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The Crest Wave of Evolution by Kenneth Morris

K >> Kenneth Morris >> The Crest Wave of Evolution




Now, what the Bible became to the English, Homer became to the
Greeks--and more also. They heard his grand manner, and were
billed by it with echoes from the Supermundane. _Anax andron
Agamemnon_--what Greek could hear a man so spoken of, and dream
he compounded of common clay? Never mind what this king of men
did or failed to do; do but breathe his name and titles, and you
have affirmed immortality and the splendor of the Human Soul!
The _human_ Soul?

"Tush!" said they, "the Greek Soul! he was a Greek as we
are!".... And so Tomides, Dickaion and Harryotatos, Athenian
tinkers and cobblers, go swaggering back to their shops, and
dream grand racial dreams. For this is a much more impressionable
people than the English; any wind from the Spirit blows
in upon their minds quickly and easily. Homer in Greece
--once Solon, or Pisistratus, or Hopparchus, had edited and
canonized him, and arranged for his orderly periodical public
reading (as the Bible in the churches)--had an advantage even
over the Bible in England. When Cromwell and his men grew mighty
upon the deeds of the mighty men of Israel, they had to thrill to
the grand rhythms until a sort of miracle had been accomplished,
and they had come to see in themselves the successors and living
representatives of Israel. But the Greek, rising on the swell of
Homer's roll and boom, had need of no such transformation. The
uplift was all for him; his by hereditary right; and no
pilfering necessary, from alien creed or race. We have seen in
Homer an inspired Race-patriot, a mighty poet saddened and
embittered by the conditions he saw and his own impotence to
change them.--Yes, he had heard the golden-snooded sing; but
Greeks were pygmies, compared with the giants who fought at
Ilion! There was that eternal contrast between the glory he had
within and the squalor he saw without. Yes, he could sing; he
could launch great songs for love of the ancients and their
magnificence. But what could a song do? Had it feet to travel
Hellas; hands to flash a sword for her; a voice and kingly
authority to command her sons into redemption?--Ah, poor blind
old begging minstrel, it had vastly greater powers and organs
than these!

Lycurgus, it is said, brought singers or manuscripts of your
poems into Sparta; because, blind minstrel, he had a mind to
make Sparta great-souled; and he knew that you were the man to
do it, if done it could be. Then for about two hundred and sixty
years, without much fuss to come into history, you were having
your way with your Greeks. Your music was ringing in the ears of
mothers; their unborn children were being molded to the long
roll of your hexameters. There came to be manuscripts of you in
every city: corrupt enough, many of them, forgeries, many of
them; lays fudged up and fathered on you by venal Rhapsodoi,
to chant in princely houses whose ancestors it was a good
speculation to praise. You were everywhere in Greece: a great
and vague tradition, a formless mass of literature: by the time
Solon was making laws for Athens, and Pisistratus was laying the
foundations of her stable government and greatness.

And then you were officially canonized. Solon, Pisistratus, or
one of the Pisistratidae, determined that you should be, not a
vague tradition and wandering songs any longer, but the Bible of
the Hellenes. From an obscure writer of the Alexandrian period
we get a tale of Pisistratus sending to all the cities of Greece
for copies of Homeric poems, paying for them well; collating
them, editing them out of a vast confusion; and producing at
last out of the matter thus obtained, a single more or less
articulate Iliad. From Plato and others we get hints leading to
the supposition that an authorized state copy was prepared; that
it was ordained that the whole poem should be recited at the
Panathenaic Festivals by relays of Rhapsodoi; this state copy
being in the hands of a prompter whose business it was to see
there should be no transgression by the chanters.* The wandering
songs of the old blind minstrel have become the familiar Sacred
Book of the brightest-minded people in Greece.

------
* For a detailed account of all this see De Quincey's essay Homer
and the Homeridae.
------

Some sixty years pass, and now look what happens. A mighty Power
in Asia arranges a punitive expedition against turbulent
islanders and coast-dwellers on its western border. But an old
blind minstrel has been having his way with these: and the
punitive expedition is to be of the kind not where you punish,
but where you are punished;--has been suggesting to them, from
the Olympus of his sacrosanct inspiration, the idea of great
racial achievement, till it has become a familiar thing, ideally,
in their hearts.--The huge armies and the fleets come on; Egypt
has gone down; Lydia has gone down; the whole world must go
down before them. But there is an old blind minstrel, long since
grown Olympian in significance, and throned aloft beside
Nephelegereta Zeus, chanting in every Greek ear and heart.
Greeks rise in some sort to repel the Persian: Athens and
Sparta, poles apart in every feeling and taste, find that under
the urge of archaic hexameters and in the face of this common
danger, they can co-operate after a fashion. The world is in a
tumult and threatens to fall; but behind all the noise and
ominous thunder, by heaven, you can hear the roll of hexameters,
and an old blind sorrow-stricken bard chanting. The soul of a
nation is rising, the beat of her wings keeping time to the music
of olden proud resounding lines. Who led the Grecian fleet at
Salamis?--Not Spartan Eurygiades, but an old blind man dead these
centuries. Who led the victors at Marathon? Not sly Athenian
Miltiades, but an old dead man who had only words for his wealth:
blind Maeonides chanting; and with his chanting marshaling on
the roll of his hexameters mightier heroes than ever a Persian
eye could see: the host that fought at Ilion; the creatures of
his brain; Polymechanos Odysseus, and Diomedes and Aias;
Podargos Achilles; Anas andron Agamemnon.

The story of the Persian Wars comes to us only from the Greek
side; so all succeeding ages have been enthusiastically
Prohellene. We are to think that Europe since has been great and
free and glorious, because free and cultured Greeks then held
back a huge and barbarous Asian despotism. All of which is great
nonsense. Europe since has not been great and free and glorious;
very often she has been quite the reverse. She has, at odd
times, been pottering around her ideal schemes of government;
which Asia in large part satisfied herself that she had found
long ago. As for culture and glory, the trumps have now been
with the one, now with the other. And the Persians were not
barbarians by any means. And when you talk of Asia, remember
that it is as far a cry from Persia to China, as from Persian to
England. Let us have not more of this preoccupation with
externals, and blind eyes to the Spirit of Man. I suppose
ballot-boxes and referenda and recalls and the like were
specified, when it was said _Of such is the kingdom of Heaven?_...

But Persia would not have flowed out over Europe, if Marathon,
Salamis, and Plataea had gone the other way. Empires wax and wane
like the moon; they ebb and flow like the tides; and are governed
by natural law as these are; and as little depend, ultimately,
upon battle, murder, and sudden death; which are but effects that
wisdom would evitate; we are wrong in taking them for causes. Two
things you can posit about any empire: it will expand to its
maximum; then ebb and fall away. Though the daily sun sets not on
its boundaries, the sun of time will set on its decay; because
all things born in time will die; and no elixer of life has been
found, nor ever will be. There is an impulse from the inner
planes; it strikes into the heart of a people; rises there, and
carries them forward upon an outward sweep; then recedes, and
leaves them to their fall. Its cycle may perhaps be longer or
shorter; but in the main its story is always the same, and bound
to be so; you cannot vote down the cycles of time. What hindered
Rome from mastery of Europe; absolute mastery; and keeping it
forever? Nothing--but the eternal Cyclic Law. So Persia.

She was the last phase of that West Asian manvantara which began
in 1890 and was due to end in 590 B. C. As such a phase, a
splendor-day of thirteen decades should have been hers; that, we
find, being always the length of a national illumination. She
began under Cyrus in 558; flowed out under Cambyses and Darius to
her maximum growth--for half the thirteen decades expanding
steadily. Then she touched Greece, where a younger cycle was
rising, and recoiled. She should have been at high tide precisely
three years before-Marathon--a half-cycle after the accession of
Cyrus, or in 493;--and was. Then the Law-pronounced its _Thus
far and no further;_ and enforced it with Homer's songs, and
Greek valor, and Darius' death, and Xerxes' fickle childishness
(he smacked the Hellespont because it was naughty). These things
together brought to naught the might and ambition and bravery of
Iran; but had they been lacking, the Law would have found other
means. Though Xerxes and Themistocles had both sat at home doing
nothing, Alexander would still have marched east in his time,
and Rome conquered the world. So discount all talk of Greece's
having saved Europe, which was never in danger. But you may say
Persia saved Greece: that her impact kindled the fires--was used
by the Law for that purpose--which so brilliantly have illumined
Europe since.

Persia rose in the evening of that West Asian manvantara; the
empires of its morning and noon, as Assyria chiefly, had been
slower of growth, longer of life, smaller of expanse; and for her
one, had several periods of glory. A long habit of empire
-building had been formed there, which carried Persia rapidly and
easily to her far limits. Assyria, the _piece de resistance_ of
the whole manvantara, with huge and long effort had created, so
to say, an astral mold; of which Persia availed herself, and
overflowed its boundaries, conquering regions east and west
Assyria never knew. But if she found the mold and the habit
there to aid her, she came too late for the initial energies of
the morning, or the full forces of the manvantaric noon. Those
had been wielded by the great Tiglath Pilesers and Assurbanipals
of earlier centuries; fierce conquerors, splendid builders,
ruthless patrons of the arts. What was left for the evening and
Persia could not carry her outward her full thirteen decades, but
only half of them: sixty-five years her tides were rising, and
then she touched Greece. Thence-forward she remained stationary
within her borders, not much troubled internally, until the four
-twenties. To a modern eye, she seems on the decline since
Marathon; to a Persian of the time, probably, that failure on
the Greek frontier looked a small matter enough. A Pancho Villa
to chase; if you failed to catch him, pooh, it was nothing!
Xerxes is no Darius, true: Artaxerxes I, no Cyrus, nor nothing
like. But through both their reigns there is in the main good
government in most of the provinces; excellent law and order;
and a belief still in the high civilizing mission of the
Persians. Peace, instead of the old wars of conquest; but you
would have seen no great falling off. Hystaspes himself had
been less conqueror than consolidator; the Augustus of the
Achaemenids, greater at peace than at war;--though great at
that too, but not from land-frontiers; and indeed, had ample
provocation, as those things go, for his punitive expedition that
failed. For the rest, he had strewn the coast with fine harbors,
and reclaimed vast deserts with reservoirs and dikes; had
explored the Indus and the ocean, and linked Egypt and Persia by
a canal from the Red Sea to the Nile. Well; and Xerxes carried
it on; he too played the great Achaemenid game; did he not send
ships to sail round Africa? If there was no more conquering, it
was because there was really nothing left to conquer; who would
bother about that Greece?--Darius Hystaspes was the last strong
kind, yes; but Datius Nothus was the first gloomy tyrant, or at
least his queen, bloodthirsty Parysatis, was; which was not til
434. So that Persia too had her good thirteen decades of
comfortable, even glorious, years.

Whereafter we see her wobbling under conflicting cyclic
impulses down to her final fall. For lack of another to take her
place, she was still in many ways the foremost power; albeit
here and there obstreperous satraps were always making trouble.
When Lysander laid Athens low in 404, it was Persian financial
backing enabled him to do it; but Cyrus might march in to her
heart, and Xenophon out again, but two years later, and none to
say them effectually nay. Had there been some other West Asian
power, risen in 520 or thereabouts, to outlast Persia and finish
its day with the end of the great cycle in 390, one supposes the
Achaemenids would have fallen in the four-twenties, and left that
other supreme during the remaining years. But there was none.
The remains of Nineveh and Babylon slept securely in the Persian
central provinces; there was nothing there to rise; they had
their many days long since. Egypt would have done something, if
she could; would have like to;--but her own cycles were against
her. She had the last of her cyclic days under the XXVIth
Dynasty. In 655 Psamtik I reunited and resurrected her while his
overlord Assurbanipal was wrecking his--Assurbanipal's--empire
elsewhere; thirteen decades afterwards, in 525, she fell before
Cambyses. Thirteen decades, nearly, of Persian rule followed,
with interruptions of revolt, before she regained her independence
in 404;--stealing, you may say, the nine years short from
the weakness of Persia. Then she was free for another half
-cycle, less one year; a weak precarious freedom at best, lost to
Artaxerxes Ochus in 340. All but the first fourteen years of it
fell beyond the limits of the manvantara; the West Asian forces
were spent. Egypt was merely waiting til the Greek cycle should
have sunk low enough and on to the military plane; and had not
long to wait. She paid back most of her nine years to Persia;
then hailed Alexander as her savior; and was brought by him, to
some extent, under the influence of European cycles; to share
then in what uninteresting twilight remained to Greece, and
presently in the pomps and crimsons of Rome.

Persia, too, was waiting for that Greek military cycle; until it
should rise, however, something had to be going on in West Asia.
The Athenian first half-cycle--sixty-five years from the
inception of the hegemony--ended in 413, when the Peloponnesian
War entered its last, and for Athens, disastrous, phase. Another
half-cycle brings us to the rise of Philip; who about that time
became dominant in Greece. But not yet had a power consolidated,
which could contest with Persia the hegemony of the world.
Having enabled Sparta to put down Athens, the western satraps
turned their attention to finding those who should put down
Sparta. Corinth, Thebes, Argos and Athens were willing; and
Pharnabazus financed them for war in 395. A year after, he and
Conon destroyed the Spartan fleet. In 387 came the Peace of
Antalicidas, by which Persia won what Xerxes had fought for of
old; the suzerainty of Greece. But she was not strong; her
cycle was long past; she stood upon the wealth and prestige of
her better days, and the weakness of her contemporaries.
Internally she was falling to pieces until Artaxerxes Ochus,
between 362 and 338, wading through blood and cruelty, restored
her unity, wore out her resources, and left her apparently as
great as under Xerxes, but really ready to fall at a touch. He
prepared the way for Alexander.

So ended an impulse that began, who knows when? on a high
spiritual plane in the pure religion of the Teacher we call
Zoroaster; a high system of ethics expressed in long generations
of clean and noble lives. From that spirituality the impulse
descending reached the planes of intellect and culture; with
results we cannot measure now; nothing remains but the splendor
of a few ruins in the wilderness--the course the lion and the
lizard keep. It reached the plane of military power, and flowed
over all the lands between the Indus and the Nile; covering them
with a well-ordered, highly civilized and wisely governed empire.
Then it began to ebb; meeting a counter-impulse arising in
Eastern Europe.

Which, too, had it source on spiritual planes; in the heart and
on the lyre of blind Maeonides; and worked downward and outward,
till it had wrought on this plane a stable firmness in Sparta, an
alertness in Athens. It contacted then the crest of the Persian
wave, and received from the impact huge accession of vigor. It
blossomed in the Age of Pericles on the plane of mind and
creative imagination. It came down presently on to the plane of
militarism, and swelled out under Alexander as far as to the
eastern limits of the Persian Empire he overthrew. Where it met
a tide beginning to rise in India; and receded or remained
stationary before that. And at last it was spent, and itself
overthrown by a new impulse arisen in Italy; which took on
impetus from contact with Greece, as Greece had done from contact
with Persia.

The Greeks of Homer's and Hesiod's time, before the European
manvantara, elsewhere begun, had reached or quickened them, were
uncouth and barbarous enough; they may have stood, to their
great West Asian neighbors, as the Moors of today to the nations
of Europe; they may have stood, in things cultural, to the
unknown nations of the north or west already at that time
awakened, as the Chinese now and recently to the Japanese. Like
Moors, like Chinese, they had behind them traditions of an
ancient greatness; but pralaya, fall, adversity, squalor, had
done their work on them, developing the plebeian qualities. Now
that they have emerged into modern history, as then when
they were emerging into ancient, we find them with many like
characteristics; a turn for democracy, for example; the which
they assuredly had not when they were passing into pralaya under
the Byzantine Empire. A turn for democracy; plebeian qualities;
these are the things one would expect after pralaya, if that
pralaya had been at all disastrous. With the ancient Greeks,
the plebeian qualities were not all virtues by any means;
they retained through their great age many of the vices of
plebeianism. They won their successes for the most part on
sporadic impulses of heroism; shone by an extraordinary
intellectual and artistic acumen. But taking them by and large,
they were too apt to ineffectualize those successes, in the
fields of national and political life, by extraordinary venality
and instability of character. I shall draw here deeply on
Professor Mahaffy, who very wisely sets out to restore the
balance as between Greeks and Persians, and burst bubble-notions
commonly held. Greek culture was extremely varied, and therein
lay its strength; you can find all sorts of types there; and
there are outstanding figures of the noblest. But on the whole,
says Mahaffy--I think rightly--there was something sordid,
grasping, and calculating: _noblesse oblige_ made little appeal
to them--was rather foreign to their nature. Patricianism did
exist; in Sparta; perhaps in Thebes. Of the two Thebans we know
best, Pindar was decidedly a patrician poet, and Epaminondas was
a very great gentleman; now Thebes, certainly, must have been
mighty in foregone manvantaras, as witness her five cycles of
myths, the richest in Greece. In her isolation she had doubtless
carried something of that old life down; and then, too, she had
Pindar. Nor was Sparta any upstart;--of her we have only heard
Athenians speak. But outside of these two, you hardly find a
Greek _gentleman_ in public life; hardly that combination of
personal honor, contempt of commerce, class-pride, leisured
and cultured living;--with, very often, ultra-conservatism,
narrowness of outlook, political ineptitude and selfishness. The
Spartans had many of these instincts, good and bad. They reached
their cultural zenith in the seventh century or earlier;
probably Lycurgus had an eye to holding off that degeneration
which follows on super-refinement; and hence the severe life he
brought in. My authority makes much of the adoration the other
Greeks accorded them; who might hate and fight with Sparta, but
took infinite pride in her nonetheless. Thus they told those
tales of the Spartan mothers, and the Spartan boy the fox
nibbled; thus their philosophers, painting an Utopia, took
always most of its features from Lacedaemon.

All of which I quote for the light's sake it throws on the past
of Greece: the past of her past, and the ages before her history.
Or really, on the whole history of the human race; for I think it
is what you shall find always, or almost always. I spoke of the
Celtic qualities as having been of old patrician; they are
plebeian nowadays, after the long pralaya and renewal. As a
pebble is worn smooth by the sea, so the patrician type, with its
refinements and culture, is wrought out by the strong life
currents that play through a race during its manvantaric periods.
Pralaya comes, with conquest, the overturning of civilization,
mixture of blood; all the precious results obtained hurled back
into the vortex;--and then to be cast up anew with the new
manvantara, a new uncouth formless form, to be played on, shaped
and infused by the life-currents again. In Greece an old
manvantara had evolved patricianism and culture; which the
pralaya following swept all away, except some relics perhaps in
Thebes the isolated and conservative, certainly in Sparta.
Lycurgus was wise in his generation when he sought by a rigid
system to impose the plebeian virtues on Spartan patricianism.

Wise in his generation, yes; but he could work no miracle.
Spartan greatness, too, was ineffectual: there is that about
pouring new wine into old bottles. Sparta was old and conservative;
covered her patrician virtues with a rude uncultural exterior;
was inept politically--as old aristocracies so commonly are;
she shunned that love of the beautiful and the things of
the mind which is the grace, as Bushido--to use the best
name there is for it--is the virtue, of the patrician. You
may say she was selfish and short-sighted; true; and yet she
began the Peloponnesian War not without an eye to freeing the
cities and islands from the soulless tyranny an Athenian
democracy had imposed on them: when there is a war, some men
will always be found, who go in with unselfish high motives.--
Being the patrician state, and the admired of all, it was she
naturally who assumed the hegemony when the Persian came. But
she had foregone the graces of her position, and her wits,
through lack of culture, were something dull. She lost that
leadership presently to a young democratic Athens endowed
with mental acumen and potential genius; who, too, gained
immeasurably from Sparta, because she knew how to turn everything
to the quickening of her wits--this having at her doors so
contrasting a neighbor, for example.--Young? Well, yes; I
suspect if there had ever been an Athenian glory before, it was
ages before Troy fell. She plays no great part in the legends of
the former manvantara; Homer has little to say about her. She
had paid tribute at one time to Minos, king of Crete; her
greatness belonged not to the past, but to the future.

As all Greeks admired the Spartans--what we call a 'sneaking'
admiration--so too they admired the Persians; who were gentleman
in a great sense, and in most moral qualities their betters. Who
was _Ho Basileus, The King_ par excellence? Always 'the Great
King, the King of the Persians.' Others were mere kings of
Sparta, or where it might be. And this Great King was a far-way,
tremendous, golden figure, moving in a splendor as of fairy
tales; palaced marvelously, so travelers told, in cities
compared with which even Athens seemed mean. Greek drama sought
its subjects naturally in the remote and grandiose; always in
the myths of prehistory, save once--when Aeschylus found a
kindred atmosphere, and the material he wanted, in the palace of
the Great King. To whom, as a matter of history, not unrecorded
by Herodotus, his great chivalrous barons accorded a splendid
loyalty,--and loyalty is always a thing that lies very near the
heart of Bushido. Most Greeks would cheerfully sell their native
city upon an impulse of chagrin, revenge, or the like. Xerxes'
ships were overladen, and there was a storm; the Persian lords
gaily jumped into the sea to lighten them. Such Samurai action
might not have been impossible to Greeks,--Spartans especially;
but in the main their eyes did not wander far from the main
chance. You will think of many exceptions; but this comes as
near truth, probably, as a generalization may. We should
understand their temperament; quick and sensitive, capable of
inspiration to high deeds; but, en masse, rarely founded on
enduring principles. That jumping into the seas was nothing to
the Persians; they were not sung to it; it was not done in
defense of home, or upon a motive of sudden passion, as hate or
the like; but permanent elements in their character moved them
to it quietly, as to the natural thing to do. But if Greeks
had done it, with what kudos, like Thermopylae, it would have
come down!

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