He gives reasons for believing that no peoples from the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians to the Europeans of the Renaissance can be judged happy.

Yet what about the Greeks?
Theirs was an age of enlightenment.

In a few pages he examines their laws and history, and concludes, "We are compelled to acknowledge that what is called the bel age of Greece was a time of pain and torture for humanity." And in ancient history, generally, "slavery alone sufficed to make man's condition a hundred times worse than it is at present." The miseries of life in the Roman period are even more apparent than in the Greek.

What Englishman or Frenchman would tolerate life as lived in ancient Rome?
It is interesting to remember that four years later an Englishman who had an incomparably wider and deeper knowledge of history declared it to be probable that in the age of the Antonines civilised Europe enjoyed greater happiness than at any other period.
Rome declined and Christianity came.

Its purpose was not to render men happy on earth, and we do not find that it made rulers less avaricious or less sanguinary, peoples more patient or quiet, crimes rarer, punishments less cruel, treaties more faithfully observed, or wars waged more humanely.