men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he settled the
difficulty by making himself the master of all Greece and then

he asked his new subjects to join him on a voyage which he
meant to pay to Persia in return for the visit which Xerxes

had paid the Greeks one hundred and fifty years before.
Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start

upon this well-prepared expedition. The task of avenging the
destruction of Athens was left to Philip's son Alexander, the

beloved pupil of Aristotle, wisest of all Greek teachers.
Alexander bade farewell to Europe in the spring of the

year 334 B.C. Seven years later he reached India. In the
meantime he had destroyed Phoenicia, the old rival of the Greek

merchants. He had conquered Egypt and had been worshipped
by the people of the Nile valley as the son and heir of the

Pharaohs. He had defeated the last Persian king--he had
overthrown the Persian empire he had given orders to rebuild

Babylon--he had led his troops into the heart of the
Himalayan mountains and had made the entire world a Macedonian

province and dependency. Then he stopped and announced
even more ambitious plans.

The newly formed Empire must be brought under the influence
of the Greek mind. The people must be taught the Greek

language--they must live in cities built after a Greek model.
The Alexandrian soldier now turned school-master. The military

camps of yesterday became the peaceful centres of the
newly imported Greek civilisation. Higher and higher did the

flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise, when suddenly
Alexander was stricken with a fever and died in the old

palace of King Hammurabi of Babylon in the year 323.
Then the waters receded. But they left behind the fertile clay

of a higher civilisation and Alexander, with all his childish
ambitions and his silly vanities, had performed a most valuable

service. His Empire did not long survive him. A number of
ambitious generals divided the territory among themselves.

But they too remained faithful to the dream of a great world
brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge.

They maintained their independence until the Romans
added western Asia and Egypt to their other domains. The

strange inheritance of this Hellenistic civilisation (part Greek,
part Persian, part Egyptian and Babylonian) fell to the

Roman conquerors. During the following centuries, it got
such a firm hold upon the Roman world, that we feel its influence

in our own lives this very day.
A SUMMARY

A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 to 20
THUS far, from the top of our high tower we have been

looking eastward. But from this time on, the history of Egypt
and Mesopotamia is going to grow less interesting and I must

take you to study the western landscape.
Before we do this, let us stop a moment and make clear to

ourselves what we have seen.
First of all I showed you prehistoric man--a creature very

simple in his habits and very unattractive in his manners. I
told you how he was the most defenceless of the many animals

that roamed through the early wilderness of the five continents,
but being possessed of a larger and better brain, he managed to

hold his own.
Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold

weather, and life on this planet became so difficult that man was
obliged to think three times as hard as ever before if he wished

to survive. Since, however, that ``wish to survive'' was (and is)
the mainspring which keeps every living being going full tilt to

the last gasp of its breath, the brain of glacial man was set to
work in all earnestness. Not only did these hardy people manage

to exist through the long cold spells which killed many
ferocious animals, but when the earth became warm and comfortable

once more, prehistoric man had learned a number of
things which gave him such great advantages over his less intelligent

neighbors that the danger of extinction (a very serious
one during the first half million years of man's residence upon

this planet) became a very remote one.
I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly

plodding along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not
well understood) the people who lived in the valley of the Nile

rushed ahead and almost over night, created the first centre of
civilisation.

Then I showed you Mesopotamia, ``the land between the
rivers,'' which was the second great school of the human race.

And I made you a map of the little island bridges of the AEgean
Sea, which carried the knowledge and the science of the old

east to the young west, where lived the Greeks.
Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hellenes,

who thousands of years before had left the heart of
Asia and who had in the eleventh century before our era pushed

their way into the rocky peninsula of Greece and who, since
then, have been known to us as the Greeks. And I told

you the story of the little Greek cities that were really states,
where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was transfigured

(that is a big word, but you can ``figure out'' what it means)
into something quite new, something that was much nobler and

finer than anything that had gone before.
When you look at the map you will see how by this time

civilisation has described a semi-circle. It begins in Egypt,
and by way of Mesopotamia and the AEgean Islands it moves

westward until it reaches the European continent. The first
four thousand years, Egyptians and Babylonians and Phoenicians

and a large number of Semitic tribes (please remember
that the Jews were but one of a large number of Semitic peoples)

have carried the torch that was to illuminate the world.
They now hand it over to the Indo-European Greeks, who become

the teachers of another Indo-European tribe, called the
Romans. But meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward

along the northern coast of Africa and have made themselves
the rulers of the western half of the Mediterranean just when

the eastern half has become a Greek (or Indo-European) possession.
This, as you shall see in a moment, leads to a terrible conflict

between the two rival races, and out of their struggle arises
the victorious Roman Empire, which is to take this Egyptian-

Mesopotamian-Greek civilisation to the furthermost corners of
the European continent, where it serves as the foundation upon

which our modern society is based.
I know all this sounds very complicated, but if you get hold

of these few principles, the rest of our history will become a
great deal simpler. The maps will make clear what the words

fail to tell. And after this short intermission, we go back to
our story and give you an account of the famous war between

Carthage and Rome.
ROME AND CARTHAGE

THE SEMITIC COLONY OF CARTHAGE ON THE
NORTHERN COAST OF AFRICA AND THE

INDO-EUROPEAN CITY OF ROME ON THE
WEST COAST OF ITALY FOUGHT EACH

OTHER FOR THE POSSESSION OF THE
WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND CARTHAGE

WAS DESTROYED
THE little Phoenician trading post of Kart-hadshat stood

on a low hill which overlooked the African Sea, a stretch of
water ninety miles wide which separates Africa from Europe.

It was an ideal spot for a commercial centre. Almost too ideal.
It grew too fast and became too rich. When in the sixth century

before our era, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed
Tyre, Carthage broke off all further relations with the Mother

Country and became an independent state--the great western
advance-post of the Semitic races.

Unfortunately the city had inherited many of the traits
which for a thousand years had been characteristic of the

Phoenicians. It was a vast business-house, protected by a
strong navy, indifferent to most of the finer aspects of life.

The city and the surrounding country and the distant colonies
were all ruled by a small but exceedingly powerful group of

rich men, The Greek word for rich is ``ploutos'' and the Greeks
called such a government by ``rich men'' a ``Plutocracy.'' Carthage

was a plutocracy and the real power of the state lay in
the hands of a dozen big ship-owners and mine-owners and

merchants who met in the back room of an office and regarded
their common Fatherland as a business enterprise which ought

to yield them a decent profit. They were however wide awake
and full of energy and worked very hard.

As the years went by the influence of Carthage upon her
neighbours increased until the greater part of the African

coast, Spain and certain regions of France were Carthaginian
possessions, and paid tribute, taxes and dividends to the mighty

city on the African Sea.
Of course, such a ``plutocracy'' was forever at the mercy of

the crowd. As long as there was plenty of work and wages
were high, the majority of the citizens were quite contented,

allowed their ``betters'' to rule them and asked no embarrassing
questions. But when no ships left the harbor, when no ore

was brought to the smelting-ovens, when dockworkers and
stevedores were thrown out of employment, then there were

grumblings and there was a demand that the popular assembly
be called together as in the olden days when Carthage had

been a self-governing republic.
To prevent such an occurrence the plutocracy was obliged

to keep the business of the town going at full speed. They
had managed to do this very successfully for almost five hun-