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RELATIVE CIVILISATION

OF

ANCIENT AND MODERN NATIONS.

THE 'stream of history' is a phrase commonly used, and is not an unsuitable figure of speech. History is a stream, and a very long stream, whose source it is difficult, sometimes impossible to trace. To find out its commencement we must direct our researches to a region not remote from the sources of the Nile, whose beginning was long as inscrutable as that of nations; we must seek it among the ruins of Thebes, or among those hardly less ancient monuments the Pyramids of Egypt. With this famous country is identified the earliest historical evidence, and to it, or its adjoining precincts, we have long been accustomed to look as the primary starting-place of the human race. It is true the earliest ages of our species are buried in worse than Egyptian darkness. In profane history no credible records exist of men's primitive existence; nor is it possible any thing beyond mere fable should survive, in the absence of correct and enduring modes of transmission. Still, that man has existed at a remote era, and been, as he continues to be, a busy creature, we have indubitable proof in the great works to which we have referred, and which he appears to have thrown up behind him in testimony of his energies and local habitation. The oldest traditions, the allusions and recitals of the earliest poets and historians, show that the land of Egypt was the original repertory of learning, civil polity, laws, and population. What was the precise nature of the Egyptian institutions cannot be fully or accurately ascertained. A gross and mysterious superstition prevailed; the belief was rife in the transmigration of souls; the institution of castes existed, or that prescriptive institution, still found in the east, of confining men to the class and occupation in which they are born.

One thing is certain, the sacerdotal order was predominant, a supremacy not difficult to explain. It is natural that priests should be mostly the first rulers and teachers of nations; they are the first possessors of knowledge, and in consequence most deserving and able to govern. In all countries religious monuments are the most ancient. Remains of temples survive everywhere, though we find no traces of palaces of contemporary antiquity. It shows that in the remotest times the ecclesiastical had precedency of the regal order. 'What,' says Denon, has become of the palaces of the kings of Egypt? Were they built of unbaked bricks, and therefore of perishable

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earth, or did the great men, the Pharoahs, as well as the priests, inhabit the temples, and the people the huts?' Church and state were one, or rather the last was subordinate; for the theocratic principle is manifest in the authorities, manners, inscriptions, and all that remains of Egyptian civilization.

Whatever may have been the precise polity of Egypt, she was undoubtedly the source and first parent of the ancient world. Greece was planted by emigrants from the Nile. Greece peopled Asia Minor and Italy, and these formed the second stage of civilization. It is unnecessary, however, to describe minutely the spread of science and population. Our purpose is only to mark the leading traits of ancient societies, as being the foundation of existing communities; and that we may observe order in our exposition, let us first glance at the geographical limits of the old world; the ground-plot of its action and development.

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A knowledge of the true figure of the earth, that its form is spherical, is a modern, almost a recent demonstration; of which the best practical proof is that navigators have repeatedly sailed round it, and if any one sets out in any direction, and continues onward in a straight line, he will return to the point he started from, in other words, describe a circle. This was an enigma in the time of Homer, whose immortal poems exhibit the primitive geographical notions entertained. According to these, the earth is considered an immense circular plane, on the circumference of which the vault of heaven is supposed to rest. Around this circle of earth was poured on all sides the broad girdle of the ocean. The idea of a circumambient ocean was naturally suggested to the inhabitants of Asia Minor and the Grecian isles, who could not travel far without encountering the sea. to the earth, the sun, the most splendid and active agent in the material world, powerfully attracted the attention of early observers; but the ideas it suggested to them belonged less to science than to poetry and mythology. The brilliant car of Apollo rising from the sea and colouring the eastern clouds; the god himself illumining with his beams, or scorching with his darts, the expanse of the universe, presented to the ancient poets an inexhaustible fountain of imagery. But the course of the sun-how he disappeared in the west and rose in the east-was a puzzle to them, and they were driven, like fictionists generally, to aid one imaginary conception by another. Into the ocean that surrounded the plane of the earth he was supposed to sink at night to rest, and then, during the nocturnal hours, in some invisible mode make a circuit round the north to his eastern palace, whence in the morning he emerged. This fancy seems to have been indulged in by the grave Roman

historian Tacitus, who expresses his readiness to concur in the belief ascribed to the northern Germans, that they heard nightly the sound of the chariot of the sun, as it drove through the waves of the northern ocean!

One laughs at these juvenile fancies now the world has become enlightened, but they were natural conclusions. As the world appeared, the poets and philosophers of old considered it to be in reality. In the absence of science they could only describe it according to the evidence of the senses. The universe has been found to be a beautiful optical illusion. We appear bounded to a circular plain, not more than ten miles in diameter, and the glittering vault of heaven to rest upon it like the canopy of a superb pavilion. Into this ethereal awning it hardly seems difficult to climb; the gorgeous moon so near that we might almost throw a blanket over it, and the sun actually stands in our eyes and dazzles by his effulgence. Even the stars appear at no great distance to rest upon the tops of the hills and about the vanes of our steeples. All this proximate and surpassing grandeur has been ascertained to be deceptive and apocryphal.

But our earth, though a speck in immensity, was only partially possessed by the ancients. The local scene of their empires, states, and cities was a very limited region. Countries now almost abandoned for sterility or insignificance constituted the territorial range of the patriarchs, the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. By looking at a map we soon run over the districts they peopled. The Mediterranean formed the central basin round which they were congregated. Egypt, Syria, Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor are all adjacent to this inland sea. Beyond these ranges they had little authentic information, and in the absence of facts substituted amusing fables of giants and pigmies, of the Fortunate Islands, hyperboreans, and Cimmerian darkness. Their conquerors made the best geographers, and who, in the vain aspiration of mastering the whole earth, explored new regions. It was thus that Alexander, after ravaging a few provinces of the East, thought he had conquered the world and reached India; and Julius Cæsar the southern parts of our own island. But these were limited acquisitions; even the old continents of Asia and Africa. were little known; the vast world of America was below the horizon of the ancients, and the great oceans of the Atlantic and Pacific unexplored and almost undescried.

The empires and states of antiquity chiefly consisted of their respective capitals. Troy, Thebes, Babylon, and Nineveh form prominent names in ancient history, but we hear little of secondary towns or the, country. The wealth and population of Liver

pool and Manchester, or other of our leading manufacturing and commercial hives, would each have afforded ample materials for the constitution of an ancient nation. The elements of society were so different, that we can hardly form a conception of them by comparison with the present. Priests, statesmen, soldiers, and agriculturists formed the chief and almost exclusive social divisions. Contrary to the modern standard of value, the rural order, now held of primary worth, was in the lowest estimation, consisting of slaves who occupied the villages apart from the rest of the community. Lines of road communicated between one great city and another, but there were few intersecting lines connecting provincial towns or villages. The variety that so agreeably diversifies the route of the traveller at present, in a succession of towns of unequal sizes, villages, parks, and mansions, was unknown. The owners of the soil did not reside on their estates, but in the chief city, sharing in its municipal government, luxuries, and refinement. The capitals included within their boundaries the horticultural and best cultivated part of the land. It is this which gave such great extent to the walls of ancient cities. The walls of Rome, for example, included not only the dwellings of the citizens, temples, and public edifices, but extensive gardens, woods, and corn-fields. It was the same with Athens and the Grecian cities. England two centuries past, when chiefly agricultural, had doubtless some resemblance to an ancient nation; as Poland and Russia have at the present, where the vitality of the state is concentrated in Petersburgh or Moscow, and all without is desolation, barbarism, and serfage.

From these indications it is manifest that the population of the Old World could not have been great. As there was no commerce, and little of manufactures, there were not the means for the employment of a numerous community. All Greece, in the time of Aristides, is supposed to have contained four millions of inhabitants, of which number three millions were slaves. According to Diodorus, ancient Egypt contained three millions of inhabitants, rather less than its population under the government of Mehemet Ali. Aristotle remarks that a city with 10,000 inhabitants is too small, and with 100,000, too large. The population of the entire Roman empire at the period of its greatest amplitude is estimated by Gibbon at 120,000,000, which is about the population of the British empire, inclusive of her colonies and foreign dependencies. We should doubt whether Rome herself ever comprised half the existing population of London within her postal radius of twelve miles. That the most celebrated states of antiquity were not densely peopled, may be inferred from natural phenomena. It is well known that as a country becomes reclaimed and populous, its climate is meliorated. The finest,

best cultivated, and most densely inhabited region of the Old World was Italy about the time of Augustus; yet the climate appears to have been much more severe than at present: the Tiber was often frozen over, and Juvenal describes a woman breaking the ice of that river to perform her ablutions. Horace frequently alludes to the streets of Rome as if filled with snow. These are now rare occurrences; in fact, we never met with a tourist who had seen snow in Rome, or felt a sharp frost there. When such phenomena do occur, as happened to be the case in the winter of 1842, they are deemed so unusual, that the libraries, academies, and schools are closed. Noble roads branched out from the imperial capital towards the frontiers, but much of the interior of Italy was wild, unenclosed, and trackless, affording ample verge for the free passage of the vast herds of swine mentioned by Polybius, and which, he says, were guided on their way by the sound of a horn. Except Rome, there were few cities in the Italian peninsula of magnitude. Venice, Milan, Florence, and Leghorn are all of modern origin and growth.

Contemplating ancient communities in another point of view, in respect of political government, it may be remarked that their republics were more municipal than national, and their institutions more suited to the government of a city than an empire. It is not easy to comprehend the precise arrangement of their civil machinery, but one prominent feature is incontestible, namely, that the sovereignty resided in the people. The senate of Rome was a privileged class, and there were privileged classes in Greece; but in both, the power of legislation, of making laws for the general government, of choosing the magistrates and chief officers, was vested in the citizens. This power, too, was exercised not intermediately but primarily by each class or individual. With the modern principle of representation, the ancients appear to have been unacquainted. In the absence of this contrivance, it is manifest that their legislative assemblies must have soon become unsuited to their purpose- multitudinous and disorderly gatherings; and their acts often exemplified the vices of their constitution, reflecting the caprice and violence of an irresponsible rabble rather than the steadiness, discrimination, and intelligence of the best portion of the community.

Inconstancy is a prominent feature in their judicial and legislative proceedings. The idol of one day might be the suspected victim or the stigmatized traitor of the next. Few of their great men who had not reason to complain of their fickleness. Miltiades, after saving Greece by his heroism at Marathon, soon became an object of undeserved suspicion and a banished man. Alcibiades ended his days in exile. The virtuous Aristides was ostracised because he was over-just. Socrates was put to death because he had taught truths repugnant to popular prejudices.

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