3. 478 B.C.—THE DEATH of CONFUCIUS We must have some symbol to represent China for us—China, so gigantic in size that it calls itself “All Under Heaven,” and so old that it records the doings of its kings for the last four thousand years.
I envy those Chinese schoolboys who were made to memorize every word of Confucius. I have found every line profound and applicable, and sometimes I think that if these maxims had sunk into my memory for twenty years, I might have in me a little of the poise of soul, the simple dignity, the quiet understanding, the depth of character, the infinite courtesy that I have found in the educated Chinese everywhere. Never has one man so written his name upon the face and spirit of a people as Confucius has done in China. Let us take him again as a symbol and a suggestion: behind him are the delicate lyrics of the T’ang Dynasty’s poets, the mystic landscapes of the Chinese painters, the perfect vases of the Chinese potters, the secular and terrestrial wisdom of the Chinese philosophers; perhaps the greatest of all historic civilizations is summed up in his name.
4. 399 B.C.—THE DEATH OF SOCRATES When this man passed, drunk with hemlock, also passed the most astonishing picture in ancient history—the Age of Pericles. But this time I am not thinking of philosophy. Behind Socrates I see his friend and lover, Alcibiades, and the destructive tragedy of the Peloponnesian War. I see Aspasia, the learned courtesan, at whose feet the old Gadfly sat with Pericles. I see Pericles gathering rich men around him and persuading them to finance the Athenian drama. I see Euripides contending with Sophocles for the dramatic prize in the Theater of Dionysius. I see Ictinus in slow thought molding the columns of the Parthenon, and Pheidias carving the gods and heroes of its frieze. I see young Plato winning the prize at the Panathenaean games. I want some stopping-point in history that shall bring to my memory a few of the thousand facets of this brave and varied age, when for the first time a whole civilization liberated itself from superstition, and created science, drama, democracy, and liberty, and passed on to Rome and Europe half of our intellectual and aesthetic heritage.
5. 44 B.C.—THE DEATH OF CAESAR A few years before the death of Georg Brandes, the Danish critic who helped the French Taine to make the British understand English literature, an American student visited him and found him in a very somber mood. “Why are you sad?” the visitor asked. “Don’t you know,” answered Brandes, “that this is the anniversary of the greatest blunder in history—the assassination of Caesar?”
The old critic might have found blunders nearer home, like the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, and perhaps he exaggerated a little the importance of Brutus’ sottise. For in a sense it is not Caesar whom we wish to remember; it is the succession of developments that followed upon his death: the reconstruction of Roman law and order by the statesmanlike Augustus on the basis and lines of Caesar’s preliminary work, the flourishing of arts and letters under the extension of the Pax Romana to Rome, the poetry of Virgil and Horace, the prose of Pliny and Tacitus, the philosophy of Epictetus and Aurelius, the beneficent rule of Hadrian and Antoninus, the beautification of the Forum and the capital with architecture and statuary, the building of those roads, and the revision and codification of those laws, which were to be Rome’s essential legacy to the modern world. As the death of Socrates may be used to sum up the Periclean Age of Athens, so the death of Caesar stands as the door to the Golden Age of Rome.
6.? B.C.—THE BIRTH OF CHRIST This date the reader may place ad lib., since no man knows it. For us it is the most important date of all, because it divides all history in the West, gives us our greatest hero and model, provides us with that body of myth and legend which is now passing from the theological to the literary stage, and marks the beginning of that Christian age which seems today to be approaching its close. After us the deluge; God knows what a mess of occult faiths will in the present century replace the tender and cruel theologies that praised and dishonored Christ.
7. A.D. 632—THE DEATH OF MOHAMMED It was in this year, so designated by us infidels but known to the Mohammedans as A.H. 10 (the tenth year after the Hegira), that Mohammed left this earth, after founding the faith that was to overrun and dominate for centuries all northern Africa from Cairo to Morocco, southern Europe in Turkey and Spain, and half of Asia from Jerusalem and Bagdad to Teheran and Delhi. Even Christianity cannot boast of so many wars waged in its name, or so many heathen killed.
With this trifling exception, it was a noble religion, sternly monotheistic, rejecting images and priests and the polytheism of saints, building strong characters with the doctrine of fatalism and the discipline of war, raising great universities and cultures at Cordova, Granada, Cairo, Bagdad, and Delhi, giving the world one of its greatest rulers—Akbar of India—and ennobling Spain, Egypt, Constantinople, Palestine, and India with gracious architecture from the Alhambra to the Taj Mahal. Today, despite their political dismemberment, they are still growing in numbers and strength; in India and China they are making converts every hour of every day. There is no surety that the future is not theirs.
8. 1294—THE DEATH OF ROGER BACON This date is almost as good as any other to mark the first use of gunpowder, for the rebellious English monk who died in this year may be held partly responsible for its invention. It was Roger Bacon who first definitely described the explosive that would revolutionize the world and offer to all pious statesmen a substitute for birth control. “One may cause to burst forth from bronze,” he wrote, “thunderbolts more formidable than those produced by nature. A small quantity of prepared matter occasions a terrible explosion accompanied by brilliant light. One may multiply the phenomena so far as to destroy an army or a city.”
Very likely. It was gunpowder that gave to the rising bourgeoisie of late medieval Europe the means of overthrowing the feudal baron by bombarding from a distance his once impregnable castle. It was gunpowder that made the infantry as important as the cavalry, and gave the common man a new prestige in war and a new power in revolutions. It was gunpowder that turned war from a gentleman’s game, occasionally fatal, to a form of standardized mass destruction, a mode of removing from the earth, with a few minutes’ bombardment, the work of a hundred thousand artists’ hands laboring for three centuries. Perhaps this is the most important date in the story of the fall of man; though some cynic might argue that a still more tragic event was the invention of thinking, the liberation of intellect from instinct, the consequent separation of sex from reproduction, and the abandonment of the perpetuation of the race to the selected morons of every land.
9. 1454—THE PRESS OF JOHANNES GUTENBERG (AT MAINZ ON THE RHINE) ISSUES THE FIRST PRINTED DOCUMENTS BEARING A PRINTED DATE The Germans had used printing from movable types for some fourteen years before; the Chinese had done such printing as far back as A.D. 1041; and in 1900 a block-printed book was discovered in China which had been published in 868. Nothing is new in China, democracy least of all. They invented gunpowder and used it chiefly for fireworks. They invented printing and never used it for tabloid newspapers, crime club fiction, or Freudian biographies.
In Western civilization, printing helped money and muskets to liberate the middle class and put an end to the rule of the knights and the priests. It enabled the people to read the Bible, and so engendered the Reformation. It immensely widened the circle to which a writer might address his ideas. And by transferring the making of books from monks to printers’ devils, and the patronage of books from the aristocracy and the church to the commonalty and the laity, it made possible the propaganda and development of democracy and free thought.