the coast of

the AEgean had been inhabited by a mysterious race of men
who in many ways had been the superiors of the wild Greek

tribes who had invaded their country and had destroyed their
civilisation or absorbed it until it had lost all trace of originality.

And this proved to be the case. In the late seventies of
the last century, Schliemann visited the ruins of Mycenae, ruins

which were so old that Roman guide-books marvelled at their
antiquity. There again, beneath the flat slabs of stone of a

small round enclosure, Schliemann stumbled upon a wonderful
treasure-trove, which had been left behind by those mysterious

people who had covered the Greek coast with their cities and
who had built walls, so big and so heavy and so strong, that

the Greeks called them the work of the Titans, those god-like
giants who in very olden days had used to play ball with

mountain peaks.
A very careful study of these many relics has done away

with some of the romantic features of the story. The makers
of these early works of art and the builders of these strong

fortresses were no sorcerers, but simple sailors and traders.
They had lived in Crete, and on the many small islands of the

AEgean Sea. They had been hardy mariners and they had
turned the AEgean into a center of commerce for the exchange

of goods between the highly civilised east and the slowly
developing wilderness of the European mainland.

For more than a thousand years they had maintained an
island empire which had developed a very high form of art.

Indeed their most important city, Cnossus, on the northern
coast of Crete, had been entirely modern in its insistence upon

hygiene and comfort. The palace had been properly drained
and the houses had been provided with stoves and the Cnossians

had been the first people to make a daily use of the hitherto
unknown bathtub. The palace of their King had been famous

for its winding staircases and its large banqueting hall. The
cellars underneath this palace, where the wine and the grain

and the olive-oil were stored, had been so vast and had so
greatly impressed the first Greek visitors, that they had given

rise to the story of the ``labyrinth,'' the name which we give
to a structure with so many complicated passages that it is

almost impossible to find our way out, once the front door has
closed upon our frightened selves.

But what finally became of this great AEgean Empire and
what caused its sudden downfall, that I can not tell.

The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing, but no
one has yet been able to decipher their inscriptions. Their

history therefore is unknown to us. We have to reconstruct
the record of their adventures from the ruins which the

AEgeans have left behind. These ruins make it clear that the
AEgean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilised race

which had recently come from the plains of northern Europe.
Unless we are very much mistaken, the savages who were

responsible for the destruction of the Cretan and the AEgean
civilisation were none other than certain tribes of wandering

shepherds who had just taken possession of the rocky peninsula
between the Adriatic and the AEgean seas and who are

known to us as Greeks.
THE GREEKS

MEANWHILE THE INDO-EUROPEAN TRIBE
OF THE HELLENES WAS TAKING

POSSESSION OF GREECE
THE Pyramids were a thousand years old and were beginning

to show the first signs of decay, and Hammurabi, the
wise king of Babylon, had been dead and buried several centuries,

when a small tribe of shepherds left their homes along
the banks of the River Danube and wandered southward in

search of fresh pastures. They called themselves Hellenes,
after Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. According

to the old myths these were the only two human beings who
had escaped the great flood, which countless years before had

destroyed all the people of the world, when they had grown
so wicked that they disgusted Zeus, the mighty God, who lived

on Mount Olympus.
Of these early Hellenes we know nothing. Thucydides,

the historian of the fall of Athens, describing his earliest
ancestors, said that they ``did not amount to very much,'' and

this was probably true. They were very ill-mannered. They
lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their enemies to the wild

dogs who guarded their sheep. They had very little respect
for other people's rights, and they killed the natives of the

Greek peninsula (who were called the Pelasgians) and stole
their farms and took their cattle and made their wives and

daughters slaves and wrote endless songs praising the courage
of the clan of the Achaeans, who had led the Hellenic advance-

guard into the mountains of Thessaly and the Peloponnesus.
But here and there, on the tops of high rocks, they saw

the castles of the AEgeans and those they did not attack for
they feared the metal swords and the spears of the AEgean

soldiers and knew that they could not hope to defeat them with
their clumsy stone axes.

For many centuries they continued to wander from valley
to valley and from mountain side to mountain side Then the

whole of the land had been occupied and the migration had
come to an end.

That moment was the beginning of Greek civilisation. The
Greek farmer, living within sight of the AEgean colonies,

was finally driven by curiosity to visit his haughty neighbours.
He discovered that he could learn many useful things from

the men who dwelt behind the high stone walls of Mycenae, and
Tiryns.

He was a clever pupil. Within a short time he mastered
the art of handling those strange iron weapons which the

AEgeans had brought from Babylon and from Thebes. He
came to understand the mysteries of navigation. He began

to build little boats for his own use.
And when he had learned everything the AEgeans could

teach him he turned upon his teachers and drove them back
to their islands. Soon afterwards he ventured forth upon the

sea and conquered all the cities of the AEgean. Finally in the
fifteenth century before our era he plundered and ravaged

Cnossus and ten centuries after their first appearance upon
the scene the Hellenes were the undisputed rulers of Greece,

of the AEgean and of the coastal regions of Asia Minor. Troy,
the last great commercialstronghold of the older civilisation,

was destroyed in the eleventh century B.C. European history
was to begin in all seriousness.

THE GREEK CITIES
THE GREEK CITIES THAT WERE REALLY

STATES
WE modern people love the sound of the word ``big.'' We

pride ourselves upon the fact that we belong to the ``biggest''
country in the world and possess the ``biggest'' navy and grow

the ``biggest'' oranges and potatoes, and we love to live in
cities of ``millions'' of inhabitants and when we are dead we

are buried in the ``biggest cemetery of the whole state.''
A citizen of ancient Greece, could he have heard us talk,

would not have known what we meant. ``Moderation in all
things'' was the ideal of his life and mere bulk did not impress

him at all. And this love of moderation was not merely a
hollow phrase used upon special occasions: it influenced the

life of the Greeks from the day of their birth to the hour of
their death. It was part of their literature and it made them

build small but perfect temples. It found expression in the
clothes which the men wore and in the rings and the bracelets

of their wives. It followed the crowds that went to the theatre
and made them hoot down any playwright who dared to

sin against the iron law of good taste or good sense.
The Greeks even insisted upon this quality in their politicians

and in their most popular athletes. When a powerful
runner came to Sparta and boasted that he could stand longer

on one foot than any other man in Hellas the people drove him
from the city because he prided himself upon an accomplish-

ment at which he could be beaten by any common goose.
``That is all very well,'' you will say, ``and no doubt it is a

great virtue to care so much for moderation and perfection,
but why should the Greeks have been the only people to develop

this quality in olden times?'' For an answer I shall
point to the way in which the Greeks lived.

The people of Egypt or Mesopotamia had been the ``subjects''
of a mysterious Supreme Ruler who lived miles and

miles away in a dark palace and who was rarely seen by the
masses of the population. The Greeks on the other hand,

were ``free citizens'' of a hundred independent little ``cities''
the largest of which counted fewer inhabitants than a large

modern village. When a peasant who lived in Ur said that he
was a Babylonian he meant that he was one of millions of

other people who paid tribute to the king who at that particular
moment happened to be master of western Asia. But when

a Greek said proudly that he was an Athenian or a Theban
he spoke of a small town, which was both his home and his

country and which recognised no master but the will of the
people in the market-place.

To the Greek, his fatherland was the place where he was
born; where he had spent his earliest years playing hide and

seek amidst the forbidden rocks of the Acropolis; where he had
grown into manhood with a thousand other boys and girls,

whose nicknames were as familiar to him as those of your own
schoolmates. His Fatherland was the holy soil where his father

and mother lay buried. It was the small house within the high
city-walls where his wife and children lived in safety. It was

a complete world which covered no more than four or five
acres of rocky land. Don't you see how these surroundings

must have influenced a man in everything he did and said and