The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

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.