web analytics

Month: July 2012

Categories
Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Asia Ethnic cleansing Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Lost Opportunity

Excerpted from the 12th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


The attractions of the vast and rich Orient for one Nordic conqueror after another are obvious. What is unfortunate is that none made racial considerations the basis of his program of conquest—and it could have been done.

Alexander, for example, could have laid the foundations for a Nordic empire which could have stood against the rest of the world—including Rome—forever. The Macedonians and the Greeks shared common blood and had similar languages (ancient Macedonian was an altogether different language from modern Macedonian, which has its roots in the sixth century A.D. conquest of Macedonia by Slavic tribes). If, before invading Asia and defeating the Asian armies, Alexander had devoted his energies to forging just these two peoples into a unified population base, casting out all the alien elements which had accumulated in Greece by the latter part of the fourth century B.C.; and if, while conquering Asia, he had carried out a policy of total extermination—then he could have colonized Asia with Nordic settlements from the Indus to the Nile, and they could have multiplied freely and expanded into the empty lands without danger of racial mixing.

But Alexander did not cleanse Greece of its Semitic merchants and moneylenders and its accumulated rabble of half-breeds, and he chose to base his Asiatic empire on the indigenous populations instead of on colonists. And so the Greco-Macedonian world, despite its uninterrupted prosperity and its maintenance of the appearance of might after Alexander’s death, continued its imperceptible downward slide toward oblivion.

Categories
Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Asia Degeneracy Demography Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Alexander the “Great”

This text has been merged within another entry (here)

Categories
Degeneracy Demography Geography India Miscegenation Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Aryans and mongrels

Excerpted from the 11th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


The foregoing remarks are especially well illustrated by the fate of a related group of Indo-European tribes whose members called themselves Aryans. Although the name “Aryan” is sometimes used to designate any person of Indo-European ancestry, it applies especially to the tribes which, beginning probably in the third millennium B.C., migrated eastward and southeastward from the ancient Nordic homeland, some going down through Turkistan and into Iran from the northeast—and some into the more easterly foothills of the Hindu Kush, in what is now Afghanistan.

The high Iranian plateau, much of it covered with grass, provided an ideal territory for the horsemen from the northern steppes. They multiplied and prospered, raiding their non-Indo-European neighbors in the Zagros Mountains or on the edge of the Sumerian plain from time to time, collecting slaves and booty. They maintained their racial purity scrupulously enough, however, so that, as late as the middle of the first millennium B.C., King Darius the Great could still proudly and truthfully boast: “I am an Aryan, the son of an Aryan.”

But Semites and other aliens became more numerous in Iran as the might and wealth of the Aryan Persians grew. In the reign of Darius’ son Xerxes, as we know from the Old Testament’s Book of Esther, Jews were already quite influential there. Today, 2,500 yeas later, the Iranians are no more Aryan than their Semitic neighbors, so thoroughly have the genes of the various races in that part of the world been mixed.

(Here Pierce writes several paragraphs about the conquest of India, then he adds:)





Crop of Half-Breeds

The first step may be a simple matter of military indiscipline: the rape of a few hundred dasyu women in a rebellious district after a revolt is put down by Aryan warriors. Twenty years later there will be a crop of half-breeds in that district, and some of the half- breed females will be much lighter and comelier than the average dasyu.

These light ones will be especially likely to be targeted for rape the next time there is a rebellion—or the next time a gang of drunken Aryans goes out on the town. And so, 20 years later, there will be some quarter-breeds around—and some of these may be light enough to be chosen as concubines by the local Aryan landlord.

Beware the almost-Whites!

And so it goes, century after century, with the simple Black-White picture gradually giving way to one in which there is a continuous range of mongrels between the two racial extremes. Near the White end of the spectrum there will be some who, although carrying some dasyu genes, will be almost indistinguishable from the true Aryans. Drawing the line between what is Aryan and what is not becomes more and more difficult. And as the racial picture becomes more blurred, the will to preserve the race is sapped. Many of the almost-Aryans will be bright and energetic citizens; style will be mistaken for substance; the keen edge of the Aryan race-soul will be blunted by imperceptible degrees.

(Nuristani kids from Afghanistan)

By the time the damage has become quite noticeable, racial decadence has become irreversible. The subtle but essential qualities of psyche and intellect in the Aryans which led to conquest and to the building of Aryan civilization are diluted to ineffectiveness in their almost-Aryan descendants 15 or 20 centuries later, even though fair hair and blue eyes may still be abundant.

That is what happened to Aryan Persia and Aryan India. And it is also what is happening to Aryan America and Aryan Europe today.

Categories
Ancient Greece Degeneracy Demography Ethnic cleansing Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Extermination or Expulsion?

Excerpted from the 10th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


And what a contrast between the Hellenes and their achievements, on the one hand, and what existed before—and has existed since—in Greece! That is not to say that every Greek of today is unimaginative or insensitive or ugly, but it is clear that something essential has been lost between the time of Aristotle and the time of his late namesake, Mr. Onassis. And the loss was at least as great between the time of Achilles and Aristotle, although the culture-lag phenomenon tends to mask this earlier decline in racial quality.

The Hellenic genes are still there, the genes of the race which gloried in single combat between equals facing one another on the field of battle and pitting skill, courage, and strength in a contest to the death, but they are now submerged in the genes of a race which always preferred to sling its stones from afar, to lie in stealthy ambush, to give a surprise knife-thrust from the rear. The race-soul which first envisioned the symmetry of the Doric temple and pondered the mysteries of existence as none before it has become inextricably mingled with one concerned, first and last, with personal advantage and disadvantage, profit and loss.

Extermination or Expulsion

This catastrophic mixing of bloods has occurred over and over again in the history and prehistory of our race, and each time it has been lethal. The knowledge of this has been with us a long time, but it has always failed us in the end. The Hellenes of Sparta and Athens both strove to keep their blood pure, but both ultimately perished. The only way they could have survived would have been to eliminate the entire indigenous population, either through expulsion or extermination, from the areas of the Mediterranean world in which they settled.

The Hellenes always possessed a certain feeling of racial unity, distinguishing themselves sharply from all those not of their blood, but this racial feeling was, unfortunately, usually overshadowed by intrarracial conflicts. The rivalries between Hellenic city-states were so fierce and so pervasive, that the Mediterranean natives were more often looked upon as a resource to be used against other Hellenes than as a biological menace to be eliminated.

Economics over Race

The ultimate downfall of the Nordic conquerors in Asia, just as in the Mediterranean world, can be traced to an economic consideration and to an error in human judgment. The economic consideration was that a conquered population, just like the land itself or the gold and other booty seized by the conquerors, had real value. Whether the people were enslaved or merely taxed as subjects, they were an economic resource which could be exploited by the conquerors. To drive them off the land or wipe them out completely would, from a strictly economic viewpoint, be akin to dumping captured gold into the ocean.

Such an action could be justified to a conquering tribe of Indo-Europeans only if they were willing to subordinate all economic considerations to the goal of maintaining their racial integrity into the indefinite future—and if they also had a sufficiently deep understanding of history to foresee the inevitability of racial mixing wherever two races are in close proximity. Unfortunately, even where the will for racial survival was very strong, the foresight was insufficient. Measures which were quite adequate to prevent racemixing for a few generations, or even for a few centuries, broke down over the course of a thousand years or more.

Categories
Ancient Greece Athens Degeneracy Demography Miscegenation Pericles Polybius Racial studies Sparta (Lacedaemon) Who We Are (book) William Pierce

White suicide since Ancient Greece

Excerpted from the tenth article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


At the beginning of the fifth century B.C. the Spartiates were able to field an army of 8,000 men against the Persians, but after the costly Spartan victory over Athens and her allies in the Peloponnesian War (431 -404 B.C.) Spartan numbers declined rapidly. When the Spartiates marched against Thebes in 371 B.C., there were too few of them to prevail. After their decisive defeat by the Thebans at Leuctra, the Spartan army numbered only 2,000 warriors. A century and a half later there were only 700 of them, and they passed from the pages of history.

The Spartiates never succumbed to racemixing, but they did succumb to their own lifestyle. They would have been well advised to eliminate the Helots of the Peloponnesus and the Mediterranean population of Crete altogether and to establish a purely Dorian peasant class in those areas. Then they may well have been able to practice a successful eugenics program, maintain their moral health, and have a stable population too. But, of course, they did not have the advantage which hindsight gives us.

The other Hellenic tribes did succumb to racemixing. Their populations did not suffer the decline in numbers which the Spartiates did, but they suffered a decline in racial quality which resulted in their extermination, perhaps more slowly but just as surely—and less cleanly.

Predominantly Nordic

Still, the earliest Athenians were, like the other Hellenes, predominantly Nordic in blood and culture. Their social structure was aristocratic, and they were ruled originally by hereditary kings, just as in the case of the Spartiates.

Although Athenian tradition credits the legendary King Theseus with the political unification of the various semi-independent townships of Attica into a single “greater Athens” during the Heroic Age, it is certain that this unification actually did not take place until long after the Dorian invasion. In any event, the monarchy did not last long in unified Attica, and at the dawn of history the Athenians were ruled by a coalition of noble families, the Eupatrids (“those who are well sired”).

Race-Based Citizenry

Even after Solon, however, democracy did not devour the Athenians all at once. Solon and the tyrants who gained power shortly after his administration, the Peisistratids, governed an Athens in which citizenship was still a racial matter, being based on membership in one of the kinship groups, or clans, which made up the Hellenic tribes of Attica.

In 509 B.C., 85 years after the beginning of Solon’s administration, another “reformer,” Cleisthenes, took office, and he undertook a program of gerrymandering which laid the basis for changing citizenship from a racial to a geographic affair. From this point it was downhill all the way for Athens, racially speaking.

Half a century later the last remnants of power were transferred from the Areopagus to a popular council. All the abuses of mass party politics with which Americans are all too familiar were thenceforth the lot of the Athenians.

Law of Pericles

As the prosperity of Athens grew, more and more foreigners crowded into Attica, with intermarriage inevitably occurring. A temporary halt to the pollution of the Athenian citizenry by the offspring of aliens came in 451 B.C., when the great Pericles pushed through a law restricting citizenship to those born of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. Only four decades later, however, in order to make up the enormous losses suffered in the Peloponnesian War, Athens bestowed citizenship on tens of thousands of foreigners.

And in the fourth century, although the citizenship law of Pericles remained on the books, every variety of Levantine mongrel was claiming Athenian citizenship. The banking industry of Athens, for example, was entirely in the hands of Semites, who had taken Greek names and were awarded citizenship for “service to the state,” much in the way Jews and Negroes have been elevated to the British “nobility” by the score in recent decades.

Darkening of Hellas

Intermarriage was rife, and the darkening of the Hellenes of Athens was well under way. Racial, moral, and cultural decline went hand in hand. The second-century historian Polybius described his countrymen as “degenerate, pleasure-seeking beggars, without loyalty or belief, and without hope for a better future.”

A century later, in the reign of Augustus, the Roman writer Manilius reckoned the Hellenes among the dark nations (coloratae genies). And so the Athenians, like the Spartiates, passed from the pages of history.

If it is difficult to believe that as great a state as Athens could pass from Nordic genius and glory to mongrelized squalor in a few centuries, just think for a moment of the racial transformation of America which has taken place in a single century. And imagine what America will be like two or three centuries hence (barring a White revolution), when Whites are a minority, outnumbered by both Blacks and Chicanos. America’s technology and industry may coast along for a century or two on the momentum acquired from earlier generations, as Athens’ culture did, but the American people—the real Americans—will have passed from the pages of history.

Categories
Arcadia My pinacoteca

Landscape with Rainbow

Painting of the day:

Jan Siberechts
Landscape with Rainbow ~ 1690
Tate Gallery

Categories
Ancient Greece Demography Iliad (epic book) Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Philosophy of history Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Nordic invasion precedes rise of Classical Civilization

Excerpted from the tenth article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:

Greece was invaded by Greek-speaking Northerners several times during prehistory. Those who arrived in the period 2,100-1,900 B.C. founded the great Mycenaean civilization, which flourished from the end of the l6th century until about 1,200 B.C.

Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey describe Mycenaean Greece, refers to the Greeks, or Hellenes, inclusively as “Achaeans.” In fact, however, the Achaeans were only one of the Hellenic tribes which were in Greece in Mycenaean times.

Aeolians and Ionians

In addition to the Achaeans, who occupied most of the Peloponnesus (the southern peninsula of Greece, in which Mycenae was located), there were the Aeolians and the Ionians, who occupied other portions of the mainland, many of the Aegean islands, and the west coast of Asia Minor. The Ionians, in particular, settled in Attica and were the founders of Athens.

These tribal divisions apparently predate the arrival of the first Hellenes in Greece, and it seems likely that the Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians invaded the Aegean region separately, over a period of several centuries.

And there were also the non-Greek Pelasgians, the Mediterranean aborigines, who occupied the lowest stratum of Greek society and substantially outnumbered the Hellenes in Mycenaean times. As pointed out in the last installment, the Mycenaean Greeks were influenced culturally by these Mediterraneans—and, as time passed, racially as well.

Divine-Born Heroes

In the late 14th and early 13th centuries B.C. more Greek-speaking Indo-Europeans arrived, coming westward across the Aegean in ships. They were Homer’s “divine born” heroes, the fathers and grandfathers of the warriors who sacked Troy about 1,250 B.C.: golden-haired Achilles, the sons of Atreus, and the other princes and kings of the Iliad. They settled in Greece, founded dynasties, and lived in a manner remarkably like that of northern Europe’s feudal lords more than 20 centuries later.

A couple of generations after the fall of Troy—exactly 80 years afterward, according to Greek tradition—a new group of divine-born warriors swept down on Greece, this time from the north. They were the Heraclidae, the supposed descendants of the blond demigod Hercules, and with them came the Dorians, the last of the major Hellenic tribes to reach the Aegean region.

Dorian Invasion

The Dorians, who had settled in central Greece a few years earlier, proceeded to conquer the Achaeans, occupy the Peloponnesus, and extinguish Mycenaean civilization. But, in so doing, they prepared the way for the rise of a new civilization which would greatly surpass the old one.

The Dorian invasion was actually a more complex phenomenon than the preceding lines might suggest. It involved repeated interactions with other peoples on a protracted journey which, although generally southward, included a number of detours, loops, and rest stops. And their legendary leaders, the Heraclidae, had already been south once before, prior to the Trojan war.

It also involved the displacement of other peoples, and it came during a period when lesser Greek-speaking tribes were undertaking invasions of their own to the south. Displaced Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians migrated to new areas, sometimes displacing those people already there and sometimes amalgamating with them.

Blond but Rude

The Dorians were blonder than the Achaeans they conquered, but that is only because the Achaeans had been mixing with the Mediterranean aborigines for several centuries before the Dorians arrived; originally the two tribes had been of the same racial composition.

But the Achaeans were certainly more civilized than the rude, new arrivals from the north, and it was 400 years before Greece recovered from the cultural shock of the Dorian invasion. When the civilization of Classical Greece bloomed in the seventh century B.C., it comprised some elements of the old, Mycenaean culture and some which were the consequence of the social, political, and demographic changes wrought by the newcomers.

Dark Age

The four centuries between the Dorian invasion and the flowering of the literate Classical civilization are referred to by most historians as “the Dark Age,” for much the same reasons that the period between the fall of Rome, more than 15 centuries later, and the flowering of Mediaeval civilization is also called “the Dark Ages.”

In both cases a people of an older civilization, who had begun to succumb to racial mixing and decadence, was overwhelmed by a more vigorous and racially healthier but culturally less advanced people from the north. And in both cases a period of gestation took place over a dozen generations or so, during which a synthesis of old and new elements, racial and cultural, occurred, before a new and different civilization arose from the ruins of the old.

Historians’ Bias

Unfortunately, most historians tacitly assume that the records of political and cultural activity which have come down to us from periods of civilized literacy provide all the data needed to yield an understanding of the historical process. The state of development and degree of organization and complexity of city life are taken as a yardstick by which to evaluate the significance or historical importance of a particular period. And if one’s standards of value are geared to such things as the volume of commerce, the gross national product, or even the intensity of scientific, literary, and artistic activity, such a yardstick may seem, at first glance, to be proper.

Racial Values

But there are other standards of value, such as those of the National Alliance, which differ somewhat from the customary ones. For it is not in the external forms of organization and activity of a people that we see the most important criteria for making a judgment as to the significance of a particular period, but rather in the actual racial constitution of a people and in the dynamic processes which, for better or worse, are influencing that racial constitution.

Although the basic racial constitution of a people is always intimately related to that people’s achievements in commerce, science, industry, art, politics, and warfare, still the two sets of criteria can lead to fundamentally different evaluations of a given historical period.

This is a consequence of the fact that race building and decay are usually strongly out of phase with civilization building and decay.

Rise and Fall of Races

Thus, the long ages between the periods of maximum civil activity—ages which the historian customarily ignores as being of only slight importance—may very well be periods of the greatest interest from a standpoint of racial dynamics.

It is, of course, true that the periods of maximum civil activity are precisely those which yield a maximum of written records, artifacts, and the other raw materials from which the historian builds his tale. But relative abundance of evidence should not be interpreted as equivalent to relative historical significance, regardless of the historian’s value criteria.

The record of the rise and fall of pure races constitutes the primary history of mankind, and the rise and fall of civilizations occupy a place of secondary importance. This statement may seem self-evident to those already accustomed to looking at history from a racial viewpoint, but it is by no means generally accepted by historians today. Until it is, much historical writing will continue to be flawed in a fundamental way.

Categories
Ancient Greece Demography Miscegenation Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Mixing and Retrogression

Excerpted from the ninth article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:



From the far north they came, the xanthoi, the golden-haired ones: tall, blue-eyed and grey-eyed giants, on horseback and on foot, carrying their battleaxes and their spears, bringing their women and their wagons and their cattle. Warrior-farmers, craftsmen and traders, they worshipped the shining Sky Father and spoke an Indo-European language. They were the Greeks.

The Greeks—or Hellenes, as they later called themselves—crashed down upon the Mediterranean world in a long sequence of waves. The first wave, a relatively weak one—and more properly described merely as Indo-European rather than as specifically Greek—hit about 5,100 years ago, and it apparently took a roundabout course, passing first from the north into western Asia Minor, and thence, by way of the Cyclades and other islands of the southern Aegean, westward into Crete and Greece.

♣

The Minoan civilization was in its essence, however, much more a Mediterranean than a Nordic civilization. The Greeks did not bring civilization to Crete; they brought only the tendency toward civilization and the capacity for building it inherent in the higher human type which they represented.

But inevitably racial mixing occurred, sometimes soon and sometimes later. The Nordics would disappear into the mass, and the civilization they had created would lose its vital spark, stagnating and eventually retrogressing, although it might coast for centuries on its momentum after the disappearance of the Nordic element before retrogression set in. (Racemixing and retrogression were avoided only when the Nordics exterminated the non-Nordic natives of an area instead of merely conquering them. But then there was left no large serf-class for the maintenance of a culturally innovative aristocracy.)

♣

Because the Mediterraneans were only conquered and not exterminated; because they formed the bulk of the economic base on which Greek society rested; because the lifestyle of Hellenes themselves changed, becoming more dependent on agriculture than before; and because race mixture inevitably followed conquest, it is not surprising that the religion of the conquerors underwent a change and assimilated many elements from the religion of the conquered natives.

Categories
Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Racial Classifications

Excerpted from the sixth article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:



European anthropologists have developed a somewhat involved scheme of racial classification to comprise these non-White Mediterraneans, with groupings designated as Hither Asiatic, Oriental, Hamitic, etc.

Since we are concerned only with the ancestors of today’s Whites, we will not become involved further with the subtleties of these groupings but will merely try to indicate whether any particular Mediterranean group should be considered fully White, marginally White, or non-White. Because of the racial mixing which has taken place in the Mediterranean area, with a consequently large number of gradations of racial character, such indications may sometimes be arbitrary.

Categories
Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Arthur Schopenhauer Asia Christendom Degeneracy Demography Lucretius Marcus Aurelius Miscegenation Pindar Socrates Story of Philosophy (book) Thebes Will Durant

White suicide since Alexander (2)

A recent discussion in another thread moves me to reproduce the following quotation of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. Although Durant was almost the opposite of a racialist historian, what he says at the beginning of the chapter “From Aristotle to the Renaissance” is germane to understand why the policies that Alexander promoted were poisonous for the still adolescent Greek psyche:

alex-map

Sparta blockaded and defeated Athens towards the close of the fifth century b. c, political supremacy passed from the mother of Greek philosophy and art, and the vigor and independence of the Athenian mind decayed.

When, in 399 b. c, Socrates was put to death, the soul of Athens died with him, lingering only in his proud pupil, Plato. And when Philip of Macedon defeated the Athenians at Chaeronea in 338 b. c, and Alexander burned the great city of Thebes to the ground three years later, even the ostentatious sparing of Pindar’s home could not cover up the fact that Athenian independence, in government and in thought, was irrevocably destroyed.

The domination of Greek philosophy by the Macedonian Aristotle mirrored the political subjection of Greece by the virile and younger peoples of the north. The death of Alexander (323 b. c.) quickened this process of decay. The boy-emperor, barbarian though he remained after all of Aristotle’s tutoring, had yet learned to revere the rich culture of Greece, and had dreamed of spreading that culture through the Orient in the wake of his victorious armies. The development of Greek commerce, and the multiplication of Greek trading posts throughout Asia Minor, had provided an economic basis for the unification of this region as part of an Hellenic empire; and Alexander hoped that from these busy stations Greek thought, as well as Greek goods, would radiate and conquer.

But he had underrated the inertia and resistance of the Oriental mind, and the mass and depth of Oriental culture. It was only a youthful fancy, after all, to suppose that so immature and unstable a civilization as that of Greece could be imposed upon a civilization immeasurably more widespread, and rooted in the most venerable traditions.

The quantity of Asia proved too much for the quality of Greece. Alexander himself, in the hour of his triumph, was conquered by the soul of the East; he married (among several ladies) the daughter of Darius; he adopted the Persian diadem and robe of state; he introduced into Europe the Oriental notion of the divine right of kings; and at last he astonished a sceptic Greece by announcing, in magnificent Eastern style, that he was a god. Greece laughed; and Alexander drank himself to death.

This subtle infusion of an Asiatic soul into the wearied body of the master Greek was followed rapidly by the pouring of Oriental cults and faiths into Greece along those very lines of communication which the young conqueror had opened up; the broken dykes let in the ocean of Eastern thought upon the lowlands of the still adolescent European mind. The mystic and superstitious faiths which had taken root among the poorer people of Hellas were reinforced and spread about; and the Oriental spirit of apathy and resignation found a ready soil in decadent and despondent Greece.

The introduction of the Stoic philosophy into Athens by the Phoenician merchant Zeno (about 310 b. c.) was but one of a multitude of Oriental infiltrations. Both Stoicism and Epicureanism—the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure—were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved; precisely as the pessimistic Oriental stoicism of Schopenhauer and the despondent epicureanism of Renan were in the nineteenth century the symbols of a shattered Revolution and a broken France. Not that these natural antitheses of ethical theory were quite new to Greece. One finds them in the gloomy Heraclitus and the “laughing philosopher” Democritus; and one sees the pupils of Socrates dividing into Cynics and Cyrenaics under the lead of Antisthenes and Aristippus, and extolling, the one school apathy, the other happiness.

Yet these were even then almost exotic modes of thought: imperial Athens did not take to them. But when Greece had seen Chaeronea in blood and Thebes in ashes, it listened to Diogenes; and when the glory had departed from Athens she was ripe for Zeno and Epicurus.

Zeno built his philosophy of apatheia on a determinism which a later Stoic, Chrysippus, found it hard to distinguish from Oriental fatalism. As Schopenhauer deemed it useless for the individual will to fight the universal will, so the Stoic argued that philosophic indifference was the only reasonable attitude to a life in which the struggle for existence is so unfairly doomed to inevitable defeat. If victory is quite impossible it should be scorned. The secret of peace is not to make our achievements equal to our desires, but to lower our desires to the level of our achievements. “If what you have seems insufficient to you,” said the Roman Stoic Seneca (d. 65 a. d.), “then, though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.” Such a principle cried out to heaven for its opposite, and Epicurus, though himself as Stoic in life as Zeno, supplied it. Epicurus, says Fenelon, “bought a fair garden, which he tilled himself. There it was he set up his school, and there he lived a gentle and agreeable life with his disciples, whom he taught as he walked and worked. He was gentle and affable to all men. He held there was nothing nobler than to apply one’s self to philosophy.” His starting point of conviction that apathy is impossible, and that pleasure—though not necessarily sensual pleasure—is the only conceivable, and quite legitimate, end of life and action.

Epicurus, then, is no epicurean; he exalts the joys of intellect rather than those of sense; he warns against pleasures that excite and disturb the soul which they should rather quiet and appease. In the end he proposes to seek not pleasure in its usual sense, but ataraxia—tranquillity, equanimity, repose of mind; all of which trembles on the verge of Zeno’s “apathy.”

The Romans, coming to despoil Hellas in 146 b. c, found these rival schools dividing the philosophic field; and having neither leisure nor subtlety for speculation themselves, brought back these philosophies with their other spoils to Rome. Great organizers, as much as inevitable slaves, tend to stoic moods: it is difficult to be either master or servant if one is sensitive. So such philosophy as Rome had was mostly of Zeno’s school, whether in Marcus Aurelius the emperor or in Epictetus the slave; and even Lucretius talked epicureanism stoically (like Heine’s Englishman taking his pleasures sadly), and concluded his stern gospel of pleasure by committing suicide. His noble epic “On the Nature of Things,” follows Epicurus in damning pleasure with faint praise.

Nations, too, like individuals, slowly grow and surely die. In the face of warfare and inevitable death, there is no wisdom but in ataraxia, —“to look on all things with a mind at peace.” Here, clearly, the old pagan joy of life is gone, and an almost exotic spirit touches a broken lyre.

Imagine the exhilarating optimism of explicit Stoics like Aurelius or Epictetus. Nothing in all literature is so depressing as the Dissertations of the Slave, unless it be the Meditations of the emperor. “Seek not to have things happen as you choose them, but rather choose that they should happen as they do; and you shall live prosperously.” No doubt one can in this manner dictate the future, and play royal highness to the universe.

Story has it that Epictetus’ master, who treated him with consistent cruelty, one day took to twisting Epictetus’ leg to pass the time away. “If you go on,” said Epictetus calmly, “you will break my leg.” The master went on, and the leg was broken. “Did I not tell you,” Epictetus observed mildly, “that you would break my leg?” Yet there is a certain mystic nobility in this philosophy, as in the quiet courage of some Dostoievskian pacifist. “Never in any case say, I have lost such a thing; but, I have returned it. Is thy child dead?—it is returned. Is thy wife dead?—she is returned. Art thou deprived of thy estate?— is not this also returned?”

In such passages we feel the proximity of Christianity and its dauntless martyrs. In Epictetus the Greco-Roman soul has lost its paganism, and is ready for a new faith. His book had the distinction of being adopted as a religious manual by the early Christian Church. From these Dissertations and Aurelius’ Meditations there is but a step to The Imitation of Christ.

Meanwhile the historical background was melting into newer scenes. There is a remarkable passage in Lucretius which describes the decay of agriculture in the Roman state, and attributes it to the exhaustion of the soil. Whatever the cause, the wealth of Rome passed into poverty, the organization into disintegration, the power and pride into decadence and apathy. Cities faded back into the undistinguished hinterland; the roads fell into disrepair and no longer hummed with trade; the small families of the educated Romans were outbred by the vigorous and untutored German stocks that crept, year after year, across the frontier; pagan culture yielded to Oriental cults; and almost imperceptibly the Empire passed into the Papacy.