treatment of disease (Galen, c. 140 A.D.), they were 

 hindered in their scientific approach to the solution of 

 problems by their unwillingness to employ experiment 

 in validating their hypotheses. The intellectual class was 

 in fact not conducive towards any kind of manual work, 

 owing to the use of slaves to do this. Thus modern science 

 did not appear in civilization for another fifteen hundred 

 years. Nevertheless we owe a great debt to the ancient 

 Greeks as the first people on the Earth who were able to 

 challenge the old view of the functioning of the Universe 

 under the control of superhuman deities. The Greeks had 

 their own gods, but those were considered to be anthro- 

 pomorphic in character, and certainly the Greek thinkers 

 felt themselves capable of free action under their own 

 conclusions. 



The Hellenistic Empire continued until about 100 B.C. 

 when Greece was conquered by another rising people, the 

 Romans. These people originated in the city states estab- 

 lished by early Greeks in Italy around 800 B.C., Rome 

 itself being founded in c. 760 B.C. The original inhabi- 

 tants of Italy, the Etruscans, combined with the Greeks, 

 and a Roman Republic was formed. The Romans succeeded 

 in conquering Italy and held the power in the Mediter- 

 ranean, and in about 270 B.C. destroyed Carthage. In 

 the first century B.C. the Romans reached a Golden Age 

 in architecture and literature (with the great writers Cicero, 

 Virgil, and Livy) and the general Julius Caesar conquered 

 France and Britain. In the next century the Greco-Roman 

 culture was diffused into all parts of the Roman Empire, 

 from Persia to Spain. This was made possible by the con- 

 struction of a wide road system, by the establishment of an 

 effective administrative system over the territories, and 

 ^v the general recognition of the rights of the free citizen 



23 



