TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND  GOVERNMENT      487
giants descended to meet and do battle -with one another. Since the
particular constellation of states constituting a particular balance of power
had usually been brought into existence by one of those abrupt changes
of scale that we have just been calling to mind, the pigmies of today were
apt to be the giants of yesterday, and the arena of today, in which
today's contending giants were doing their worst to ruin the civilization
that was their common mother, was apt to be yesterday's nursery-garden,
in which the civilization of today had been brought up as a seedling
before being bedded out farther afield.1
For example, the plain traversed by the Lower Yellow River, which
in a post-Confucian Age of Sinic history was the principal battlefield of
surrounding Great Powers that had arisen on the periphery of an expand-
ing Sinic World, had previously been the domicile of the Chou Dynasty
and of a preceding Shang Dynasty's surviving successor-states, which in
an earlier age had been the Great Powers of the Sinic World and the seed-
beds of the culture that had come to prevail throughout the Sinic World
in the subsequent Age of the peripheral Contending States. In Hel-
lenic history corresponding roles were played by Continental European
Greece and Sicily, and in Western history by Northern Italy and
Flanders. Continental European Greece and Sicily, which in the third
and second centuries b.c. were the battlefields of post-Alexandrine
Hellenic Powers of the calibre of Egypt, Macedon, Carthage, Rome, and
the Seleucid Monarchy, had been the domiciles of city-states that had
been the Great Powers of a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic World and the
seed-beds of an expanded Hellenic Civilization's post-Alexandrine phase
of culture. Northern Italy, which from ajd. 1494 to a.d. 1866 was one
of the two principal battlefields of the Great Powers of the Modern Age
of Western history, and Flanders, which was their other principal battle-
field down to ajx 1918, had in a preceding constellation of forces been
the domiciles of city-states that had been the Great Powers of a Medieval
Western city-state cosmos and the seed-beds of the Western Civiliza-
tion's Modern phase of culture.
It will be seen that these examples of peripeteia—the reversal of roles
—in the play of the Balance of Power conform to a uniform pattern; and
in Western history, by the time of writing, this pattern of events had
repeated itself. In a twentieth-century Western World the nation-states
that had been the Great Powers in the Modem chapter of Western his-
tory had been overtaken in their turn, since the transition to a post-
Modem chapter, by the peripeteia which they themselves had inflicted
once upon a time, at the preceding transition to the Modern chapter of
Western history rrom a Medieval chapter, upon the city-states that had
been the Western World's Great Powers in a foregoing Medieval Age.
Since the onset of the series of world wars that had opened in ajd. 1914,
France, Germany, Spain,* and Britain,3 as well as Italy and Belgium,
1 See I. i. 19, for the performance of this part by Northern Italy in a Medieval over-
ture to a. Modern chapter of Western history. See further II. iL 263, and the |	—
in III. iii, cited on p. 486, n. 3.
_     .	..    , rof AJ
In the Civil War of a.d. 1936-9, which, trader the guise of being a domestic conflict,
had been a local prelude to the international war of a.d. 1930-45.
3 In the attacks from the air to wbiehshe had been subject from
A.D, 1940 to A.D. 1945.