'THERE IS NO ARMOUR AGAINST FATE* 301
Justinian could hardly have succeeded in remaining blind to it if he had
not taken pains to reinforce a congenital myopia by putting on the blinkers
of Archaism.
The 'fatality' of a post-Diocletianic Roman Empire's loss of Italy has
its closest historical parallel in the loss of the Oriental provinces south of
Taurus; for this loss, likewise, was no historical surprise. Though the
Hellenic ascendancy in South-West Asia west of Euphrates was little less
than a thousand years old by the time when, in the seventh century of
the Christian Era, Arab conquistadores liquidated it almost as rapidly as
Macedonian conquistadores had established it in the fourth century B.C.,
Hellenism had never succeeded south of Taurus—apart from a cluster
of maritime Greek settlements on the Cilician Plain which had been
planted in the pre-Alexandrine Age—in becoming anything more than
an exotic alien culture, all but confined within the walls of a few Hellenic
or Hellenized cities and only feebly radiating out from these into a still
invincibly Syriac and Egyptiac agricultural countryside. Hellenism's
capacity to achieve mass-conversions here had been put to the test by
the Seleucid Hellenizer Antiochus IV Epiphanes (regnabat 175-163 b.c.)
when he had set out to make Jerusalem as Hellenic as Antioch or Athens;
and the resounding defeat of this cultural missionary enterprise had
portended the ultimate total disappearance of the intrusive culture in
partibus Orientalium. Indeed, the sporadic veneer of Hellenism which
Epiphanes had so signally failed to transmute into solid timbers would
have been stripped away before the opening of the Christian Era by
Arab Nomad intruders from the Syrian Desert and Iranian Nomad in-
truders from Eurasia if Rome had not given Hellenism a further lease of
life in South-West Asia and Egypt by stepping masterfully into the
shoes of prematurely senile Seleucidae and Ptolemies. The wonder was
that an anti-Hellenic resistance movement—which in Egypt had first
gone into action as far back as the turn of the third and second centuries
B.C.1—should not have found an effective retort to an Hellenic ascendancy
earlier than the same fifth century of the Christian Era that saw Roman
Italy fall under the dominion of barbarian war-lords.
The Hellenic ascendancy over the Syriac and Egyptiac societies had
been imposed and maintained by force of arms; and, so long as the sub-
jugated societies had reacted by replying in kind, they had been courting
defeat. When the Jews and Egyptians had been encouraged by the success
of their insurrections against the epigoni of their Macedonian conquerors
to try conclusions with the Roman heirs of thoseperitura regnal, they had
found to their cost that this Roman second wave of Hellenic domination
had a more formidable momentum than its Macedonian forerunner.
The discomfiture of Epiphanes at the hands of the Maccabees had been
avenged on a Palestinian Jewry by a Titus and a Hadrian; and there-
after, when the temporary breakdown of the Pax Augusta in the third
century of the Christian Era had given a militant Oriental resistance
movement a fresh opportunity for trying its fortune, Zenobia's successor-
state of the Roman Empire had gone the way, not of Mu'awiyah's
1	See V. v. 68.
2	Virgil: Geargics, Book II, L 498.