Continuation through Greek and Roman History

How Darius, in consequence of the assistance rendered by the Athenians to the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor, who had revolted against him (B.C. 502), sent a vast Persian army into European Greece; how this army was defeated by the Athenian general, Miltiades, with only 11,000 men, in the glorious battle of Marathon (B.C. 490); how, ten years later, Xerxes, the son and successor of Darius, undertook an expedition against Greece with a host of several millions, and was defeated by Themistocles in a naval battle at Salamis (B.C. 480), which was followed by two contemporaneous defeats of his lieutenants at Plata and Mycale (B.C. 479); how the Persians were thus finally driven back into Asia; how for a century and a-half relations, sometimes hostile and sometimes friendly, were maintained between the Greek states and the Persian monarchs, the degenerate successors of Darius and Xerxes, under whom the empire had begun to crumble; how at length, in the reign of Darius Codomannus (B.C. 324), Alexander the Great retaliated on the Persians the wrongs they had done the Greeks by invading and destroying their decrepit empire, and organizing all the countries between the Adriatic and the Indus under, not a Semitic, as in the case of the Assyrian empire, nor an Indo-Germanic, as in the case of the Persic empire, but a Greek or Pelasgic system; how, on Alexander's death (B.C. 323), this vast agglomeration of the human species fell asunder into three Greek monarchies - the Macedonian monarchy, including the states of European Greece; the Egyptian monarchy of the Ptolemies, including, besides Egypt, Phoenicia, Palestine, and Arabia; and the Syrian monarchy of the Seleucidae, comprehending, although with a weak grasp, Asia Minor (or at least parts of it which had belonged to the Lydian and Assyrian empires), Syria, Assyria, and Babylonia - with the loss, however, of the countries between the Tigris and the Indus, where a germ of independence arose (B.C. 236) in a native nomad dynasty, which ultimately united all the tribes of Iran in one empire, called the Parthian Empire; and how these three fragments dragged on a separate existence, full of wars and revolts; all this belongs to Grecian history.

How, about two centuries and a half before Christ, another, but more mixed portion of this Pelasgic family, which had arisen in Italy, and in the course of several centuries rendered itself coextensive with that peninsula - began to assume consequence in the wider area of the Mediterranean world: how it first grappled with the power of the Carthaginians (B. C . 264-201), who for several centuries had been pursuing the career of world-merchants, formerly pursued by their fathers the Phoenicians; how it then. assailed and subdued the crumbling Macedonian monarchy, incorporating all Greece with itself (B.C. 134); how retrograding, so to speak, into Asia, it gradually absorbed the Syrian and Egyptian monarchies, till it came into collision with the Parthian empire at the Euphrates (B. C . 134 B. C . 60); how, advancing into the new regions of northern and western Europe, it compelled the yet uncultured races there - the Celts or Gauls, the Iberians, etc. - to enter the pale of civilization (B. C . 80-50); how thus, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, was founded a new empire, called 'The Roman,' retaining, with vast additions, all that portion of humanity which the former empires had embraced, with the exception of what had lapsed back to the Parthians; how this empire subsisted for several centuries, a great mass of matured humanity girt by comparative barbarism that is, surrounded on the east by the Parthians, on the south by the Ethiopians, on the north by the Germans and Scythians, and on the west by the roar of the Atlantic; and how at last (A. D. 400-475) this great mass, having lost its vitality, fell asunder before the irruption of the barbaric element - that is, the Germans, the Scythians, and the Arabs - giving rise to the infant condition of the modern world; all this belongs to Roman history, which forms the subject of a separate treatise.

With one general remark we shall conclude; namely: that the progress of history - that is, of Caucasian development - has evidently been, upon. the whole, from the east westward. First, as we have seen, the Assyrian or Semitic fermentation affected western Asia as far as the Mediterranean; then the Persian movement extended the historic stage to the Aegean; after that the Macedonian conquest extended it to the Adriatic; and finally, the Romans extended it to the Atlantic. For fifteen centuries humanity kept dashing itself against this barrier; till, at length, like a great missionary sent in search, the spirit of Columbus shot across the Atlantic. And now, in the form of a dominant Anglic race, though with large intermixture, Caucasian vitality is working in its newest method, with Ethiopian help, on the broad and fertile field of America.