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The fun lasted for about a century, during which Athens fought off the Persians (this war, says Durant, "made Europe possible"), colonized the Mediterranean, built up an empire on sea power and trade. The 43,000 Athenians were free to litigate, make money, philosophize, fornicate and fight because most of the heavy work was done by some 115,000 slaves. Leaders and citizens alike were barbarically hardy, childishly corrupt; selling out to the enemy was a common piece of petulance. Furthermore the Athenians continually ditched and lorded it over other Greek cities, especially Sparta; and this combative local pride prevented a union, led to the desperate war with totalitarian Sparta which closed the century of invention and exhausted Greece.
The great inheritor was Alexandrian Greek Egypt, on whose "extensive experiment in state socialism" Durant is particularly good. There, as in Soviet Russia (which Durant does not mention), the land was collectivized; workers and peasants were forbidden to move from region to region; many industries were government-owned; banks were controlled by the government. It has been fashionable among historians to consider the culture of this age "decadent"; Durant qualifies that easy view considerably. Scholarship, science, and luxury arts—all now regarded as indispensable to civilization—flourished freely for the first time.
Popularizer. Will Durant does not belong with Aristotle and Bacon as a seeker of universal knowledge, but with the modern breed of synthesizers whose aim is to get knowledge into the heads of semi-educated people. He did his first popular writing for the vast E. Haldeman-Julius market. His twelve little Blue Books (5¢) on Aristotle, Plato and other philosophers have sold 1,800,000 out of a total Blue Book sale of 200,000,000. Publishers Simon and Schuster got him to put these painless essays together in 1926 as The Story of Philosophy, which has sold some 500,000 copies.
For a long time professional scholars found "Dr."* Durant's works a source of indefinable distaste. Now they bear in mind the unfortunate experience of the great Egyptologist, Professor James Henry Breasted. Entrusted in 1935 with the reviewing of Our Oriental Heritage, 1,049-page first volume in Durant's projected The Story of Civilization (The Life of Greece is volume two), Professor Breasted rode over it in a haughty hurry. He was soon faced with a quiet public letter from Durant showing clearly that the Professor had scarcely read the book.