STUDIES ON THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 005
The Consequences of Catastrophe
1. Historical Perspective: Man’s Outlook on History (4)
The Consequences of Catastrophe
But whether a man or a generation be pessimistic or optimistic in their historical perspective, it is clear that there have been certain cataclysmic events which have from time to time compelled a revision of values—a general modification of outlook. It is a misfortune that we cannot trace things back to the very beginning of conscious thought, because we require some literary record to help us. No doubt there must have been such revisions of outlook when man first discovered the use of fire, or of agriculture, or of the employment of metals—revisions, I take it, in the optimistic direction, but we can only guess at them. And certainly every race was liable to a sharp change of perspective when national religions received a shock at the same time as national ambitions.
The first episode of the kind of which sufficient literary record remains to enable us to visualize the meaning of such a catastrophe, is that which befell the Jews when the destruction of the house of David and the kingdom of Judah synchronized with the burning and desecration of the temple of Jerusalem. When a religion has centred round a single shrine, when, indeed, its more enthusiastic votaries have been for generations working to destroy all minor shrines, and to concentrate all worship and ceremonial round one great temple, it is an awful thing to see that temple deliberately cast down and gutted by a Nebuchadnezzar, more especially when there comes at the same time the end of a hereditary kingship many centuries old, and a transplantation to alien lands of all surviving members of the royal and the priestly castes. Many local worships and royal dynasties had perished before. “Where are the Gods of Hamath and the Gods of Arpad, and the Gods of the City of Sepharvaim?” Sennacherib had asked a century back; he obviously conceived that the God and the city perished together. The God of the Hebrews survived—to become ultimately the God of the Christian world; but the national outlook of the Hebrews was profoundly modified by the catastrophe of the destruction of the temple. They came to understand that their God could be worshipped otherwhere than in his temple at Jerusalem, even when, after the seventy years of ruin, it could be restored on a modest scale. And the great lesson was that a God invisible and omnipresent was independent of arks and altars and local traditions; and that a nation was independent of local cohabitation round the ancestral sanctuary.
This was a case of both religious and national perspective upset by a catastrophe. Two centuries and a half later there was a good example of political perspective being upset for a whole nation, not by catastrophe, but by sudden expansion. I allude to the Greeks, and the result on their view of the world caused by the exploits of Alexander the Great. The Macedonian conquest of the East revolutionized the relations of the active and high-cultured little states of Greece, both with each other and with the outer world. Civic patriotism received a blow, but in return the establishment of the new Macedonian Empire offered many compensations both to the state and to the individual. If a man consented to forget that he was an Athenian or a Corinthian, and merely to remember that he was a Greek, what was more inspiring than to see that the old Hellenic genius for colonization was not extinct; to behold every land from the Aegean to the Indus covered with Greek cities as large and splendid as any that had ever existed in the old motherland? For every active-minded man, for soldier, poet, painter, scribe, merchant, or seaman, there was instant honourable and lucrative employment. Those Greeks who threw themselves into the new life of the conquered East looked back on the old times of the “balance of power”, and its constant wars between democracy and oligarchy, as something petty and absurd. Aristotle’s wonderful analysis of the constitution and tendencies of Greek cities seemed out-of-date almost before its author was dead. Shortly after Alexander the Great won his crowning victory over Persia at Arbela, news came to him of a battle in Greece. Agis King of Sparta had fallen, and with him five thousand brave men more. But the Macedonian turned to his generals and said with a smile: “It seems that while we have been conquering the Great King there has been a battle of mice in Arcadia”! While the empire of the Eastern world was being won by the Tigris, fights at home between small armies for a strip of plainland or a border fort seemed contemptible and absurd. For the Greeks who had thrown themselves into Alexander’s great adventure the national perspective had suddenly enlarged from a view of the Aegean to a view as far as the Oxus and the Indus. The Hellenic world had been increased twenty-fold. Why discuss constitutions any more, or indulge in petty faction-fights, when the man with a brain and a sword had the universe at his feet?
The vision was illusive, and ended in a veneer of Greek civilization imposed on the East for a few centuries, at the cost of the exhaustion and debasement of the civilizer. There was an end of the Greece of Aristides and Pericles and Socrates, and in return there was produced the Levantine mongrel—as the Romans knew him and as we know him today. Juvenal’s Greculus esuriens, the talented adventurer and charlatan, master of all trades save those for which honesty is indispensable, was the degenerate heir of Ulysses, Themistocles, and Alcibiades, if not of Solon, Plato, and Epaminondas. What a despicable result of what a great endeavour!
To obtain a deluxe leatherbound edition of STUDIES ON THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, subscribe to Castalia History.
