Persia, too, was waiting for that Greek military cycle; until it should rise, however, something had to be going on in West Asia. The Athenian first half-cycle—sixty-five years from the inception of the hegemony—ended in 413, when the Peloponnesian War entered its last, and for Athens, disastrous, phase. Another half-cycle brings us to the rise of Philip; who about that time became dominant in Greece. But not yet had a power consolidated, which could contest with Persia the hegemony of the world. Having enabled Sparta to put down Athens, the western satraps turned their attention to finding those who should put down Sparta. Corinth, Thebes, Argos and Athens were willing; and Pharnabazus financed them for war in 395. A year after, he and Conon destroyed the Spartan fleet. In 387 came the Peace of Antalicidas, by which Persia won what Xerxes had fought for of old; the suzerainty of Greece. But she was not strong; her cycle was long past; she stood upon the wealth and prestige of her better days, and the weakness of her contemporaries. Internally she was falling to pieces until Artaxerxes Ochus, between 362 and 338, wading through blood and cruelty, restored her unity, wore out her resources, and left her apparently as great as under Xerxes, but really ready to fall at a touch. He prepared the way for Alexander.
So ended an impulse that began, who knows when? on a high spiritual plane in the pure religion of the Teacher we call Zoroaster; a high system of ethics expressed in long generations of clean and noble lives. From that spirituality the impulse descending reached the planes of intellect and culture; with results we cannot measure now; nothing remains but the splendor of a few ruins in the wilderness—the course the lion and the lizard keep. It reached the plane of military power, and flowed over all the lands between the Indus and the Nile; covering them with a well-ordered, highly civilized and wisely governed empire. Then it began to ebb; meeting a counter-impulse arising in Eastern Europe.
Which, too, had it source on spiritual planes; in the heart and on the lyre of blind Maeonides; and worked downward and outward, till it had wrought on this plane a stable firmness in Sparta, an alertness in Athens. It contacted then the crest of the Persian wave, and received from the impact huge accession of vigor. It blossomed in the Age of Pericles on the plane of mind and creative imagination. It came down presently on to the plane of militarism, and swelled out under Alexander as far as to the eastern limits of the Persian Empire he overthrew. Where it met a tide beginning to rise in India; and receded or remained stationary before that. And at last it was spent, and itself overthrown by a new impulse arisen in Italy; which took on impetus from contact with Greece, as Greece had done from contact with Persia.
The Greeks of Homer's and Hesiod's time, before the European manvantara, elsewhere begun, had reached or quickened them, were uncouth and barbarous enough; they may have stood, to their great West Asian neighbors, as the Moors of today to the nations of Europe; they may have stood, in things cultural, to the unknown nations of the north or west already at that time awakened, as the Chinese now and recently to the Japanese. Like Moors, like Chinese, they had behind them traditions of an ancient greatness; but pralaya, fall, adversity, squalor, had done their work on them, developing the plebeian qualities. Now that they have emerged into modern history, as then when they were emerging into ancient, we find them with many like characteristics; a turn for democracy, for example; the which they assuredly had not when they were passing into pralaya under the Byzantine Empire. A turn for democracy; plebeian qualities; these are the things one would expect after pralaya, if that pralaya had been at all disastrous. With the ancient Greeks, the plebeian qualities were not all virtues by any means; they retained through their great age many of the vices of plebeianism. They won their successes for the most part on sporadic impulses of heroism; shone by an extraordinary intellectual and artistic acumen. But taking them by and large, they were too apt to ineffectualize those successes, in the fields of national and political life, by extraordinary venality and instability of character. I shall draw here deeply on Professor Mahaffy, who very wisely sets out to restore the balance as between Greeks and Persians, and burst bubble-notions commonly held. Greek culture was extremely varied, and therein lay its strength; you can find all sorts of types there; and there are outstanding figures of the noblest. But on the whole, says Mahaffy—I think rightly—there was something sordid, grasping, and calculating: noblesse oblige made little appeal to them—was rather foreign to their nature. Patricianism did exist; in Sparta; perhaps in Thebes. Of the two Thebans we know best, Pindar was decidedly a patrician poet, and Epaminondas was a very great gentleman; now Thebes, certainly, must have been mighty in foregone manvantaras, as witness her five cycles of myths, the richest in Greece. In her isolation she had doubtless carried something of that old life down; and then, too, she had Pindar. Nor was Sparta any upstart;—of her we have only heard Athenians speak. But outside of these two, you hardly find a Greek gentleman in public life; hardly that combination of personal honor, contempt of commerce, class-pride, leisured and cultured living;—with, very often, ultra-conservatism, narrowness of outlook, political ineptitude and selfishness. The Spartans had many of these instincts, good and bad. They reached their cultural zenith in the seventh century or earlier; probably Lycurgus had an eye to holding off that degeneration which follows on super-refinement; and hence the severe life he brought in. My authority makes much of the adoration the other Greeks accorded them; who might hate and fight with Sparta, but took infinite pride in her nonetheless. Thus they told those tales of the Spartan mothers, and the Spartan boy the fox nibbled; thus their philosophers, painting an Utopia, took always most of its features from Lacedaemon.
All of which I quote for the light's sake it throws on the past of Greece: the past of her past, and the ages before her history. Or really, on the whole history of the human race; for I think it is what you shall find always, or almost always. I spoke of the Celtic qualities as having been of old patrician; they are plebeian nowadays, after the long pralaya and renewal. As a pebble is worn smooth by the sea, so the patrician type, with its refinements and culture, is wrought out by the strong life currents that play through a race during its manvantaric periods. Pralaya comes, with conquest, the overturning of civilization, mixture of blood; all the precious results obtained hurled back into the vortex;—and then to be cast up anew with the new manvantara, a new uncouth formless form, to be played on, shaped and infused by the life-currents again. In Greece an old manvantara had evolved patricianism and culture; which the pralaya following swept all away, except some relics perhaps in Thebes the isolated and conservative, certainly in Sparta. Lycurgus was wise in his generation when he sought by a rigid system to impose the plebeian virtues on Spartan patricianism.
Wise in his generation, yes; but he could work no miracle. Spartan greatness, too, was ineffectual: there is that about pouring new wine into old bottles. Sparta was old and conservative; covered her patrician virtues with a rude uncultural exterior; was inept politically—as old aristocracies so commonly are; she shunned that love of the beautiful and the things of the mind which is the grace, as Bushido—to use the best name there is for it—is the virtue, of the patrician. You may say she was selfish and short-sighted; true; and yet she began the Peloponnesian War not without an eye to freeing the cities and islands from the soulless tyranny an Athenian democracy had imposed on them: when there is a war, some men will always be found, who go in with unselfish high motives.— Being the patrician state, and the admired of all, it was she naturally who assumed the hegemony when the Persian came. But she had foregone the graces of her position, and her wits, through lack of culture, were something dull. She lost that leadership presently to a young democratic Athens endowed with mental acumen and potential genius; who, too, gained immeasurably from Sparta, because she knew how to turn everything to the quickening of her wits—this having at her doors so contrasting a neighbor, for example.—Young? Well, yes; I suspect if there had ever been an Athenian glory before, it was ages before Troy fell. She plays no great part in the legends of the former manvantara; Homer has little to say about her. She had paid tribute at one time to Minos, king of Crete; her greatness belonged not to the past, but to the future.
As all Greeks admired the Spartans—what we call a 'sneaking' admiration—so too they admired the Persians; who were gentleman in a great sense, and in most moral qualities their betters. Who was Ho Basileus, The King par excellence? Always 'the Great King, the King of the Persians.' Others were mere kings of Sparta, or where it might be. And this Great King was a far-way, tremendous, golden figure, moving in a splendor as of fairy tales; palaced marvelously, so travelers told, in cities compared with which even Athens seemed mean. Greek drama sought its subjects naturally in the remote and grandiose; always in the myths of prehistory, save once—when Aeschylus found a kindred atmosphere, and the material he wanted, in the palace of the Great King. To whom, as a matter of history, not unrecorded by Herodotus, his great chivalrous barons accorded a splendid loyalty,—and loyalty is always a thing that lies very near the heart of Bushido. Most Greeks would cheerfully sell their native city upon an impulse of chagrin, revenge, or the like. Xerxes' ships were overladen, and there was a storm; the Persian lords gaily jumped into the sea to lighten them. Such Samurai action might not have been impossible to Greeks,—Spartans especially; but in the main their eyes did not wander far from the main chance. You will think of many exceptions; but this comes as near truth, probably, as a generalization may. We should understand their temperament; quick and sensitive, capable of inspiration to high deeds; but, en masse, rarely founded on enduring principles. That jumping into the seas was nothing to the Persians; they were not sung to it; it was not done in defense of home, or upon a motive of sudden passion, as hate or the like; but permanent elements in their character moved them to it quietly, as to the natural thing to do. But if Greeks had done it, with what kudos, like Thermopylae, it would have come down!
They were great magnificoes, very lordly gentlemen, those Persian nobles; hijosdalgo, as they say in Spain; men of large lives, splendor and leisure, scorning trade; mighty huntsmen before the Lord. Of the Greeks, only the Spartans were sportsmen; but where the Spartans hunted foxes and such-like small fry, The Persians followed your true dangerous wild-fowl: lions, leopards, and tigers. A great satrap could buy up Greece almost at any time; could put the Greeks to war amongst themselves, and finance his favorite side out of his own pocket. On such a scale they lived; and travelers and mercenaries brought home news of it to Greece; and Greeks whose wealth might be fabulous strove to emulate the splendor they heard of. The Greeks made better heavy armor—one cause of the victories; but for the most part the Persian crafts and manufactures outshone the Greek by far. All these things I take from Mahaffy, who speaks of their culture as "an ancestral dignity for superior to, and different from, the somewhat mercantile refinement of the Greeks." The secret of the difference is this: the West Asian manvantara, to which the Persians belonged, was more than a thousand years older than the European manvantara, to which the Greeks belonged; so the latter, beside the former, had an air of parvenu. The Greeks dwelt on the Persian's borders; and fought him when they must; intrigued with or against him when they might; called him barbarian for self-respect's sake—and admired and envied him always. Had he been really a barbarian, in contact with their superior civilization, he would have become degraded by the contact; in such cases it always happens that the inferior sops up the vices only of his betters. But Alexander found the Persians much the same courtly-mannered, lordly-living, mighty huntsmen they had been when Herodotus described them; and was ambitious that his Europeans should mix with them on equal terms and learn their virtues.
Where and when did this high tradition grow up? There was not time enough, I think, in that half cycle between the rise of Cyrus and Marathon. In truth we are to see in these regions vistas of empires receding back into the dimness, difficult to sort out and fix their chronology. Cyrus overthrew the Assyrian; from whose yoke his people had freed themselves some fifteen years or so before. The Medes had been rising since the earlier part of that seventh century; sometime then they brought the kindred race of Persians under their sway. Sometime then, too, I am inclined to think, lived the Teacher Zoroaster: about whose date there is more confusion than about that of any other World Reformer; authorities differ within a margin of 6000 years. But Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Pythagoreanism all had their rise about this time; the age of religions began then; it was not a thing of chance, but marked a definite change in the spiritual climate of the world. The Bundahish, the Parsee account of it, says that he lived 258 years before Alexander; almost all scholars reject the figure—once more, "it is their nature to." But you will note that 258 is about as much as to say 260, which is twice the cycle of thirteen decades; I think the probabilities are strong that the Bundahish is right. The chief grounds for putting him much earlier are these: Greek accounts say, six thousand years before the Greek time; and there are known to have been kings in those parts, long before Cyrus, by the name or title of Mazdaka,—which word is from Mazda, the name of the God-Principle in Zoroastrianism. The explanation is this: you shall find it in H.P. Blavatsky: there were many Zoroasters; this one we are speaking of was the last (as Gautama was the last of the Buddhas); and of course he invented nothing, taught no new truth; but simply organized as a religion ideas that had before belonged to the Mysteries. Where then did his predecessors teach?—Where Zal and Rustem thundered as they might; in the old Iran of the Shah Nameh, the land of Kaikobad the Great and Kaikhusru. Too remote for all scholars even to agree that it existed; set by those who do believe in it at about 1100 B.C.—we hear of a "Powerful empire in Bactria"— which is up towards Afghanistan; I take it that it was from this the Persian tradition came—last down to, and through, the period of the Achaemenidae. What arts, what literature, these latter may have had, are lost; nothing is known of their creative and mental culture; but, to quote Mahaffy once more, it is exceedingly unlikely they had none. Dio Chrysostom, in the first century B.C., says that "neither Homer nor Hesiod sang of the chariots and horses of Zeus so worthily as Zoroaster"; which may mean, perhaps, that a tradition still survived in his time of a great Achaemenian poetry. Why then is this culture lost, since if it existed, it was practically contemporary with that of the Greeks? Because contemporaneity is a most deceiving thing; there is nothing in it. Persia now is not contemporary with Japan; nor modern China with Europe or America. The Achaemenians are separated from us by two pralayas; while between us and the Greeks there is but one. When our present Europe has gone down, and a new barbarism and Middle Ages have passed over France, Britain and Italy, and given place in turn to a new growth of civilization—what shall we know of this Paris, and Florence, and London? As much and as little as we know now of Greece and Rome. We shall dig them up and reconstruct them; found our culture on theirs, and think them very wonderful for mere centers of (Christian) paganism; we shall marvel at their genius, as shown in the fragments that go under the names of those totally mythological poets, Dante and Milton; and at their foul cruelty, as shown by their capital punishment and their wars. And what shall we know of ancient Athens and Rome? Our scholars will sneer at the superstition that they ever existed; our theologians will say the world was created somewhat later.
Or indeed, no; I think it will not be so. I think we shall have established an abiding perception of truth: Theosophy will have smashed the backbone of this foolish Kali-Yuga as a little, before then.