| Description |
xxxvi, 519 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm |
| Summary |
"This volume is one of the first histories yet compiled and written exclusively from a standpoint of social science. That the "still small voice" meant the ever suppressed yet ever living, struggling, co-operating and mutually supporting majorities, is made self-suggestive without forsaking history. The phenomenal fact is moreover brought out, that the present movement whose most radical wing loudly disclaims Christianity, is nevertheless building exactly upon the precepts of that faith, as it was told to us and taught us by Jesus Christ; whatever may or may not have been borrowed by His school from the immense social organization of His own and preceding ages. Modern greed with its class hatreds, individualisms, aristocracy, its struggle for personal wealth, dangerous, defiant in our faith and in our political economy, is not Christianity at all; it is the ancient evil still lingering in the roots of the gradually decaying paganism that appears to remain for the labor movement to smother and at last uproot and completely annihilate. One thing must be solemnly set forth as a very suggestive hint to modern anarchists, however honest their impulses. The historical facts are that the great strikes, rebellions and social wars--if we are permitted to except those of Drimakos and the strike of the 20,000 from the the silver mines of Laurium in Attica--all turned out disastrously for the general cause. The punishments meted out to the strikers and insurgents of the working class after their overthrow by the Romans, as in the rebellions of Eunus, of Athenion, of Spartacus, of every one we have treated in this book, with but the above exceptions, was bloody, revengeful and exterminatory to the last degree. An ancient author whom we quote, gives the aggregate number crucified at something more than a million. Crassus and Pompey alone crucified over 6,000 workingmen on the Appian Way as examples of the awful blood-wreaking to be expected from Roman military justice. Twenty thousand were similarly massacred at Enna and Tauromanion. These unscrupulous deeds of retribution that went far toward annihilating the ancient civilization by stimulating a blood-thirsting craze in a long succession of Roman emperors, completely extinguished all hopes of the workingmen for the achievement of liberty by violent means"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
| Notes |
Half-title: The ancient lowly |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references |
| Notes |
Also issued in print |
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s 2011 dcu n s |
| Subject |
Labor and laboring classes -- Rome
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Labor and laboring classes -- Greece
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Socialism -- History
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Socialism -- history
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Socialism.
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Greece.
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Rome (Empire)
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| Genre/Form |
History.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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