302	LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY
some four hundred years later,1 but of Samsigeramus's successor-
state of the Seleucid Empire some three hundred years earlier. In the
next chapter of the story after the overthrow of Zenobia by Aurelian,
the mass-conversion of the population of the Oriental provinces to
Christianity, which had been consummated during the pre-Diocletianic
bout of anarchy, might have seemed at the moment to have done for
Hellenism incidentally what Epiphanes had once tried to do for it deli-
berately without success; for in the Oriental provinces a triumphant
Catholic Christian Church had captivated a subject native peasantry and
an urban Hellenic 'ascendancy' alike; and, since Christianity had been
making its triumphal progress in an Hellenic dress, it looked as if the
Orientals had now at last inadvertently 'received*, in association with
Christianity, a Hellenism which they had so vehemently rejected when it
had been offered to them unadulterated and undisguised. This conclusion
was not belied by the first of the schisms that rent the Christian Church
after the Imperial Government, imperante Constantino, had given the
Church its countenance; for the strife between Athanasians and Arians
was not a cultural conflict between Hellenes and Orientals but a family
quarrel between two rival factions of philosophizing Alexandrian Greeks.
The subsequent breach between Catholics and Nestorians did, on the
other hand, split the population of the Oriental provinces on communal
lines; and, in thus resuming the Oriental resistance movement against
Hellenism in the form of a theological controversy within the bosom of
the Christian Church, the Orientals had hit upon a new technique of
cultural warfare which eventually prevailed over a Hellenism that had
shown itself to be invincible so long as the Orientals had been content
to fight it on ground of Hellenism's choosing, and not of theirs.2
The series of Oriental counter-attacks on Hellenism in the form of
Christian theological movements that were branded as 'heresies' by a
dominant minority of 'Melchites'3 has come to our attention in divers
contexts in this Study so many times already that in this place we may
confine our observation of it to the point of noticing that this was one
of those 'fateful5 movements that advance towards an ultimate victory
through successive defeats. When an Oriental resistance movement
struck at Hellenism by way of a Nestorian Christian attack on a Catholic
Christian Christology, an Hellenic Orthodoxy was still strong enough to
be able to proscribe a Syriac Nestorianism within the frontiers of the
Roman Empire—though not strong enough to prevent the banned
Nestorians from finding a second home under a Sasanian political aegis,
capturing the whole of the Christian community in the Sasanian domi-
nions, and thereby winning for themselves the monopoly of a Christian
mission-field extending overseas south-eastward into Southern India
and overland north-eastward into Western China. When thereafter the
same Oriental resistance movement struck a second stroke at Hellenism
by way of a Monophysite Christian attack on a Catholic Christian
1 The historical relation between Mu'awlyah's and Zenobia's successor-states of the
Roman Empire in the East has been noticed in I. i. 74, n. 4.
^ See IX. viii. 413-14.
3 This nickname for the Catholic Christians which was applied to them by the
Monophysites was a Graecized form of a Syriac word signifying 'Imperialists'.