even polygamous institutions. The gods themselves change without degradation into the forms of beast and bird, so that the chiefs of the gens could feel no shame in taking their names from the bear, the wolf, or the eagle, and giving them in turn to the whole groups. Amongst the Hebrews, too, it is clear that the so-called patriarchs were really nature-gods; the names of chiefs were frequently compounded of the word Baal-that is "god," a fact naïvely recognised by the historians of the later and orthodox period by their changing Baal into El or Ja, the special names of the Hebrew tribal God. Similarly Abram is the high heaven, like Zeus or Jove. This line of religion was still followed up in the period of ancient civilisation; the state and religion were one, as is indicated amongst other things by the temples having been used as popular meeting-places for pleasure, law or business. In short, in the ancient world, religion was ancestor-worship, developing, as the gens and the peod gave place to the city, into city-worship, in which the individual only felt his more elevated life as a part of the Holy City that had made him. and his what they were, and would lead them to all excellence and glory. We have mentioned that the city-confederacies of the East which assumed the appearance to later ages of great despotic monarchies fell either into demoralisation or languid bureaucracy. From Asia the lead in civilisation passed to Europe, and the progress of humanity became speedy and brilliant. But the Ancient Civilisation, incomplete, founded on oligarchy, political and intellectual, and on industrial slavery of the crudest kind, had to undergo the law of change. The Greek cities, after fierce struggles among themselves for the leadership of their world, fell, destroyed by individual greed for position and fame, that took the place of the old city-worship. Their fall was helped by the new system of individualistic ethics, which put forward as the aim of life the excellence and moral qualities of the individual, looked at in himself, instead of those of the society of which he formed a part. Thus Greek civilisation fell into the clutches of the Tyrants, and again the lead passed westward into the hands of Rome-the most complete, self-contained and powerful development of the city-world. But again, as her power grew and the wealth of her oligarchy with it, the doom was awaiting; the boundless greed of the great slaveholding and tax-gathering capitalists, the conquerors of the ancient world, led them into a condition of chaos, from which they had to be rescued by an imperial bureaucracy. It was the function of the latter, on the one hand, to keep peace between the competitors for monstrous wealth, and, on the other, to hold down and pacify the proletariat and subject barbarians, on whom the oligarchy fed. Steady degradation followed the Augustan "Pax Romana"; the whole of the mighty power of Rome, the growth of so many centuries of energy and valour, was prostituted to the squeezing of taxes from the Roman world; the very form of the citysociety was reduced to an absurdity by the sale of citizenship, until Caracalla abolished its mere form, extending it to all freed men. At last the Roman armies were wholly composed of Gauls and Goths, Armenians and Arabs; no Italian could be found willing to fight for his life much less for the sham state, good only for tax-gathering, which now represented the once great city. Rome fell, and with it the Ancient World. Note on the, 323 Civil war in the time of Charles I., the, 114, 115 Civilisation, ancient, 32-47 not the final form of human society, Civilisations, four great, 37 Commodities, circulation of, Commodity, Marx's definition suppression of the, 199 98 international char- power, 70 Criminal law, mechanical char- acter of, 22, 23 Cromwell's revolution, 114-16 DANTON, 148-55 Decentralisation, 280 Democratic Federation, forma- Depression, cycles of, 169, 272, 273 |