LAWS OF NATURE IN CIVILIZATIONS 265

Nicator's son and heir Antiochus I.1 A poetic justice which, within a year
of the murder of Nicator, thus brought the Macedonian Macbeth,
Ptolemy the Thunderbolt, to his death in battle, in a vain attempt to
defend the kingdom whose diadem, he had usurped against the north-
western barbarians' onslaught, had to be purchased by Macedon's
tutelary genius at a veritably prohibitive price.

Du treibst mir's gar zu toll,

Ich furcht', es breche!
Nicht jeden Wochenschluss

Macht Gott die Zeche.

This apprehensive exclamation, wrung from a Goethe who was ob-
serving, with his heart in his mouth, the criminal recklessness of his own
contemporaries, might have been wrung, with no less reason, from a
spectator of the international arena in either the Western World of the
sixteenth century of the Christian Era or the Hellenic World of the Age
of Alexander's successors; yet, in the less turbulent course of Western
history, God's settlement of accounts with Man was relatively long
delayed.

The fate that, in the Hellenic tragedy, a mad-dog militarist Pyrrhus
had brought, by 272 B.C., before the close of the overture, on a small and
backward kingdom on which he had irresponsibly attempted to force
the untenable role of a Great Power was not brought on Sweden by
Charles XII until after the corresponding Western tragedy had entered
on the second of its regular recurrent cycles; and, though Epirus, after
Pyrrhus had got himself killed at Argos in 272 B.C., was allowed to lapse
into the tranquillity of a premature exhaustion, like Sweden after
Charles XIFs defiantly courted death in the trenches before Frederiksten
in A.D. lyig,2 this long since inoffensive little Continental Greek country
was given over to pillage in cold blood by the Roman conqueror of

1 In II. ii. 281, n. i, it has been noticed that the Macedonians invited this barbarian
invasion by their imprudence in first stimulating the European barbarians by an aggres-
sive expansion at their expense in the reign of King Philip Amyntou (regnabat 350-
336 B.C.) and then neglecting this reanimated barbarian frontier in order to turn their
arms against the Achaemenidae and thereafter against one another. The equivalent event
in Early Modern Western history would have been an invasion of Spain on the morrow
of the Battle of St. Quentin (commission 10 August, 1557) by a horde of resurgent
Muwahhid Berbers from the Atlas or Murabit Berbers from the Senegal, with an
impetus that we must imagine to have carried these irrupting barbarians on beyond an
overrun Spain into Italy in one direction and Mexico in the, other. Castile did neglect
her Berber frontier when, after the completion of the conquest of Granada in A.D. 1492,
she failed to follow up her seizure of this last unsubjugated remnant of Andalusia by
a seizure of North-West Africa that was the logical next step in the march of Castilian
imperialism. Instead of concentrating all her military efforts on pushing forward to the
natural frontier offered by the north shore of the Sahara, she made a few half-hearted
descents upon North-West African ports while diverting the best part of her energies to
a conquest of the Americas and to a competition with France for the hegemony over
Italy. Spain, like Macedon, did pay a penalty for having thus looked back after having
put her hand to the plough (Luke be. 62); she exposed herself to the scourge of a piracy
organized by Ottoman corsairs ensconced in North-West African naval bases on which
Spain had neglected to secure her own hold. Yet this nuisance was trivial compared to
the catastrophe that Macedon brought on herself in 379-276 B.C.

z Between A.D. 1494 and A.D. 1952 the only other actor of a leading part in the Western
power game who had lost his life in battle had been one of Charles XII's predecessors
on the throne of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus. Napoleon, like Francis I, had died in his
bed; Hitler had died in his bunker. By contrast, the deaths among eminent participants
in a post-Alexandrine Hellenic power game are too numerous to record.

B 291533: K 2