Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/108



The prehistoric has no legitimate claim to the predominance attributed to it by the present-day. There is no true guidance to be found in the vague language of excavated pottery and flint arrow-heads, nor in the aesthetic but doubtfully accurate interpretations of such disinterred relics, resulting oft-times in the discovery of a society of cave-dwellers worshipping a hitherto unsuspected and quite fabulous deity.

The prejudice of successive national monarchies of the past can no better withstand the judgment of the historian. He rather gains the impression that the state of the gods, the state for the « four corners of the earth » is successively helped and sustained, to the end of their power, by all oriental nations. None of them, when occupied by a dynasty foreign in our sense of the word, has the humilitating sentiments of a vanquished nation. The gods have only changed their representative, the instrument of their domination, and the newcomer, as in Egypt, be it Cambyse, Alexander or Caesar, adopts the traditional forms respected by his predecessors in entirety. With this the Hellenic role of the Macedonian, for instance, disappears : he leads his peasants in the name of vengeful Achilles to the conquest of a world which, immediately after the victory, causes the victor to be a king in its sense, a divine monarch, as Nebuchadnezzar, to whose spirit Babylon, under all rules, has remained true.

Greece is a very different matter. It is outside the pale of godly monarchy, inaugurating by its revolt the reign of man in politics as well as in thought and art. But not the visible Greece of Athens, which speaks for all others (notwithstanding that not all moral leaders whose biographies are connected with Athenian life were born in that city) so much as the Greece of Southern Italy, the monarchical state of Sicily — as opposed to the Persian