第15节

mple in his habits and very unattractive in his manners. I

told you how he was the most defenceless of the many animals

that roamed through the early wilderness of the five continents,

but being possessed of a larger and better brain, he managed to

hold his own.

Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold

weather, and life on this planet became so difficult that man was

obliged to think three times as hard as ever before if he wished

to survive. Since, however, that ``wish to survive'' was (and is)

the mainspring which keeps every living being going full tilt to

the last gasp of its breath, the brain of glacial man was set to

work in all earnestness. Not only did these hardy people manage

to exist through the long cold spells which killed many

ferocious animals, but when the earth became warm and comfortable

once more, prehistoric man had learned a number of

things which gave him such great advantages over his less intelligent

neighbors that the danger of extinction (a very serious

one during the first half million years of man's residence upon

this planet) became a very remote one.

I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly

plodding along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not

well understood) the people who lived in the valley of the Nile

rushed ahead and almost over night, created the first centre of

civilisation.

Then I showed you Mesopotamia, ``the land between the

rivers,'' which was the second great school of the human race.

And I made you a map of the little island bridges of the AEgean

Sea, which carried the knowledge and the science of the old

east to the young west, where lived the Greeks.

Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hellenes,

who thousands of years before had left the heart of

Asia and who had in the eleventh century before our era pushed

their way into the rocky peninsula of Greece and who, since

then, have been known to us as the Greeks. And I told

you the story of the little Greek cities that were really states,

where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was transfigured

(that is a big word, but you can ``figure out'' what it means)

into something quite new, something that was much nobler and

finer than anything that had gone before.

When you look at the map you will see how by this time

civilisation has described a semi-circle. It begins in Egypt,

and by way of Mesopotamia and the AEgean Islands it moves

westward until it reaches the European continent. The first

four thousand years, Egyptians and Babylonians and Phoenicians

and a large number of Semitic tribes (please remember

that the Jews were but one of a large number of Semitic peoples)

have carried the torch that was to illuminate the world.

They now hand it over to the Indo-European Greeks, who become

the teachers of another Indo-European tribe, called the

Romans. But meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward

along the northern coast of Africa and have made themselves

the rulers of the western half of the Mediterranean just when

the eastern half has become a Greek (or Indo-European) possession.

This, as you shall see in a moment, leads to a terrible conflict

between the two rival races, and out of their struggle arises

the victorious Roman Empire, which is to take this Egyptian-

Mesopotamian-Greek civilisation to the furthermost corners of

the European continent, where it serves as the foundation upon

which our modern society is based.

I know all this sounds very complicated, but if you get hold

of these few principles, the rest of our history will become a

great deal simpler. The maps will make clear what the words

fail to tell. And after this short intermission, we go back to

our story and give you an account of the famous war between

Carthage and Rome.

ROME AND CARTHAGE

THE SEMITIC COLONY OF CARTHAGE ON THE

NORTHERN COAST OF AFRICA AND THE

INDO-EUROPEAN CITY OF ROME ON THE

WEST COAST OF ITALY FOUGHT EACH

OTHER FOR THE POSSESSION OF THE

WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND CARTHAGE