Story of Civilization

In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.

History is mostly guessing, the rest is prejudice.

One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages.

Greece did not begin civilization—it inherited far more civilization than it began; it was the spoiled heir of three millenniums of arts and sciences brought to its cities from the Near East by the fortunes of trade and war. In studying and honoring the Near East we shall be acknowledging a debt long due to the real founders of European and American civilization.

In this loose structure law was weak, unpopular, and diverse. The people preferred to be ruled by custom, and to settle their disputes by face-saving compromises out of court. They expressed their view of litigation by such pithy proverbs as “Sue a flea and catch a bite,” or “Win your lawsuit, lose your money.

if you are alone, you are all your own; with a companion you are half yourself; so you squander yourself according to the indiscretion of your company.

Noble character is now seldom found among those of noble birth, most of whom are good for nothing. ... Highly gifted families often degenerate into maniacs

Having collected and studied, with his students, 158 Greek constitutions, Aristotle divided them into three types: monarchy, aristocracy, and timocracy-government respectively by power, by birth, and by excellence. Anyone of these forms may be good according to time, place, and circumstance. "Though one form of government may be better than others," reads a sentence which every American should memorize, "yet there is no reason to prevent another from being preferable to it under particular conditions." .... Each form of government is good when the ruling power seeks the good of all rather than its own profit; in the contrary case each is bad. Each type, therefore, has a degenerate analogue when it becomes government for the governors instead of for the governed; then monarchy lapses into despotism, aristocracy into oligarchy, timocracy into democracy in the sense of rule by the common man." When the single ruler is good and able, monarchy is the best form of government; when he is a selfish autocrat we have tyranny, which is the worst form of government.

In the end Sparta's narrowness of spirit betrayed even her strength of soul. She descended to the sanctioning of any means to gain a Spartan aim; at last she stooped so far to conquer as to sell to Persia the liberties that Athens had won for Greece at Marathon. Militarism absorbed her, and made her, once so honored, the hated terror of her neighbors. When she fell, all the nations marveled, but none mourned.

Their degeneration was even more rapid than their rise. Astyages, who succeeded his father Cyaxares, proved again that monarchy is a gamble, in whose royal succession great wits and madness are near allied. He inherited the kingdom with equanimity, and settled down to enjoy it. Under his example the nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways; wealth had come too suddenly to be wisely used. The upper classes became the slaves of fashion and luxury, the men wore embroidered trousers, the women covered themselves with cosmetics and jewelry, the very horses were often caparisoned in gold.7 These once simple and pastoral people, who had been glad to be carried in rude wagons with wheels cut roughly out of the trunks of trees,8 now rode in expensive chariots from feast to feast.

old—about 2300 B.C.—the poets and scholars of Sumeria tried to reconstruct its ancient history. The poets wrote legends of a creation, a primitive Paradise and a terrible flood that engulfed and destroyed it because of the sin of an ancient king.11 This flood passed down into Babylonian and Hebrew tradition, and became part of the Christian creed. In 1929 Professor Woolley, digging into the ruins of Ur, discovered, at considerable depth, an eight-foot layer of silt and clay; this, if we are to believe him, was deposited during a catastrophic overflow of the Euphrates, which lingered in later memory as the Flood. Beneath that layer were the remains of a prediluvian culture that would later be pictured by the poets as a Golden Age.

versions of Hippocrates’ Prognostics, Galen On Foods, and

Bracelets, necklaces, anklets, finger-rings and ear-rings made the women of Sumeria, as recently in America, show-windows of their husbands’ prosperity.10

History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved.

25,000 B.C., the first of the postglacial industries, and the first known culture of Cro-Magnon Man. Bone tools—pins, anvils, polishers, etc.—were now added to those of stone; and art appeared in the form of crude engravings on the rocks, or simple figurines in high relief, mostly of nude women.