History of Ancient Civilization

=Military Anarchy.=--After the reigns of the Antonines the civil wars commenced. There were in the empire, beside the praetorian guard in Rome, several great armies on the Rhine...

=The Emperor.=--In the new regime absolute authority was lodged in a single man; he was called the emperor (imperator--the commander). In himself alone he exercised all those fu...

=Military Service.=--To be admitted to service in the Roman army one must be a Roman citizen. It is necessary to have enough wealth to equip one's self at one's own expense, for...

=Aryan Languages.=--The races which in our day inhabit Europe--Greeks and Italians to the south, Slavs in Russia, Teutons in Germany, Celts in Ireland--speak very different lang...

=The Gods. Polytheism.=--The Greeks, like the ancient Aryans, believed in many gods. They had neither the sentiment of infinity nor that of eternity; they did not conceive of Go...

=Imitation of the Greeks.=--The Romans were not artists naturally. They became so very late and by imitating the Greeks. From Greece they took their models of tragedy, comedy, t...

=Decadence of the Persian Empire.=--The Greeks, engaged in strife, ceased to attack the Great King; they even received their orders from him. But the Persian empire still contin...

=Destruction of the Peasantry.=--The old Roman people consisted of small proprietors who cultivated their own land. These honest and robust peasants constituted at once the army...

=The Christ.=--He whom the Jews were expecting as their liberator and king, the Messiah, appeared in Galilee, a small province of the North, hardly regarded as Jewish, and in a...

=The Land of Egypt.=--Egypt is only the valley of the Nile, a narrow strip of fertile soil stretching along both banks of the stream and shut in by mountains on either side, som...

=The Country.=--Greece is a very little country (about 20,000 square miles), hardly larger than Switzerland; but it is a country of great variety, bristling with mountains, inde...

=Pericles.=--In the middle of the fifth century Athens found herself the most powerful city in Greece. Pericles, descended from one of the noble families, was then the director...

=The Roman Gods.=--The Romans, like the Greeks, believed that everything that occurs in the world was the work of a deity. But in place of a God who directs the whole universe,...

=The Bible.=--The Jews united all their sacred books into a single aggregation which we call by a Greek name the Bible, that is to say, the Book. It is the Book par excellence....

=The Kings.=--Tradition relates that Rome for two centuries and a half was governed by kings. They told not only the names of these kings and the date of their death, but the li...

=Greek and Oriental Influence.=--Conquest gave the Romans a clearer view of the Greeks and Orientals. Thousands of foreigners brought to Rome as slaves, or coming thither to mak...

=The Provinces.=--The inhabitants of conquered countries did not enter into Roman citizenship, but remained strangers (peregrini), while yet subjects of the Roman empire. They w...

=The Land.=--From the high and snowy mountains of Armenia flow two deep and rapid rivers, the Tigris to the east, the Euphrates to the west. At first in close proximity, they se...

=Iran.=--Between the Tigris and the Indus, the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf rises the land of Iran, five times as great as France,[28] but partly sterile. It is composed of...

=Origin of the Persian Wars.=--While the Greeks were completing the organization of their cities, the Persian king was uniting all the nations of the East in a single empire. Gr...

=Rich and Poor.=--In almost all the Greek cities the domains, the shops of trade, the merchant ships, in short, all the sources of financial profit were in the hands of certain...

=Attica.=--The Athenians boasted of having always lived in the same country; their ancestors, according to their story, originated from the soil itself. The mountaineers who con...

=Prehistoric Remains.=--One often finds buried in the earth, weapons, implements, human skeletons, debris of every kind left by men of whom we have no direct knowledge. These ar...

=Laconia.=--When the Dorian mountaineers invaded the Peloponnesus, the main body of them settled at Sparta in Laconia. Laconia is a narrow valley traversed by a considerable str...

=The Land.=--Phoenicia is the narrow strip of country one hundred and fifty miles long by twenty-four to thirty wide, shut in between the sea of Syria and the high range of Leba...

=Etruria.=--The word Italy never signified for the ancients the same as for us: the Po Valley (Piedmont and Lombardy) was a part of Gaul. The frontier country at the north was T...

=Legends.=--The most ancient records of people and their doings are transmitted by oral tradition. They are recited long before they are written down and are much mixed with fab...