The first achievement of united Hellas was the invasion of Persia, although it was under Macedonian leadership that this was done, but soldiers of Alexander appeared as Greeks to the East, and Alexander is מלך יון, melek Yavan, “king of Greece,” in the Book of Daniel.[[51]]
Just at this culminating point in the development of Greek nationality, the process of blurring began. Greek and non-Greek were no sooner sharply contrasted than by the conscious assimilation policy of Alexander’s successors the lines tended to obliterate themselves. At first Greek culture was dominant, but beneath it Syrian, Egyptian, and Cappadocian obstinately survived, and ultimately, under Christian and Mohammedan influences, regained their place. It is with one phase of this specific problem—the threatened submergence of an Asiatic people by Greek culture—that we are particularly concerned.
The attitude of Romans toward other nations was, as might be expected, even more arrogantly that of masters and conquerors. But where we find among Greeks a certain theoretical importance attached to purity of Hellenic descent[[52]] (which, by the by, was largely ignored in practice), the Romans scarcely understood what the term meant. A system in which emancipated slaves were citizens, who in the second generation were eligible to high civic honors,[[53]] and not infrequently attained them—such a system did not tend to encourage claims to purity of blood. That does not mean that foreign origin, real or suspected, could not at any time become a handle for abuse. Cicero fastens on the Celtic strain in Piso’s lineage with savage delight, just as Demosthenes’ enemies rarely forgot to remind him of his Scythian grandfather.[[54]] But these are not matters of real significance. The significant fact was that they who were Liby-Phoenicians in one generation were descendants of Romulus in the next.[[55]]
Sumus Romani qui fuimus ante Rudini, “We are Romans, we who formerly were Rudinians,” says Ennius,[[56]] and the metamorphosis was as complete and as easy if, instead of Italians, they were wholly barbarous elements that were absorbed. In religious matters the Romans more than the Greeks felt the efficacy of form. So in political matters the formula of emancipation and the decree of citizenship were deemed operative of a real change in the persons affected.
The Roman nobility, it is true, often made pretensions to a purity of descent that felt every foreign admixture as a stain.[[57]] But such claims were absurdly groundless, and cannot really have deceived even those who maintained them. The great majority of Romans had no quarrel with any who desired and tried to be Roman. Even Juvenal’s venom is vented only on the avowed foreigners, who as Greeks, Egyptians, and Syrians lolled at their ease, while the ragged Cethegi and Cornucanii munched, standing, the bread of affliction and charity. The leveling tendencies of the autocracy removed a great many of the reasons of this friction, and in part succeeded in giving even the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West a common culture to maintain. But by that time new movements of population made such race-concepts as were based on blood-kinship too plainly out of accord with the facts to be seriously asserted. At the close of the period we are discussing, every man was either a Roman citizen, with a pressingly heavy share of the burden of maintaining the Roman system, or he was not. Who his ancestors were was wholly forgotten. It had even ceased to be of moment whether he spoke Greek or Latin or Syriac, Punic, or even Gallic,[[58]] which had never completely died out in their ancient homes.
At no time did a feeling of racial kinship make a strong sentimental appeal. That the whole human race was an extended family was taken as axiomatic. Striking physical differences did not prevent similarity of names from proving kinship between Egyptian and Greek and Persian and Ethiopian. All through Greek history factions in Greek cities called upon outsiders against their countrymen. The Phoenicians of Utica preferred the foreign Romans to their Carthaginian kinsmen. Similarly the Campanians of Capua chose to fraternize with the Libyans and Phoenicians of Hannibal’s army rather than the closely related Latins.[[59]] In these circumstances nothing will lend itself more easily to distorting our view of the times than the importation into them of the modern view of race—of that view, at least, in which the historians of the nineteenth century found so easy and adequate an explanation of everything they desired to debase or extol.
CHAPTER IV
SKETCH OF JEWISH HISTORY BETWEEN NEBUCHADNEZZAR AND CONSTANTINE
We have briefly sketched in the foregoing chapters the concepts of race and religion that Greek and Roman applied to the world about them. These concepts were not starkly rigid. They changed considerably and often rapidly in the six centuries our subject covers. They are further to be qualified by the social environment within which they operated. But it was not only the Greeks or Romans who in blood and thought passed through many and profound changes. The Jews, too, developed in many directions, and this development can no more be lost sight of than the corresponding one among their neighbors.
In 586 B.C.E. the kingdom of Judah, which had for some years been a Babylonian dependency, was ended as a political institution, and the majority of its people, at any rate of the nobles and wealthy men of them, were forcibly deported to Babylon. The deportation though extensive was not complete. Some, principally peasants and artisans, were left, but in districts so long wasted by war their condition can only have been extremely wretched. Since the whole region was part of the same huge empire, the old boundary lines were probably obliterated, and those who lived there subjected to the control of imperial governors residing in one or another of the walled cities of Syria or Philistia.