TEE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 401 



wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story. 

 Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism — war for 

 war's sake, all the citizens being warriors. It is horrible reading, be- 

 cause of the irrationality of it all — save for the purpose of making 

 " history " — and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization in 

 intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen. 



Those wars were purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves, ex- 

 citement, were their only motives. In the Peloponnesian war, for ex- 

 ample, the Athenians ask the inhabitants of Melos (the island where the 

 "Venus of Milo " was found), hitherto neutral, to own their lordship. 

 The envoys meet, and hold a debate which Thucydides gives in full, 

 and which, for sweet reasonableness of form, would have satisfied Mat- 

 thew Arnold. " The powerful exact what they can," said the Athenians, 

 " and the weak grant what they must." When the Meleans say that 

 sooner than be slaves they will appeal to the gods, the Athenians reply r 

 " Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by a law of their 

 nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made by us,, 

 and we are not the first to have acted upon it; we did but inherit it, 

 and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, 

 would do as we do. So much for the gods; we have told you why we 

 expect to stand as high in their good opinion as you." Well, the Meleans 

 still refused, and their town was taken. " The Athenians," Thucydides 

 quietly says, " thereupon put to death all who were of military age and 

 made slaves of the women and children. They then colonized the is- 

 land, sending thither five hundred settlers of their own." 



Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy 

 of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. 

 There was no rational principle in it, and the moment he died his gen- 

 erals and governors attacked one another. The cruelty of those times 

 is incredible. When Eome finally conquered Greece, Paulus iEmilius 

 was told by the Eoman Senate to reward his soldiers for their toil 

 by " giving " them the old kingdom of Epirus. They sacked seventy 

 cities and carried off a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants as slaves. 

 How many they killed I know not; but in Etolia they killed all the 

 senators, five hundred and fifty in number. Brutus was " the noblest 

 Eoman of them all," but to reanimate his soldiers on the eve of Philippi 

 he similarly promises to give them the cities of Sparta and Thessalonica 

 to ravage, if they win the fight. 



Such was the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness. We 

 inherit the warlike type ; and for most of the capacities of heroism that 

 the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history. Dead 

 men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this 

 they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into 

 our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it 



