BUT WHILE THESE EVENTS OF WHICH WE HAVE JUST SPOKEN WERE TAKING PLACE,A GREAT CHANGE HAD COME OVER THE WORLD.THE GENIUS OF THE GREEKS HAD SET THE WORLD FREE FROM ITS ANCIENT IGNORANCE AND SUPERSTITION.THE FOUNDATION HAD BEEN LAID FOR OUR MODERN WORLD OF SCIENCE AND ART AND PHILOSOPHY AND STATECRAFT
Far to the east,where the purple sails of the Phoenician ships disappeared beyond the distant horizon,lay the rugged peninsula of Greece.
It was a small country,not quite as tiny as the modern state of Delaware,and not quite as large as South Carolina.But it was inhabited by a race of people who were to play a most remarkable role in the history of mankind.
The Greeks,like the Jews,were immigrants.
While Abraham was driving his flocks westward in search of new pastures,the advance-guard of the Greek army was exploring the northern slopes of Mount Olympus.
The problem before the Greeks was not as difficult as that which Moses and Joshua encountered when they tried to get a foothold in the land of Canaan.
The Pelasgians,the original inhabitants of the Peloponnesian and Attican valleys,were weak and uncivilised and had not yet outgrown the habits of the late stone age.They were conquered and exterminated without great difficulty by an enemy armed with iron spears.
As soon as this had been done,the Greeks settled down behind the high walls of their little cities and laid the foundations for that civilisation which since then has become the common possession of all the nations of Europe and America.
In the beginning,the Greeks did not pay much attention to their neighbours across the sea.They conquered the Aegean Islands,but they did not try to get a foothold in Asia.The Phoenicians maintained their hold upon foreign commerce and the Greeks rarely ventured beyond Cape Males or the Straits of the Dardanelles.
There was the memorable exception when the Greek contemporaries of Jephthah and Samson started upon their famous expedition against Troy.But when the insult to Menelaus had been avenged,the Greeks returned to their own country and rarely ventured beyond the distant harbours of Pergamum and Halicarnassus.What lay hidden behind the blue mountain-ridges of Phrygia did not interest them.Babylon was only a name to the citizens of Athens.Nineveh was of small interest to the Puritan soldiers of Sparta.They spoke of these mysterious cities as our own grandfathers spoke of Timbuktu and Lassa.
The land of Canaan was unknown territory to them.
They had never heard of the Jews.
But in the fifth century before the birth of Christ,all this changed.
Europe did not come to Asia,but Asia tried to come to Europe.
And in this unholy endeavour,Asia almost succeeded.
We have heard the name of Cyrus before.To the Jews in their captivity,he came as the deliverer,who was to restore the glories of the old temple.
The Greeks had reason to regard him in a somewhat different light.
Cyrus himself was too busy consolidating his empire to march far beyond the plains of Mesopotamia.But eight years after his death,Darius,the son of Hystaspes,came to the throne and there was an end to the peace of Hellas.
The Persian army (after a long period of preparation)crossed the Hellespont and conquered Thrace.That happened in the year 492B.C.The expedition met with disaster near Mount Athos,a defeat which the Greeks attributed to the timely interference of their great god Zeus.
Two years later,the Persians returned.
At Marathon,they were brought to a standstill.
Twice thereafter they repeated the experiment.But although they defeated and destroyed a Greek force near the Thermopylae and plundered and burned Athens,they never gained a lasting foothold on the western continent.
It was the first clash between the old civilisation of Asia and the young civilisation of Europe,and Europe remained victorious.
As for the Greeks,the triumph of their arms was followed by a period of unparalleled mental and artistic development.
Within a single century they produced more scientists,more sculptors,more mathematicians and physicians and philosophers and poets and dramatists and architects and orators and statesmen and law-givers than have graced the annals of any other country during the last twenty centuries.
Athens became the centre of the entire civilised world.
From far and wide,people travelled to Attica to study the graces of the body and the subtleties of the mind.
Among the crowds which gathered at the foot of the Acropolis there may have been a few Jews.
But we have reason to doubt this.
Jerusalem never heard of the Greek capital,and those things which filled the western mind with eager curiosity were a matter of deep contempt to the serious zealots of Palestine,to whom a knowledge of the will of Jehovah was the beginning and the end of all things.
They did not know and they did not care what was happening in the land of the heathen.
They went to their temple.
They listened to the exhortations of their priests in the newly established synagogues.They minded their own business.
And they lived such inconspicuous lives that we know nothing of their history during this period.
Jerusalem had been forgotten.Which is exactly what the pious Jews had prayed for.
