Section One:

"You know the rent is in arrears;
the dog has not been fed in years;
it's even worse than it appears;
but it's all right."

--The Grateful Dead
   Touch of Gray

2327 A.D.
Rome, 200 A.D.: Neoplatonism comes to dominate the thinking of the educated.

2334 A.D.
Rome, 217 A.D.: Vicious Emperor Caracalla dies.

2336 A.D.
China, 36 A.D.: The Latter (or Eastern) Han Dynasty is established. The capital and centers of power move east.

2337 A.D.
China, 37 A.D.: The empire adopts a laissez faire economic policy and a defensive military posture.

2340 A.D.
Islam, 1714 A.D.: Tripoli becomes effectively independent of the empire.

2345 A.D.
Rome, 218 A.D.: Heliogabalus misrules the empire, or at least the City of Rome, for four years.

Egypt, 1202 B.C.: A brief interregnum occurs, during part of which the land is ruled by a Syrian adventurer.

2347 A.D..
Rome, 220 A.D.: Goths invade Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula.

2349 A.D.
Rome, 222 A.D.: Alexander Severus, another soldier emperor and perhaps a crypto-Christian, hold the empire together.

2350 A.D.
Egypt, 1197 B.C.: Set-nakt establishes the Twentieth Dynasty.

2357 A.D.
Egypt, 1190 B.C.: Ramses III defends his northeastern border against the Sea Peoples.

2358 A.D.
China, 58 A.D.: The Emperor Ming-Ti introduces Buddhism.

2360 A.D.
China, 60 A.D.: The historian Pan Ku writes the definitive history of the Former Han Dynasty.

2362 A.D.
Rome, 235 A.D.: Severus is murdered and six emperors succeed in six years.

2364 A.D.
Islam, 1738 A.D.: The Turks defeat an Austro-Russian alliance.

2371 A.D.
Rome, 244 A.D.: Emperor Philip the Arabian reigns briefly.

2376 A.D.
Rome, 249 A.D.: The harsh but efficient Emperor Decius maintains order and institutes a vigorous persecution of Christians.

Throughout the period of decline, civilization is prone to external attacks of various kinds which it is only barely competent to deal with. It is an old saw that an empire organizes its enemies to defeat it; the very existence of concentrated wealth and a non-combatant population attracts marginal peoples to the borders with an eye to trade and occasional plunder. These peoples have sometimes been called the "external proletariat." With time, they acquire many of the skills of civilized societies, creating a pale of loosely-organized barbarian states radiating from the civilized core areas. While in its heyday the empire can keep this gray region more or less policed, in its decline this is no longer possible. The barbarians often see that some region of the empire is undefended because the central government's attention is focussed on internal affairs.

Sometimes, these invaders are barely more than savages off the steppe, attracted by legends of the wealth of the settled lands. Sometimes, they are civilized societies in their own right with long-term strategic goals. This was the situation Islam faced. It is possible for the difference between an "external" and an "internal" proletariat to be largely theoretical, particularly when the empire contains large chunks of primitive alien societies which never became "developed" in the way that the core areas did. It is the regions of immemorial banditry, such as Central Asia and Anatolia, the Balkans and the American Southwest, which easily become regions where the emperor's writ does not run, and the only "public services" are reprisal raids from the central government.

This pattern is to be distinguished from the behavior of old and populous cultures caught in another civilization's empire. As we noted above, these are scarcely much of a threat to the empire's real integrity. They can and do produce inchoate revolts and even real nationalist insurrections. Always, however, these are the work either of peasant enthusiasts or of romantic urban intellectuals. So ingrained does the habit of civilization become in regions like Egypt and India, China and Western Europe, that they soon reach accommodation with whoever seems most likely to promote order in the long term. Nationalism is a disease of modernity, and even the chauvinism which marks all mature civilizations tends to fade out as both dominator and dominated reach comparable levels of decrepitude.

The unambiguously internal proletariat creates problems in only some civilizations during this period. When it does, the result is simply the pointless vandalism of people who think themselves ill-used, but who literally cannot imagine a state of things fundamentally different from the present order. Revolts are in the nature of an appeal to the central government for the redress of grievances, usually involving corrupt or incompetent local authorities. The real sources of disorder during this epoch are the ruling class itself. The outrages committed by the imperial government during the Third Transition robbed it of much of its sacred character. The temporary collapse of the administration also proved to all the limits of its power. It now seems, to the local police and army commanders, to lesser members of the imperial family, even to merely opulent citizens, that just anyone can aspire to the highest office. The result is, often enough, "just anybody" does in fact achieve it. Indeed, this is the last era in which there can be really eccentric world rulers. None of them last long, but their antics are a delight for moralists to condemn in all later ages.

A more interesting feature of the political history of the period, however, is the degree of good government it somehow manages to provide, even against the odds. In Roman history, during a long slice of this epoch, the empire came close to being governed in the way its "constitution" prescribed, with the emperor elected by and responsible to the Senate. In other civilizations, there was at least a period of successful rally against incipient chaos, of partial reforms and much selfless devotion to duty. The very bursting of the illusion that the world had entered a permanent golden age, that Ramses II would be Pharaoh forever or that the Roman peace was magically unbreakable, inspired a degree of initiative and original thinking which had not been seen since the beginning of the imperial era. Of course, the thinking was along the lines of "How can we stop this fatal trend from getting out of hand?", but still it constituted an improvement over the simple search for precedent and scurrying to save face which passed for statecraft in more comfortable phases of the empire's life.

At ground level, we have the first whiff during this period, not just of economic decline, but of the physical collapse of civilized life. Ancient infrastructures, from aqueducts to communication satellites, are ill-repaired or not repaired at all. While the government begins, and sometimes even finishes, large prestige projects, the machinery of everyday life becomes less reliable. Amenities begin to be too expensive for the lower classes, and in some cases wholly unobtainable. Particularly, communications and travel become more difficult and sporadically dangerous. Though the population is stable or in decline, basic subsistence begins to come into question. Food production and transport lose the clockwork efficiency which some universal states achieved in their younger days. Prior stages of the imperial era might have been troubled by "food crises," when prices rose beyond the means of ordinary citizens. As the decline deepens, what in the past would have been mere distribution bottlenecks threaten to become true famines.

While this world is showing ever greater signs of wear and tear, both the heights of society and its depths are increasingly concerned with the other world. At the top, the last generation of "intellectuals," as that class had existed (under various names) since the days of modernity, is putting the finishing touches on systems of thought which link the natural, human and divine in a single apprehension of reality. Down below, the immemorial religion of mankind, of amulets and holy men and holy places, is reviving in new forms. Whatever hold the skepticisms of high culture had ever had on popular culture swiftly melt away as the traditional objections to the spiritual life cease to persuade even the educated.

More ominous, however, is the antinomian streak which sometimes infects both the ancient and the novel devotions that grow in popularity with the triumph of the Second Religiousness. Sometimes, these new faiths are shot through with vivid images of revenge and strange ambitions for the faithful, with hatred against the order of things and half-furtive notions of a future whose shape freezes the blood of such of the uninitiated who hear of it.

These demotic cults tend to rise up the social scale more than even the popularized versions of the systems of the educated tend to fall. Though the cults may be phrased in the language of philosophy when they come to be expounded by philosophers, their power at all levels of society is visceral, numinous, unanswerable.

The last intellectuals inhabit this period for the same reason that the last true scientists died out more than a century before: what they had to do was just about finished. The term intellectual has been variously defined. Perhaps it is most aptly used with regard to people who make their living by devising new systems of thought. Artists may or may not fit into this category; it depends on the degree to which they are conscious of the systemic implications of their creations. The systems produced in this period, when "all the data are in," when people at least believe that have a complete account of the natural world, when everything bad and good that can happen in history has already happened, when all arts are finished, these systems are really and truly final.

Everything has been accounted for. The supposedly final philosophical systems developed at the beginning of Winter, the philosophies of the Aristotelians and the Confucians, were as much concerned with denying or denigrating areas of experience or belief as they were with trying to be comprehensive; they "explained" only a congenial residue of life. This is not the case with the truly final systems like Neoplatonism or late Taoism or Mahayana Buddhism, which really do explain everything from pond scum to the Mind of God. Having settled these matters, there is really very little left to say.

After this epoch, there is still a class of teachers and researchers, there are still large and well-attended institutions of higher learning, there is even some of the most poignant and skilful historical and memoirist writing ever composed. All of this, however, has ceased to live. In future ages, people will die to preserve the treasures of the civilization, because they know themselves incapable of creating any more.