284 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

220-189 B.C. and the confirmation of this result in the supplementary
wars of 171-146 B.C. In the forms of civil war, social revolution, and
barbarian invasion, the rhythmic bouts of disorder continued to recur
throughout the history of an Hellenic universal state which Augustus
had founded and which Diocletian afterwards rehabilitated, until the
onset of a final bout of such severity that this time the moribund society
was unable to rally its depleted vital forces. There was the eruption of
A.D. 66—70; the convulsion, ending with the accession of Diocletian in
A.D. 284, whose beginning may be dated from the assassination of
Alexander Severus in A.D. 235 or indeed from the death of Marcus
Aurelius in A.I>. 180; and the recurrent convulsion of A.D. 376-394, which
proved fatal to the Empire in the West and which was followed in the
Centre and the East by a likewise fatal seizure after Justinian's death in

A.D. 565.

We could go on to analyse on the same lines the histories of other
universal states that we have identified in this Study, and, besides taking
account of social revolutions, civil wars, and barbarian invasions, we
could also bring into our panorama the warfare with neighbouring
Powers representing alien civilizations. The Roman Empire, for example,
served from 64 B.C. to A.D. 632 as the warden of a post-Alexandrine
Hellenic World's marches over against a resurgent Syriac Power clothed
in the successive forms of the Arsacid and the Sasanid Empire;1 and an
Ottoman Empire which had provided the main body of Orthodox
Christendom with an alien universal state found itself recurrently at
war with Hungary and Hungary's successor the Hapsburg Monarchy in
the Danube Basin, with Venice and with Spain in the Mediterranean,
and with the Safawi Power in South-West Asia.

Our purpose, however, is, not to make an exhaustive survey of war-
and-peace cycles, but to carry our investigation far enough to assemble
adequate evidence for judging whether there is, or is not, any uniform
common rhythm discernible in different series of such cycles that are
sufficiently remote from one another in date and location to be reason-
ably regarded as being mutually independent; and for this oositive pur-
pose a wider expansion of our field of vision might be less illuminating
than a closer comparative view of the three series that we have now
examined in some detail. We may therefore conclude the present chapter
by juxtaposing our three series with an eye to ascertaining whether the
likeness between them, which we have already observed, is no more than
a similarity in their general structure, or whether it extends to a chrono-
logical correspondence between the lengths of the Time-spans of the
alternating bouts of warfare and spells of peace out of which this more
or less uniforrn structure is built up in all three episodes.

The accompanying table3 sets out, side by side, the data presented
separately in the three preceding tables displaying successive occurrences
of the war-and-peace cycle in Modern and post-Modern Western his-
tory, in post-Alexandrine Hellenic history, and in post-Confucian Sinic
history respectively. In each of the three triple columns of dates in
Table IV, the dates in the column on the left are the historical dates of
i See I. i. 75. a Table IV, opposite.