The Great Events by Famous Historians

Yet its power faded. Life in the hot and languid tropics tends to weaken, not invigorate, the sinews of a race. Then, too, a formal religion, a system of castes[8] as arbitrary as among the Egyptians, laid its paralyzing grip upon the land. About B.C. 600 Buddhism, a new and beautiful religion, sought to revive the despairing people; but they were beyond its help.[9] Their slothful languor had become too deep. From having been perhaps the first and foremost and most civilized of the Aryan tribes, the Hindus sank to be degenerate members of the race. We shall turn to look on them again in a later period; but they will be seen in no favorable light.

Meanwhile other wanderers from the Aryan home appear to the north and west. Perhaps even the fierce Tartars are an Aryan race, much altered from long dwelling among the yellow peoples. One tribe, the Persians, moved directly west, and became neighbors of the already noted Semitic group. After long wars backward and forward, bringing us well within the range of history, the Persians proved too powerful for the whole Semite group. They helped destroy Assyria,[10] they overthrew the second Babylonian empire which Nebuchadnezzar had built up, and then, pressing on to the conquest of Egypt, they swept the Hamites too from their place of sovereignty.[11]

How surely do those tropic lands avenge themselves on each new savage horde of invaders from the hardy North. It is not done in a generation, not in a century, perhaps. But drop by drop the vigorous, tingling, Arctic blood is sapped away. Year after year the lazy comfort, the loose pleasure, of the south land fastens its curse upon the mighty warriors. As we watch the Persians, we see their kings go mad, or become effeminate tyrants sending underlings to do their fighting for them. We see the whole race visibly degenerate, until one questions if Marathon[12] were after all so marvellous a victory, and suspects that at whatever point the Persians had begun their advance on Europe they would have been easily hurled back.

It was in Europe only that the Aryan wanderers found a temperate climate, a region similar to that in which they had been bred. Recent speculation has even suggested that Europe was their primeval home, from which they had strayed toward Asia, and to which they now returned. Certainly it is in Europe that the race has continued to develop. Earliest of these Aryan waves to take possession of their modern heritage, were the Celts, who must have journeyed over the European continent at some dim period too remote even for a guess. Then came the Greeks and Latins, closely allied tribes, representing possibly a single migration, that spread westward along the islands and peninsulas of the Mediterranean. The Teutons may have left Asia before B.C. 1000, for they seem to have reached their German forests by three centuries beyond that time, and these vast migratory movements were very slow. The latest Aryan wave, that of the Slavs, came well within historic times. We almost fancy we can see its movement. Russian statesmen, indeed, have hopes that this is not yet completed. They dream that they, the youngest of the peoples, are yet to dominate the whole.

[8] See The Formation of the Castes, page 52.

[9] See The Foundation of Buddhism, page 160.

[10] See Destruction of Nineveh, page 105.

[11] See Conquests of Cyrus, page 250.

[12] See The Battle of Marathon, page 322.

THE GREEKS AND LATINS

Of these European Aryans the only branches that come within the limits of our present period, that become noteworthy before B.C. 480, are the Greeks and Latins.

Their languages tell us that they formed but a single tribe long after they became separated from the other peoples of their race. Finally, however, the Latins, journeying onward, lost sight of their friends, and it must have taken many centuries of separation for the two tongues to grow so different as they were when Greeks and Romans, each risen to a mighty nation, met again.

The Greeks, or Hellenes as they called themselves, seem to have been only one of a number of kindred tribes who occupied not only the shores of the Ægean, but Thrace, Macedonia, a considerable part of Asia Minor, and other neighboring regions. The Greeks developed in intellect more rapidly than their neighbors, outdistanced them in the race for civilization, forgot these poor relations, and grouped them with the rest of outside mankind under the scornful name "barbarians."