264 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

through three subsequent regular cycles before it had begun to get out

of hand.

The difference in temper between the Western gladiatorial combat of
A.D. 1494-1559 and the Hellenic combat 05321-281 B.C. can be measured
by the difference between the personal fates that overtook the principal
adventurers in the two arenas. The military defeat suffered by Francis I
at Pavia in A.D. 1525 was no less crushing than the overthrows of An-
tigonus at Ipsus in 301 B.C. and Lysimachus at Corupedium in 281 B.C.,
yet the worst that happened to Francis was to have to spend rather less
than a year as a prisoner of war and to ransom himself at the price of
undertaking to marry his adversary's sister and to renounce his claims
to the Italian and Burgundian territories that were the stakes in his
contest with Charles V. There was never any serious question of the
destruction or even subjugation of a Kingdom of France which had
brought upon itself this prostrating blow; and Francis had no sooner
recovered his liberty and his throne than he broke the promises in
exchange for which he had been released, and resumed a struggle that
was fraught with no mortal danger either for his person or for his realm.
Francis lived to die in his bed more than twenty-two years after the day
on which he had been taken prisoner on the battlefield of Pavia. There
is a piquant contrast between the impunity with which Francis thus
played with fire and the experiences of an Antigonus and a Lysimachus,
whose realms perished with them on the battlefield.

There were no such fatal casualties in the Western gladiatorial contest
of A.D. 1494-1559; and the contrast between the characters of the Western
and the Hellenic episode comes out still more sharply when we pass on
to compare the respective fates of the victors. The worst that happened
to Charles V was to become so weary of his Sisyphean task that he
insisted on sloughing off his public burdens on to other shoulders and
retiring into private life under conditions skilfully devised to give his
body its long-overdue rest without prejudice to the long-neglected wel-
fare of his soul. Like a discomfited Francis I, a disillusioned Charles V
died in his bed; and this tame death did not overtake him till more than
thirty-three years after a victory at Pavia whose aftermath had been still
more ironically disappointing for the victor than it had been for his
vanquished opponent. A more tragic destiny was in store for Charles V's
Hellenic counterpart Seleucus Nicator, who, after overthrowing and
slaying his last adversary, was foully murdered in his old age by a
younger and more unscrupulous adventurer, to whom he had rashly
given his confidence, before he had satisfied his heart's desire to set eyes
once again on a Macedonian homeland which he had not seen for fifty-
four years.

The mutual exhaustion of the belligerents in this last round (debella-
tum 282-281 B.C.) of the Wars of Alexander's Succession was so extreme
that a Macedon from which an Alexander had gone forth, conquering
and to conquer,1 in 334 B.C. was overrun in 279 B.C. by barbarians from
a North European hinterland who went on in 278 B.C. to cross the
Dardanelles and break into the vast Asiatic dominions of Seleucus

1 Rev. vi. 2.