The Story Of Mankind - Part 5

The Story of Mankind was written and illustrated by Dutch-American journalist, professor, and author Hendrik Willem van Loon and published in 1921. In 1922, it was the first book to be awarded the Newbery Medal for its outstanding contribution to children's literature.

Transcript

This is part 5 of the story of mankind by Hendrik van Loon.

The Greek Theatre.

The origins of the theatre,

The first form of public amusement.

At a very early stage of their history,

The Greeks had begun to collect the poems which had been written in honor of their brave ancestors who had driven the Pelestians out of Hellas and had destroyed the power of Troy.

These poems were recited in public and everybody came to listen to them.

But the theatre,

The form of entertainment which had become almost a necessary part of our own lives,

Did not grow out of these recited heroic tales.

It had such a curious origin that I must tell you something about it in a separate chapter.

The Greeks had always been fond of parades.

Every year they held solemn processions in honor of Dionysus,

The god of the wine.

As everybody in Greece drank wine,

The Greeks thought water only useful for the purpose of swimming and sailing,

This particular divinity was as popular as a god of the soda fountain would be in our own land.

And because the wine god was supposed to live in the vineyards,

Amidst a merry mob of satyrs,

Strange creatures who were half man and half goat,

The crowd that joined the procession used to wear goat skins and to hee haw like a real billy goat.

The Greek word for goat is tragos,

And the Greek word for singer is oidos.

The singer who met like a goat,

Therefore,

Was called a tragos oidos,

Or goat singer,

And it is this strange name which developed into the modern word tragedy,

Which means in the theatrical sense a piece with an unhappy ending,

Just as comedy,

Which really means the singing of something komos,

Or gay,

Is the name given to a play which ends happily.

But how,

You will ask,

Did this noisy chorus of masqueraders,

Stamping around like wild goats,

Ever develop into the noble tragedies,

Which have filled the theaters of the world for almost two thousand years?

The connecting link between the goat singer and Hamlet is really very simple,

And I shall show you in a moment.

The singing chorus was very amusing in the beginning,

And attracted large crowds of spectators who stood along the side of the road and laughed.

But soon this business of hee-hawing grew tiresome,

And the Greeks thought dullness and evil only comparable to ugliness or sickness.

They asked for something more entertaining.

Then an inventive young poet from the village of Ikaria in Attica hit upon a new idea which proved a tremendous success.

He made one of the members of the goat chorus step forward and engage in conversation with the leader of the musicians,

Who marched at the head of the parade,

Playing upon their pipes of pan.

This individual was allowed to step out of line.

He waved his arms and gesticulated while he spoke.

That is to say he acted,

While the others merely stood and sang,

And he asked a lot of questions,

Which the bandmaster answered accordingly to the role of papyrus upon which the poet had written down these answers before the show began.

This rough and ready conversation,

The dialogue which told the story of Dionysus,

Or one of the other gods,

Became at once popular with the crowd.

Henceforth every Dionysian procession had an acted scene,

And very soon the acting was considered more important than the procession and the memeing.

A skillless,

The most successful of all traditions,

Who wrote no less than 80 plays during his long life,

From 526 to 455,

Made a bold step forward when he introduced two actors instead of one.

A generation later,

Sophocles increased the number of actors to three.

When Euripides began to write his terrible tragedies in the middle of the 5th century BC,

He was allowed as many actors as he liked.

And when Aristophanes wrote those famous comedies,

In which he poked fun at everybody and everything,

Including the gods of Mount Olympus,

The chorus had been reduced to the role of mere bystanders,

Who were lined up behind the principal performers,

And who sang,

This is a terrible world.

All the hero in the foreground committed a crime against the will of the gods.

This new form of dramatic entertainment demanded a proper setting,

And soon every Greek city owned a theatre,

Cut out of the rock of a nearby hill.

The spectators sat upon wooden benches and faced a wide circle,

Our present orchestra where you pay three dollars and thirty cents for a seat.

Upon this half-circle,

Which was the stage,

The actors and the chorus took their stand.

Behind them there was a tent,

Where they made up with large clay masks,

Which hid their faces and which showed the spectators whether the actors were supposed to be happy and smiling or unhappy and weeping.

The Greek word for tent is skein,

And that is the reason why we talk of the scenery of the stage.

Even once the tragedy had become part of Greek life,

The people took it very seriously and never went to the theatre to give their minds a vacation.

A new play became as important an event as an election,

And a successful pay-write was received with great honors than those bestowed upon a general who had just returned from a famous victory.

The Persian Wars How the Greeks defended Europe against Asiatic invasion and drove the Persians back across the Aegean Sea.

The Greeks had learned the art of trading from the Aegans who had been the pupils of the Phoenicians.

They had founded colonies after the Phoenician pattern.

They had even improved upon the Phoenician methods by a more general use of money in dealing with foreign customers.

In the sixth century before our era,

They had established themselves firmly along the coast of Asia Minor,

And they were taking away trade from the Phoenicians at a fast rate.

This the Phoenicians of course did not like,

But they were not strong enough to risk a war with their Greek competitors.

They sat and waited.

Nor did they wait in vain.

In a former chapter,

I have told you of a humble tribe of Persian shepherds had suddenly gone upon the war path and had conquered the greater part of Western Asia.

The Persians were too civilized to plunder their new subjects.

They contented themselves with a yearly tribute.

When they reached the coast of Asia Minor,

They insisted that the Greek colonies of Lydia recognize the Persian kings as their overlords and pay them a stipulated tax.

The Greek colonies objected.

The Persians insisted.

Then the Greek colonies appealed to the home country and the stage was set for a quarrel.

For if the truth be told,

The Persian kings regarded the Greek city-states as very dangerous political institutions and bad examples for all other people who were supposed to be patient slaves of the mighty Persian kings.

Of course,

The Greeks enjoyed a certain degree of safety,

Because their country lay hidden beyond the deep waters of the Aegean.

But here their old enemies,

The Phoenicians,

Stepped forward with offers of help and advice to the Persians.

If the Persian king would provide the soldiers,

The Phoenicians would guarantee to deliver the necessary ships to carry them to Europe.

It was the year 492,

Before the birth of Christ,

And Asia made ready to destroy the rising power of Europe.

As a final warning,

The king of Persia sent messengers to the Greeks,

Asking for earth and water as a token of their submission.

The Greeks promptly threw the messengers into the nearest well,

Where they would find both earth and water in large abundance,

And thereafter,

Of course,

Peace was impossible.

But the gods of High Olympus watched over their children,

And when the Phoenicians fleet carrying the Persian troops was near Mount Athos,

The storm god blew his cheeks until he almost burst the vein of his brow,

And the fleet was destroyed by a terrible hurricane,

And the Persians were all drowned.

Two years later,

They returned.

This time they sailed straight across the Aegean Sea and landed near the village of Marathon.

As soon as the Athenians heard this,

They sent their army of ten thousand men to guard the hills that surrounded the Marathonian plain.

At the same time,

They dispatched a fast runner to Sparta to ask for help.

But Sparta was envious of the fame of Athens and refused to come to her assistance.

The other Greek cities followed her example,

With the exception of tiny Plataea,

Which sent a thousand men.

On the 12th of September of the year 490,

Miletades,

The Athenian commander,

Threw his little army against the hordes of the Persians.

The Greeks broke through the Persian barrage of arrows,

And their spears caused terrible havoc among the disorganized Asiatic troops,

Who had never been called upon to resist such an enemy.

That night the people of Athens watched the sky grow red with the flames of burning ships.

Anxiously they waited for news.

At last a little cloud of dust appeared upon the road that led to the north.

It was Phaidpides,

The runner.

He stumbled and gasped for his end was near.

Only a few days before had he returned from his errand to Sparta.

He had hastened to join Miletades.

That morning he had taken part in the attack,

And later he had volunteered to carry the news of victory to his beloved city.

The people saw him fall and they rushed forward to support him.

We have won,

He whispered.

And then he died.

A glorious death which made him envied of all man.

As for the Persians,

They tried after this defeat to land near Athens,

But they found the coast guarded and disappeared,

And once more the land of Hellas was at peace.

Eighty years they waited,

And during this time the Greeks were not idle.

They knew that a final attack was to be expected,

But they did not agree upon the best way to avert the danger.

Some people wanted to increase the army.

Others said that a strong fleet was necessary for success.

The two parties led by Aristides for the army,

And Themistocles,

The leader of the biggest navy men,

Fought each other bitterly and nothing was done until Aristides was exiled.

Then Themistocles had his chance and he built all the ships he could and turned Apiraeus into a strong naval base.

In the year 481 BC a tremendous Persian army appeared in Thessaly,

A province of northern Greece.

In this hour of danger,

Sparta,

The great military city of Greece,

Was elected commander in chief,

But the Spartans cared little what happened to northern Greece,

Provided their own country was not invaded.

They neglected to fortify the passes that led into Greece.

A small detachment of Spartans under Leonidas had been told to guard the narrower road within the high mountains and the sea which connected Thessaly with the southern provinces.

Leonidas obeyed his orders.

He fought and held the pass with unequalled bravery.

But a traitor by the name of Ephialtes,

Who knew the little byways of Mali,

Guided a regiment of Persians through the hills and made it possible for them to attack Leonidas in the rear,

Near the warm wells,

The Thermopylae.

A terrible battle was fought.

When night came,

Leonidas and his faithful soldiers lay dead under the corpses of their enemies.

But the pass had been lost,

And the greater part of Greece fell into the hands of the Persians.

They marched upon Athens,

Threw the garrison from the rocks of the Acropolis and burned the city.

The people fled to the island of Salamis.

All seemed lost.

But on the twentieth of September of the year 480,

Themistocles forced the Persian fleet to give battle within the narrow straits which separated the island of Salamis from the mainland,

And within a few hours he destroyed three-quarters of the Persian ships.

In this way the victory of Thermopylae came to naught.

Xerxes was forced to retire.

The next year,

So he decreed,

Would bring a final decision.

He took his troops to Thessaly,

And there he waited for spring.

But this time the Spartans understood the seriousness of the hour.

They left the safe shelter of the wall,

Which they had built across the Isthmus of Corinth,

And under the leadership of Pausanias they marched against Mardonius,

The Persian general.

The United Greeks,

Some one hundred thousand men from a dozen different cities,

Attacked the three hundred thousand men of the enemy near Plataea.

Once more the heavy Greek infantry broke through the Persian barrage of arrows.

The Persians were defeated,

As they had been at Marathon.

And this time they left for good.

By a strange coincidence,

The same day that the Greek armies won their victory near Plataea,

The Athenian ships destroyed the enemy's fleet near Cape Micheli in Asia Minor.

Thus did the first encounter between Asia and Europe end.

Athens had covered herself with glory,

And Sparta had fought bravely and well.

If these two cities had been able to come to an agreement,

If they had been willing to forget their little jealousies,

They might have become the leaders of a strong and united Hellas.

But alas,

They allowed the hour of victory and enthusiasm to slip by,

And the same opportunity never returned.

Athens vs.

Sparta How Athens and Sparta fought a long and disastrous war for the leadership of Greece.

Athens and Sparta were both Greek cities,

And their people spoke a common language.

In every other respect they were different.

Athens rose high from the plain.

It was a city exposed to the fresh breezes from the sea,

Willing to look at the world with the eyes of a happy child.

Sparta on the other hand,

Was built at the bottom of a deep valley,

And used the surrounding mountains as a barrier against foreign thought.

Athens was a city of busy trade.

Sparta was an armed camp where people were soldiers for the sake of being soldiers.

The people of Athens loved to sit in the sun and discuss poetry or listen to the wise words of the philosopher.

The Spartans on the other hand,

Never wrote a single line that was considered literature,

Because they knew how to fight.

They liked to fight.

And they sacrificed all human emotions for their ideal of military preparedness.

No wonder that these somber Spartans viewed the success of Athens with malicious hate.

The energy which the defense of the common home had developed in Athens was now used for purposes of a more peaceful nature.

The Acropolis was rebuilt,

And was made into a marble shrine to the goddess Athena.

Pyrrhocles,

The leader of the Athenian democracy,

Sent far and wide to find famous sculptors and painters and scientists to make the city more beautiful and the young Athenians more worthy of their home.

At the same time,

He kept a watchful eye on Sparta and built high walls which connected Athens with the sea and made her the strongest fortress of that day.

An insignificant quarrel between two little Greek cities led to the final conflict.

For thirty years the war between Athens and Sparta continued.

It ended in a terrible disaster for Athens.

During the third year of the war,

The plague had entered the city.

More than half of the people and Pyrrhocles,

The great leader,

Had been killed.

The plague was followed by a period of bad and untrustworthy leadership.

A brilliant young fellow by the name of Alcibiades had gained the favor of the popular assembly.

He suggested a raid upon the Spartan colony of Syracusi in Sicily.

An expedition was equipped and everything was ready.

But Alcibiades got mixed up in a street brawl and was forced to flee.

The general who succeeded him was a bungler.

First he lost his ships and then he lost his army,

And a few surviving Athenians were thrown into the stone quarries of Syracuse where they died from hunger and thirst.

The expedition had killed all the young men of Athens.

The city was doomed.

After a long siege,

The town surrendered in April of the year 404.

The high walls were demolished.

The navy was taken away by the Spartans.

Athens ceased to exist as the center of the great colonial empire which it had conquered during the days of its prosperity.

Though that wonderful desire to learn and to know and to investigate,

Which had distinguished her free citizens during the days of greatness and prosperity,

Did not perish with the walls and the ships,

It continued to live.

It became even more brilliant.

Athens no longer shaped the destinies of the land of Greece.

But now as the home of the first great university,

The city began to influence the minds of intelligent people far beyond the narrow frontiers of Hellas.

Alexander the Great Alexander the Macedonian establishes a Greek world empire,

And what became of his high ambition.

When the Achanians had left their homes along the banks of the Danube to look for pastures new,

They had spent some time among the mountains of Macedonia.

Ever since,

The Greeks had maintained certain more or less formal relations with the people of this northern country.

The Macedonians from their side had kept themselves well informed about conditions in Greece.

Now it happened.

Just when Sparta and Athens had finished their disastrous war for the leadership of Hellas,

That Macedonia was ruled by an extraordinarily clever man by the name of Philip.

He admired the Greek spirit in letters and art,

But he despised the Greek lack of self-control in political affairs.

It irritated him to see a perfectly good people waste its man and money upon fruitless quarrels.

So he settled the difficulty by making himself the master of all Greece,

And then he asked his new subjects to join him on a voyage which he meant to pay to Persia in return for their visit which Xerxes had paid the Greeks 150 years before.

Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start upon this well-prepared expedition.

The task of avenging the destruction of Athens was left to Philip's son Alexander,

The beloved pupil of Aristotle,

Wisest of all Greek teachers.

Alexander bade farewell to Europe in the spring of the year 334 BC.

Seven years later he reached India.

In the meantime he had destroyed Phoenicia,

The old rival of the Greek merchants.

He had conquered Egypt and had been worshipped by the people of the Nile valley as the son and heir of the pharaohs.

He had defeated the last Persian king.

He had overthrown the Persian Empire.

He had given orders to rebuild Babylon.

He had led his troops into the heart of the Himalayan mountains and made the entire world a Macedonian province and dependency.

Then he stopped and announced even more ambitious plans.

The newly formed empire must be brought under the influence of the Greek mind.

The people must be taught the Greek language.

They must live in cities built after a Greek model.

The Alexandrian soldier now termed schoolmaster.

The military camps of yesterday became the peaceful centers of the newly important Greek civilization.

Higher and higher did the flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise,

When suddenly Alexander was stricken with a fever and died in the old palace of King Hammurabi of Babylon in the year 323.

Then the waters receded,

But they left behind the fertile clay of a higher civilization and Alexander,

With all his childish ambitions and his silly vanities,

Had performed a most valuable service.

His empire did not long survive him.

A number of ambitious generals divided the territory among themselves,

But they too remained faithful to the dream of a great world brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge.

They maintained their independence until the Romans added Western Asia and Egypt to their other domains.

The strange inheritance of this Hellenistic civilization,

Part Greek,

Part Persian,

Part Egyptian and Babylonian,

Fell to the Roman conquerors.

During the following centuries,

It got such a firm hold upon the Roman world that we feel its influence in our own lives this very day.

Reviews

I have listened to this at least three times. So very very interesting. I am looking forward to each new chapter.. thank you