THE PERSIAN EMPIRE. Greek philosophical criticism had lent its
aid to Greek philosophical discovery in this destruction of the
national faith. It sustained by many arguments the wide-spreading
unbelief. It compared the doctrines of the different schools with
each other, and showed from their contradictions that man has no
criterion of truth; that, since his ideas of what is good and
what is evil differ according to the country in which he lives,
they can have no foundation in Nature, but must be altogether the
result of education; that right and wrong are nothing more than
fictions created by society for its own purposes. In Athens, some
of the more advanced classes had reached such a pass that they
not only denied the unseen, the supernatural, they even affirmed
that the world is only a day-dream, a phantasm, and that nothing
at all exists.

The topographical configuration of Greece gave an impress to her
political condition. It divided her people into distinct
communities having conflicting interests, and made them incapable
of centralization. Incessant domestic wars between the rival
states checked her advancement. She was poor, her leading men had
become corrupt. They were ever ready to barter patriotic
considerations for foreign gold, to sell themselves for Persian
bribes. Possessing a perception of the beautiful as manifested in
sculpture and architecture to a degree never attained elsewhere
either before or since, Greece had lost a practical appreciation
of the Good and the True.

While European Greece, full of ideas of liberty and independence,
rejected the sovereignty of Persia, Asiatic Greece acknowledged
it without reluctance. At that time the Persian Empire in