THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 5 



eration and believed instead that the earliest condition of 

 men had been that of animals and that civilization had been 

 developed by the exercise of human intelligence. Expression 

 of this school is found in the work of Lucretius, the Roman 

 poet who restated the philosophical ideas of Epicurus in 

 Latin hexameters. But the pessimism of the Greeks was too 

 fundamental for this view to be maintained, and Lucretius 

 himself expresses his skepticism of the value of civilization. 

 When Prometheus stole the fire from heaven and Icarus 

 adopted wings, they paid for their daring the penalty that 

 they owed to the gods whom they had challenged. The 

 Greeks were resigned, in fact, to a fixed order of the uni- 

 verse, and any idea of progress toward perfection would have 

 been a violation of that fixed order. 



The organization of Europe under the Romans did noth- 

 ing to make men feel that a definite progress in the conditions 

 of mankind was possible. Those conditions, indeed, were 

 bad, at best. The economic foundation of the Roman Em- 

 pire was unsound. Its government was a totalitarian tyranny. 

 It is not without significance that the historical doctrines 

 of German National Socialism are akin to those of Marcus 

 Aurelius. 



With the rise of Christianity, an entirely ne^v idea of 

 human history was introduced— the idea that life on earth 

 was on the verge of ceasing. For St. Augustine, as for any 

 believer of that time, the course of history would be satis- 

 factorily complete if the world came to an end in his own 

 lifetime. The Christian church had started as a group of 

 disciples waiting for the return of their leader, and for the 

 early church the orthodox theory was that the Second Com- 

 ing might be expected at any time. Moreover, the basis of 

 the Christian religion was the idea of the individual's fall 

 from grace and his redemption from sin by the sacrifice of 

 the god. History, then, was the history of a degenerate world, 

 some of which might finally be redeemed and, with that re- 

 demption, obliterated by absorption into the godhead. 



