Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/62

 5 o THE GLORY OF GREECE AND RISE OF ROME In fact, this was a very critical time in the world's history, be- cause it was the one moment when there was a very great danger that the civilised Aryan peoples would be brought into subjec- tion by the non-Aryan races, whereby the progress of the world would have been very much checked. It is true indeed that the Persians and Medes were actually Aryans, but it is also true that their civilisation was borrowed from that of the Semites and other non-Aryan races of Asia ; it was what we call an oriental civilisation, as opposed to the western civilisation of Greeks and Romans. Carthage was a maritime state, originally a colony of the Semitic Phoenicians ; the greatest of the sea-going races of antiquity, in some respects more so even than the Greeks. They were a commercial people, and their weakness lay partly in the fact that their fighting forces were composed largely either of subject peoples or of allies who would serve for pay. Happily their attempt to make themselves masters of Sicily, in alliance with the Etruscans who were then the most powerful people in Italy, failed like the attempt of Xerxes to conquer the Greeks. They were overthrown at the Himera, battle of Himera, which took place on the same day 480 B.C. as the battle of Salamis. The Latin peoples of Italy were left under the leadership of Rome to break up the Etruscan power and establish a Latin supremacy in the Italian peninsula. We turn back then to the history of Greece itself which centres in the history of Athens. We have seen how in the short period of eleven years from 490 B.C. to 479 B.C. the decisive answer had been given to the question whether an 3. The Hel- oriental civilisation should overwhelm that higher lenic World, civilisation called the Hellenic, because the Grecian peoples named themselves not Greeks but Hellenes. The Hellenes were not to fall under Asiatic dominion, but would a Hellenic Empire now arise which should bring the world under its sway? If a Hellenic nation had existed, it is quite certain that after the crushing defeats inflicted on the oriental invader that nation would have set about the subjection of the Persian Empire. The Hellenes had learnt the immense superiority of their own efficiency in warfare over that of the