72 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



those along the Euphrates. Its character appears from the architec- 

 ture, the engineering works, the agricultural operations as much as 

 from the literature and the science. When one views the ruins at 

 Karnak and considers that the rock on which the Egyptian sculptor 

 labored is one of the most intractable granites known, he marvels at 

 the sculptors' skill as much as he admires the genius of the architects 

 who planned the gigantic structures. If instead of granite from Syene 

 the material had been soft Pentelican marble, the dainties of Grecian 

 architecture and the grandeur of Egyptian might have been united at 

 KarnaJs. 



The Greeks competed long with the Phoenicians for control of 

 Mediterranean trade; their colonies were in Asia Minor, Italy and 

 Sicily as those of the Phoenicians were in northern Africa and the 

 west. When Psammetichus ended the seclusion of Egypt by opening 

 her ports and by enlisting Greek mercenaries into his army, travelers 

 from Grecian colonies found their way thither, gathered fragments of 

 Egyptian philosophy, literature, science and art and carried them back 

 to their own land to be fused with similar fragments from Arabia, 

 Mesopotamia and Phoenicia, just as seventeen hundred years later the 

 Crusaders brought home with them the knowledge of oriental civiliza- 

 tion. The philosophy and literature of Greece originated in her com- 

 mercial colonies. When Athens and her immediate allies, after the 

 Persian war, wrested commercial supremacy from the Phoenicians, the 

 Pirfeus was enlarged and Athens became at once the commercial and 

 the intellectual center of the world. Then, the art and thought of 

 other lands unfolded through Grecian genius into wondrous propor- 

 tions — with a background of no history and a foreground of the dark 

 ages, it seemed to be a veritable Melchisedec, without ancestor, with- 

 out descendant. Only within the last thirty years has its true place 

 been determined. 



Those whose energies are expended in bitter sneers against com- 

 merce either forget or ignore the truth that Athens was preeminently 

 commercial. They seem to think that the city was enveloped by an 

 atmosphere of pure intellectuality amid which the necessary merchants 

 moved in a state of semi-asphyxiation. Some years ago, a writer in a 

 religious paper, lamenting modern degeneracy, asserted that in Athens 

 the street boys competed in making verses whereas in New York the 

 street boys play marbles. No doubt some Athenian boys engaged occa- 

 sionally, just as some New York boys do now, in the possibly lofty 

 game of verse-making, but from what is known of the Athenians and 

 of the Greeks from the earliest times to our own day one may suppose 

 with more probability that the Athenian boys' favorite sport was that 

 of matching small coins. Commerce was never disreputable in Athens ; 

 Aristotle is said to have been an apothecary, and Plato an exporter of 



