LAWS OF NATURE IN CIVILIZATIONS 271
four generations. In the Reduplicated General War of 220-189 B.C.
there was no reflorescence of the chivalry that had been shown on both
sides during Demetrius Poliorce'tes* siege of Rhodes in 305-304 B.C. and
that had afterwards been shown to Demetrius, after his final surrender
in 285 B.C., by Seleucus Nicator; and, if in this post-Hannibalic chapter
of Hellenic history there was nothing to compare with these earlier
mitigations of the barbarity of War, a fortiori there was no counterpart
of the social solidarity which, in the halcyon days of a delusively
promising antecedent spell of peace, the Hellenic World had displayed
when, in 227 B.C., kings, princes, and city-states had vied with one
another in contributing to the relief of Rhodes after this ornament of
a post-Alexandrine Hellenic World had been laid in ruins by an earth-
quake.1

A comparison of our two tables brings out the further fact that, in
recurrences of cycles of War and Peace, inter-state wars and civil wars
are equivalent to one another and are interchangeable. We have noticed
already2 that, in the Modern Western episode, a series of wars that came
to be fought as inter-state wars between France, Spain, and other
parochial states was inaugurated by a civil war between two branches of
the French House of Valois. Conversely, in the post-Alexandrine
Hellenic episode, a series of wars that was similarly inaugurated by a
civil war between rival successors of the Macedonian Argead king Alex-
ander the Great, and that then similarly passed over into inter-state wars
between Egypt, Asia, Macedon, Rome, and Carthage, was not brought
to an end by Rome's overthrow of the last surviving rival Power in
168 B.C., but ran on thereafter through a second cycle into a third cycle
in the form of a succession of civil wars within the bosom of a now
oecumenical Roman Commonwealth.

The War-and-Peace Cycle in post-Confucian Sinic History

If we now enlarge our field of historical vision by bringing into our
synoptic view the episode of Sinic history traditionally known as the
'Period of the Contending States* (Chan Kuo), we shall detect corre-
spondences between this post-Confucian chapter of Sinic history and
both the post-Alexandrine chapter of Hellenic history and the Modern
and post-Modern chapters of Western history—and this not only in the
general features of the historical landscape but also in the particular
structure of the successive war-and-peace cycles.

Like those other two series, this Sinic series of cycles was originally
set in motion by a struggle for possession of the derelict heritage of a
former Great Power in which there had been a breakdown of the central
government. The heritages of Alexander the Great and of Charles the
Bold, which had been the original apples of discord in the post-Alexan-
drine Hellenic and in the Modern Western episode, had their counter-
part in the post-Confucian Sinic episode in the heritage of the state of
Tsin,3 which fell to pieces in the fifth century B.C. after having played
a leading part in a previous chapter of Sinic history as one of two prin-

* See Polybius: Oecumenical History, Book V, chaps. 88-90.

3 In the present volume on pp. 237-81 above. 3 See v. vi. 293-4,