Lecture VI

You see how a civilization arises in the first epoch of the Post-Atlantean Age, reaches its culmination and must again decline, how it attains its highest point in the flight from materiality but how it must recede because it has sought its culture on the ground of the non-acknowledgment of matter. You then see how a new cycle enters with the old Persian civilization, how it conquers the earth through the acknowledgment of matter, at all events as a power striving against man, which man subdues through his labor; again this culture reaches its culmination and sinks into decadence. But a new civilization ascends, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian, which no longer merely acknowledges matter, but penetrates it with human intelligence—where the orbits of the stars are investigated, where buildings are erected in accordance with star-wisdom, laid out in accordance with the laws of geometry. Matter is no longer an opposing power but is recast and remoulded to the spiritual. And after the Egyptian-Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian culture has fallen into decay, we go on further to the Greco-Latin culture, where in Greek art man has so transformed matter that he has formed his own image in it. It had never been the case before that, as in Greek sculpture, Greek architecture and drama, the human being imprinted his own image into matter. And with Roman civilization we see added the legal idea of the personality. It is only a quite perverted scholarship that says the legal concept had already existed earlier—a rational man can see that at a glance. The Law-book of Hammurabi is entirely different from what was created in Rome as jurisprudence. That is a genuine Roman product, for jurisprudence emerged where the personality created its image in law too; in law man is placed entirely on his own personality. One should study and compare the testament of the Roman Law with what one finds in the Law-book of Hammurabi, where man's personality was definitely given its place in a theocracy. The “Roman citizen” was a new element in the evolutionary cycle of mankind. And there will be a new cycle when men have fully grasped what comes forward today as Theosophy. We see how each cycle in civilization reaches its peak and again declines and how each new cycle has the task of carrying civilization further.