THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 3 



man. They have, indeed, been among those "ideas" that 

 have dominated the imagination and directed the actions of 

 mankind. After the destruction of the ancient world that 

 preceded the classical period— the world of Babylonia and 

 Egypt, Crete and the Hittite Empire, the world that was at 

 its height of prosperity in the fifteenth century before Christ- 

 there was a great period of darkness, in which the Hellenes 

 who had invaded western Asia Minor and Greece were slowly 

 advancing from their barbarian culture, much apparently as 

 the Saxons advanced slowly after they had destroyed the 

 Roman culture that they had found in Britain. In both cases, 

 the destruction of the old culture was extraordinarily com- 

 plete. In England, the very ditches had been abandoned, so 

 that when the cultivation of the fields was resumed, new lines 

 of drainage had to be established, a change that requires cen- 

 turies. In Greece, the art of writing appears to have been 

 lost, and the earliest writers of the reviving civilization bor- 

 rowed their alphabet from Semitic sources. This, however, 

 had its advantao^es. The Greeks started with a "clean slate." 

 As Bacon reminds us, they had no knowledge of antiquity, 

 and it is interesting to reflect that the classical Greeks spent 

 no time learning foreign languages. They were, in fact, 

 almost the only people of antiquity who did not devote them- 

 selves to that occupation, which today is considered such a 

 necessary discipline. The Babylonian youth had to learn 

 Sumerian, in which his classical books were written, and the 

 Roman regarded a knowledge of Greek as essential. But the 

 Greeks had no venerated classics, no holy books, no dead lan- 

 guages to master, no authorities to check their free specu- 

 lation. 



Since the Greeks had no knowledge of any long period of 

 history, they had little material from ^vhich to get an idea of 

 a pattern in history. They recognized that man had pro- 

 gressed from a state of barbarism, and they ascribed his 

 progress to the invention and assistance of the gods. At the 

 same time, they held to the old legend of a past golden age, 

 a period of well-being and innocence from which man had 



