266 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

Macedon, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, in 167 B.C., 105 years after Pyrrhus's
death, whereas in A.D. 1952, 233 years after the death of Charles XII,
Sweden was still inviolate, though her fellow ephemera] Great Power
Holland, as well as her two Scandinavian neighbours Denmark and
Norway, had suffered at German hands in A.D. 1940 what Epirus had
suffered at Roman hands in 167 B.C. In A.D. 1952 the ultimate military
and political outcome of a Western Balance of Power that had been
inaugurated in A.D. 1494 was still obscure; and, however ominously
impenetrable might be the darkness that still shrouded the future, an
already accomplished passage of 458 years testified that this Modern and
post-Modern Western Balance of Power, whatever might be the denoue-
ment towards which it was heading, had at any rate already achieved a
decidedly longer run than had been attained by an Hellenic Balance which
Rome had overturned by establishing her sole supremacy in 168 B.C.,
not more than 153 years after the post-Alexandrine Balance had been
inaugurated by tie outbreak of the first fighting between Alexander's
successors.

After these general considerations it will be convenient to set out the
successive occurrences of the war-and-peace cycle in post-Alexandrine
Hellenic history in a tabular form which we can then analyse in the light
of our foregoing table of the corresponding Western phenomena.1

The most striking feature in the history of the post-Alexandrine
Hellenic war-and-peace cycles that our present table throws into relief
is the balefully decisive importance of the Reduplicated General War
of 220-189 B.C.

Before the outbreak of this war, an Hellenic World whose area had
been vastly expanded by the conquests of Alexander the Great had not
constituted a single unitary field of international politics but had con-
sisted of two distinct arenas—one in the Levant and the other in the
Western Basin of the Mediterranean—in which the competition between
Great Powers had been carried on more or less independently; in the
course of the Reduplicated General War of 220-189 B-c- these two arenas
coalesced into one; the political event in which this coalescence was regis-
tered was the treaty of alliance against Rome that King Philip V of Mace-
don rashly concluded with Hannibal in 215 B.C. During the preceding
period each of the two arenas had been infested with an aggressor Power
of its own: the role played by Egypt in the Levant had been played by
Rome in the Ponent.2 After the close of the general war of the first cycle

i See Tables I, p. 255, and II, pp. 268-9.

* It Is noteworthy that both Rome in the first Romano-Punic War (gerekatur 264-
241 B.C.) and Egypt in the contemporaneous general war in the Levant (gerebatur 266-
241 B.c.) employed sea-power as the principal instrument of aggression, whereas, in the

de force, from the land-power that had conquered Italy and had defeated Pyrrhus's
attempt to undo her work there into a sea-power capable of conquering Sicily and
invading North-West Africa from an Italian base of operations. This difference in the
matter of armament between the typical Hellenic and the typical Western aggressor
Power was the corollary of a corresponding difference in geographical structure between
the Hellenic and the Western World. The Hellenic World, throughout its history, was
centred on a landlocked sea—the Aegean Basin at the beginning of the story and
eventually the Mediterranean Basin as a whole. The geographical expansion of the