Section One:

"I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature--not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened."

-- Norman Maclean
   USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook,
   and a Hole in the Sky

1838 A.D.
Rome, 289 B.C.: Rome is defeated by the Senores, a Gaulish tribe, at Arretium.

1840 A.D.
Rome, 287 B.C.: A coup in Macedonia.

1844 A.D.
Rome, 283 B.C.: Rome conquers Corsica.

1847 A.D.
Rome, 280 B.C.: King Pyrrhus of Epirus defeats the Romans in alliance with the Greek cities of southern Italy, but is eventually forced to withdraw.

1852 A.D.
Rome 275 B.C.: Gauls invading Asia Minor defeated by Antiochus I of Syria.

1855 A.D.
Rome, 272 B.C.: Rome conquers central and southern Italy.

1862 A.D.
Islam, 1236 A.D.: The Arabs lose Cordoba to Castile.

This perception is an illusion. The restraints on society and international relations which made the ancient regime what it was are gone: internal politics are no longer confined to certain families and carried out in cabinet rooms and harems, international politics is no longer restrained by traditional alliances and objectives, or even by the traditional geographical limits of civilization. This is the epoch of incipient democracy (in its various forms) and of the growth of the state around which the future universal empire will form. It is also the period in which certain neighboring barbarians, attracted by civilization's growing prosperity, become increasingly frisky.

Democracy, of course, is everywhere culture-specific. In the West and during Classical times, it was associated with the franchise, but even in those cases the similarities are more apparent than real. In the Greco-Roman world, voting rights seem originally to have been an incident of membership in the militia. In the West, they were originally a perk for property taxpayers. Thus, the female franchise followed naturally after the enactment of property reform laws which allowed married women to possess their own property.

Elections and democracy have never been synonymous. In earlier Greek times, lotteries rather than elections were regarded as the most democratic procedure for selecting an official. Voting for a magistrate, particularly in open assembly, was regarded with suspicion by the common people, because open elections meant the rich and eminent had a much greater chance of achieving office. Elections did not become identified as a democratic institution until parties developed which claimed to represent the popular interest. In the West, too, the democratic era did not really dawn until the candidates for office ceased to necessarily be members of the traditional ruling families and groups. The question is not whether the president is elected by the popular vote, the question is whether just anybody can be elected president.

This process whereby "just anyone" can become an important government official is something that begins to happen with increasing frequency during this period in all civilizations. The apex of the process is as likely to be a theoretically meritocratic civil service system as a universal franchise. Everywhere, it takes the form of an increase in the prestige of the military and the opening of its leadership to talents. The gradual militarization of society does not usually express itself in military coups and the seizure of power by the army, not yet. Rather, it is a matter of the state being increasingly structured along military lines. The aristocratic governments of the previous periods were hardly pacific, but their wars were in their families' interest (not their class interest: that phantasm haunts only modernity). In this early modern period, on the other hand, even when the personnel of important government departments still consist disproportionately of the members of the old aristocracy, the military and strategic policy of the state has a logic of its own. The state does not serve the interests of a certain class: it conscripts all classes to serve its interests.

This is the period in which the great revolutionary philosophies have their beginning, though they only achieve their final form in the last phase of the civilization's life. The result is never quite what their originators expect. Mo-ti's (Meh-ti's) socialism was by intent a theory of populist pacifism, not the heady millenarian brew that came out of the assimilation of his ideas into demotic Taoism. (We will have occasion to consider the fate of the statist doctrine of Legalism, produced by the scholars of the Ch'i Gate, at several points below.) Marx's theory of revolution was intended as a fairly straightforward program for the traditional European left to act upon during the next industrial depression; he could not have foreseen its catastrophic fusion with popular Christian apocalyptic. Even in those cultures which developed little of no theory of the downtrodden, the fact of class politics, riot and occasional economic civil war increasingly darkened the worldview of educated dwellers in the great cities.

Meanwhile, on the periphery of the known world, a political and cultural system is growing which will first begin to dominate civilization in the following century, and whose influence will be decisive even through the Imperial period to come. It is only on the borderlands, on the frontiers of a civilization, that it is usually possible for a new country to expand without being hampered by old, experienced neighbors, and to try out new modes of economic and military organization. At the centers of civilization, at Athens and the State of Ch'i and Baghdad, these events on the periphery are often scarcely noted. Indeed, the inroads of the nearer barbarians, which occur in more than one culture at this time, may seem more threatening to the traditional state of things than the antics of uncouth provincials at the edge of the civilized world. The coming challengers grow almost clandestinely, though everything they do is done in the plain light of day with no effort to mask their ambitions. For that matter, at this stage, they may have no particular ambitions.

In Islam, the new Turkic nationality was only gradually being formed in the vacuum left in Asia Minor by the decay of the Byzantine Empire. It is these peripheral powers, however inchoate they may yet be, whose energies are directed during this period away from the old centers of civilization and into the hinterlands. Nucleating nations tend to be frontier settler states. This investment of effort will prove decisive in another two generations.

While it is true that this is a period in which civilized influence continues to spread, and some states do expand rapidly and without great opposition, it is not one in which the civilized powers necessarily have all things their own way. The barbarian groups which cluster around every civilized society are quite capable of humiliating, and even nearly destroying, the forces of the mature civilized states. In some instances, even neighboring civilizations are a danger, as the case of Islam and the West demonstrated time and time again. The states of the periphery are still underpopulated and imperfectly organized, while the more advanced powers in the heartlands of civilization are increasingly taken up with populist (or at least anti-aristocratic) politics. The attention of thinking people is often directed toward inessentials during this period.