In Hebrew history the point referred to in 323 the text may be remarked in the confusion of ideas between the mere Burg or hill fortress (Zion or Sihon) of the earlier days of Jerusalem and the later developed Holy City, schism from which was criminal in the eyes of the pious Hebrew, as the earliest seat of the federalised nation. The same thing is obvious in the genealogical history of Early Greece, of which we may take Athens as a type; the great tragedies, as the trilogies of Aeschylus, illustrate this, the actual city playing its part in the scenery as in the Eumenides. Here then we have three great cities—Troy, Jerusalem, Athens, proclaiming themselves obviously as centres of the new society and rising conspicuously above the welter of the tribes and the þeoð; but though these are obvious cases, the same thing was going on throughout the whole of the growing world of 324 ancient civilisation. The Oriental monarchies, when looked at closely, turn out to have been compressed confederacies of cities. These flourished so long as the cities composing them retained some individuality, but their life was at last crushed out by monarchical and despotic centralisation. As a consequence the system which they formed was either broken up by the surrounding uncivilised tribes, as Accadian Babylon by the Assyrians, and Assyria in its turn by the Medes, or stagnated into huge lifeless bureaucracies, as in the case of China or Egypt. The life of the latter existed in the emulation of the cities of Memphis, Thebes, etc., and lay in abeyance between the time of the Persian invasion and the rise under the Ptolemies of the Greek city of Alexandria.
Everywhere, in short, in the ancient world, one is struck by the preponderance of the city. Tyre is a mighty power, Carthage a great empire; nay, the mere material aggregation of buildings, the shrine, so to say, of the city-organisation, is all-important, and the territory a mere farm or recruiting ground; the long walls fall to the music of Lysander’s flutes, and Athens becomes an appanage of the Dorians; Carthaginian walls are breached, and the huge Semitic empire becomes a part of the realm of the mightiest city of all. Nowhere is there independence, unity, progress, save where a city knits up the 325 energies and gives form to the aspirations of men, providing an aim for which their virtue (valour) may expend itself.
It may here be noted that during all this time ethics and religion were developing on one line; in the earlier barbarism there was no distinction between society and nature; man was the sole rational type; the gods were wholly anthropomorphous, and even amidst the delicate poetry of Homer at times grotesquely so; man was everything, the rest was homogeneous with him. Nature-gods were the ancestors of society, the heads of gentes and tribes traced their descent quite frankly by mere begettal from the highest. Heracles, Jove, Mavors, Woden were no forces exterior to the life of the existing people of the Hellenes, the Latins, or the Goths, but veritable material ancestors, so many counted generations back. Their most tragic stories, embodied in the noblest poetry which the world has seen, and perhaps will ever see,—looked upon as no chance fictions or literary inventions, but rather as pieces of inspired history,—were but episodes of the great story, blossoms of the genealogical tree of the existing child of Atreus or Wolsmeg. This tendency for the identification of man with everything sensible or insensible, animate or inanimate, is again illustrated by totem worship, necessitated also by the more obvious reason of the early absence of monogamous or 326 even polygamous institutions. The gods themselves change without degradation into the forms of beast and bird, so that the chiefs of the gens could feel no shame in taking their names from the bear, the wolf, or the eagle, and giving them in turn to the whole groups. Amongst the Hebrews, too, it is clear that the so-called patriarchs were really nature-gods; the names of chiefs were frequently compounded of the word Baal—that is “god,” a fact naively recognised by the historians of the later and orthodox period by their changing Baal into El or Ja, the special names of the Hebrew tribal God. Similarly Abram is the high heaven, like Zeus or Jove.
This line of religion was still followed up in the period of ancient civilisation; the state and religion were one, as is indicated amongst other things by the temples having been used as popular meeting-places for pleasure, law or business. In short, in the ancient world, religion was ancestor-worship, developing, as the gens and the þeoð gave place to the city, into city-worship, in which the individual only felt his more elevated life as a part of the Holy City that had made him and his what they were, and would lead them to all excellence and glory.
We have mentioned that the city-confederacies of the East which assumed the appearance to later ages of great despotic 327 monarchies fell either into demoralisation or languid bureaucracy. From Asia the lead in civilisation passed to Europe, and the progress of humanity became speedy and brilliant. But the Ancient Civilisation, incomplete, founded on oligarchy, political and intellectual, and on industrial slavery of the crudest kind, had to undergo the law of change. The Greek cities, after fierce struggles among themselves for the leadership of their world, fell, destroyed by individual greed for position and fame, that took the place of the old city-worship. Their fall was helped by the new system of individualistic ethics, which put forward as the aim of life the excellence and moral qualities of the individual, looked at in himself, instead of those of the society of which he formed a part. Thus Greek civilisation fell into the clutches of the Tyrants, and again the lead passed westward into the hands of Rome—the most complete, self-contained and powerful development of the city-world. But again, as her power grew and the wealth of her oligarchy with it, the doom was awaiting; the boundless greed of the great slave-holding and tax-gathering capitalists, the conquerors of the ancient world, led them into a condition of chaos, from which they had to be rescued by an imperial bureaucracy. It was the function of the latter, on the one hand, to keep peace between the competitors 328 for monstrous wealth, and, on the other, to hold down and pacify the proletariat and subject barbarians, on whom the oligarchy fed.
Steady degradation followed the Augustan “Pax Romana”; the whole of the mighty power of Rome, the growth of so many centuries of energy and valour, was prostituted to the squeezing of taxes from the Roman world; the very form of the city-society was reduced to an absurdity by the sale of citizenship, until Caracalla abolished its mere form, extending it to all freed men. At last the Roman armies were wholly composed of Gauls and Goths, Armenians and Arabs; no Italian could be found willing to fight for his life much less for the sham state, good only for tax-gathering, which now represented the once great city. Rome fell, and with it the Ancient World.