Such, for instance, was the attitude of the Assyrians toward the civilization of the Chaldeans; of the Iberians, Celts, and Illyrians towards that of the Romans. If, then, the Cherokees, the Catawbas, Muskogees, Seminoles, Natchez and other tribes, still preserve a feeble impress of the Alleghanian civilization, I should not thence conclude that they are the pure and direct descendants of the initiatory element of that people, which would imply that a race may once have been civilized, and be no longer so. I should say, on the contrary, that the Cherokees, if at all ethnically connected with the ancient dominant type, are so by only a collateral tie of consanguinity, else they could never have relapsed into a state of barbarism. The other tribes which exhibit little or no vestiges of the former civilization are probably the descendants of a different conquered population which formed no constituent element of the society, but served rather as the substratum upon which the edifice was erected. It is no matter of surprise, if this be the case, that they should preserve—without understanding them and with a sort of superstitious veneration—customs, laws, and rites invented by others far more intelligent than themselves.
The same may be said of the mechanical arts. The aborigines of the Carolines are about the most interesting of the South Sea islanders. Their looms, sculptured canoes, their taste for navigation and commerce show them vastly superior to the Pelagian negroes, their neighbors. It is easy to account for this superiority by the well-authenticated admixture of Malay blood. But as this element is greatly attenuated, the inventions which it introduced have not borne indigenous fruits, but, on the contrary, are gradually, but surely, disappearing.
The preceding observations will, I think, suffice to show that the traces of civilization among a barbarous tribe are not a necessary proof that this tribe itself has ever been really civilized. It may either have lived under the domination of a superior but consanguineous race, or living in its vicinity, have, in an humble and feeble degree, profited by its lessons. This result, however, is possible only when there exists between the superior and the inferior race a certain ethnical affinity; that is to say, when the former is either a noble branch of the same stock, or ennobled by intermixture with another. When the disparity between races is too great and too decided, and there is no intermediate link to connect them, the contact is always fatal to the inferior race, as is abundantly proved by the disappearance of the aborigines of North America and Polynesia.
I shall now speak of the relations arising from the contact of different civilizations.
The Persian civilization came in contact with the Grecian; the Egyptian with the Grecian and Roman; the Roman with the Grecian; and finally the modern civilization of Europe with all those at present subsisting on the globe, and especially with the Arabian.
The contact of Greek intelligence with the culture of the Persians was as frequent as it was compulsory. The greater portion of the Hellenic population, and the wealthiest, though not the most independent, was concentrated in the cities of the Syrian coast, the Greek colonies of Asia Minor, and on the shores of the Euxine, all of which formed a part of the Persian dominions. Though these colonies preserved their own local laws and politics, they were under the authority of the satraps of the great king. Intimate relations, moreover, were maintained between European Greece and Asia. That the Persians were then possessed of a high degree of civilization is proved by their political organization and financial administration, by the magnificent ruins which still attest the splendor and grandeur of their cities. But the principles of government and religion, the modes and habits of life, the genius of the arts, were very differently understood by the two nations; and, therefore, notwithstanding their constant intercourse, neither made the slightest approach toward assimilation with the other. The Greeks called their puissant neighbors barbarians, and the latter, no doubt, amply returned the compliment.
In Ecbatana no other form of government could be conceived than an undivided hereditary authority, limited only by certain religious prescriptions and a court ceremonial. The genius of the Greeks tended to an endless variety of governmental forms; subdivided into a number of petty sovereignties. Greek society presented a singular mosaic of political structures; oligarchical in Sparta, democratical in Athens, tyrannical in Sicyon, monarchical in Macedonia, the forms of government were the same in scarcely two cities or districts. The state religion of the Persians evinced the same tendency to unity as their politics, and was more of a metaphysical and moral than a material character. The Greeks, on the contrary, had a symbolical system of religion, consisting in the worship of natural objects and influences, which gradually changed into a perfect prosopopœia, representing the gods as sentient beings, subject to the same passions, and engaged in the same pursuits and occupations as the inhabitants of the earth. The worship consisted principally in the performance of rites and demonstrations of respect to the deities; the conscience was left to the direction of the civil laws. Besides, the rites, as well as the divinities and heroes in whose honor they were practised, were different in every place.
As for the manners and habits of life, it is unnecessary to point out how vastly different they were from those of Persia. Public contempt punished the young, wealthy, pleasure-loving cosmopolitan, who attempted to live in Persian style. Thus, until the time of Alexander, when the power of Greece had arrived at its culminating point, Persia, with all her preponderance, could not convert Hellas to her civilization.
In the time of Alexander, this incompatibility of dissimilar modes of culture was singularly demonstrated. When the empire of Darius succumbed to the Macedonian phalanxes, it was expected, for a time, that a Hellenic civilization would spread over Asia. There seemed the more reason for this belief when the conqueror, in a moment of aberrancy, treated the monuments of the land with such aggressive violence as seemed to evince equal hatred and contempt. But the wanton incendiary of Persepolis soon changed his mind, and so completely, that his design became apparent to simply substitute himself in the room of the dynasty of Achæmenes, and rule over Persia like a Persian king, with Greece added to his estates. Great as was Alexander's power, it was insufficient for the execution of such a project. His generals and soldiers could not brook to see their commander assume the long flowing robes of the eastern kings, surround himself with eunuchs, and renounce the habits and manners of his native land. Though after his death some of his successors persisted in the same system, they were compelled greatly to mitigate it. Where the population consisted of a motley compound of Greeks, Syrians, and Arabs, as in Egypt and the coast of Asia Minor, a sort of compromise between the two civilizations became thenceforth the normal state of the country; but where the races remained unmixed, the national manners were preserved.
In the latter periods of the Roman empire, the two civilizations had become completely blended in the whole East, including continental Greece; but it was tinged more with the Asiatic than the Greek tendencies, because the masses belonged much more to the former element than to the latter. Hellenic forms, it is true, still subsisted, but it is not difficult to discover in the ideas of those periods and countries the Oriental stock upon which the scions of the Alexandrian school had been engrafted. The respective influence of the various elements was in strict proportion to the quantity of blood; the intellectual preponderance belonged to that which had contributed the greatest share.