[97] The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles composed in Asia Minor were written in Greek.
[98] They were called Lagidæ from the father of Ptolemy I.
[99] The library of the Museum was burnt during the siege of Alexandria by Cæsar. But it had a successor in the Serapeum which contained 300,000 volumes. This is said to have been burnt in the seventh century by the Arabs. [The tale of the destruction of the library under orders of Omar is doubtful.--ED.]
[100] King Ptolemy Philadelphus who had great fear of death passed many years searching for an elixir of life.
[101] There still remain to us some of the statues executed by the orders of King Attalus to commemorate his victory over the Gauls of Asia.
=Rich and Poor.=--In almost all the Greek cities the domains, the shops of trade, the merchant ships, in short, all the sources of financial profit were in the hands of certain rich families. The other families, that is to say, the majority of the citizens,[102] had neither lands nor money. What, then, could a poor citizen do to gain a livelihood? Hire himself as a farmer, an artisan, or a sailor? But the proprietors already had their estates, their workshops, their merchantmen manned by slaves who served them much more cheaply than free laborers, for they fed them ill and did not pay them. Could he work on his own account? But money was very scarce; he could not borrow, since interest was at the rate of ten per cent. Then, too, custom did not permit a citizen to become an artisan. "Trade," said the philosophers, "injures the body, enfeebles the soul and leaves no leisure to engage in public affairs." "And so," says Aristotle, "a well-constituted city ought not to receive the artisan into citizenship." The citizens in Greece constituted a noble class whose only honorable functions, like the nobles of ancient France, were to govern and go to war; working with the hands was degrading. Thus by the competition of slaves and their exalted situation the greater part of the citizens were reduced to extreme misery.
=Social Strife.=--The poor governed the cities and had no means of living. The idea occurred to them to despoil the rich, and the latter, to resist them, organized associations. Then every Greek city was divided into two parties: the rich, called the minority, and the poor, called the majority or the people. Rich and poor hated one another and fought one another. When the poor got the upper hand, they exiled the rich and confiscated their goods; often they even adopted these two radical measures: