CuaprTer IV 
THE AZTECS 
Beer Aztecs were the dominant nation on the high- 
lands of Mexico when Cortez marched with his 
small army to conquer New Spain. The horrible sacri- 
fices that they made to their gods and the wealth and 
barbaric splendor of their rulers have often been de- 
scribed. But their history in point of time covered 
short space and their art and religion was based in a 
large measure on achievements of the nations that had 
preceded them. 
Mayas and Aztecs compared to Greeks and 
Romans. A remarkably close analogy may be 
drawn between the Mayas and Aztecs in the New 
World and the Greeks and Romans in the Old, as 
regards character, achievements, and relations one to 
the other. The Mayas, like the Greeks, were an 
artistic and intellectual people who developed sculp- 
ture, painting, architecture, astronomy, and _ other 
arts and sciences to a high plane. Politically, both 
were divided into communities or states that 
bickered and quarreled. There were temporary leagues 
between certain cities, but real unity only against a 
common enemy. Culturally, both were one people, in 
spite of dialectic differences, for the warring factions 
were bound together by a common religion and a 
common thought. To be sure the religion of the 
Mayas was much more barbaric than that of the Greeks 
but in each case the subject matter was idealized and 
beautified in art. 
The Aztecs, like the Romans, were a brusque and war- 
like people who built upon the ruins of an earlier civili- 
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