ARE LAWS INEXORABLE OR CONTROLLABLE? 345
at least some of them had caught a Pisgah sight of a saving alternative
solution, even though none of them had ever yet succeeded in translating
this ideal into an achievement.

In the Hellenic World, for example, the vision of a Homonoia or Con-
cord that might do what Force could never do towards healing a deadly
strife between contending states and contending social classes, and even
between contending civilizations, had unquestionably been caught by
certain rare Hellenic souls1 under the spiritual stress of a Time of
Troubles that had set in at the outbreak of the Atheno-Peloponnesian
War of 431-404 B.C.—even though this glimpse of a happier alternative
possibility had not availed to save the Hellenic Society from continuing
to tread the path of destruction to the point at which a temporary re-
prieve had been purchased, through the imposition of a Roman Peace, at
the cost of making the Hellenes' descent of Avernus irretrievable. In a
post-Modern Western World the same ideal had been embodied, in
response to the challenge of two successive world wars, in two successive
oecumenical institutions—in the League of Nations after the War of AJX
1914-18, and in the United Nations Organization after the War of A.D.
1939-45. In Sinic history during the Sinic Society's first rally after its
breakdown, Confucius's zeal for the revivification of a traditional code of
conduct and ritual and Lao-tse's quietist belief in leaving a free field for
the spontaneous operation of the subconscious psychic forces of WuWei3
had both been inspired by a yearning to touch springs of feeling that
might release a saving power of spiritual harmony; and in the Sinic, as
in the Western, World this yearning had also found institutional expres-
sion. In 681—679/8 B.C., for example, at a date when the progressive
assertion of rival parochial sovereignties de facto was already threatening
the Sinic Society with the breakdown that it eventually brought upon
itself in 634 B.C., an attempt was made to provide an effective substitute
for a now shadowy oecumenical presidency of the Imperial House of
Chou by an international recognition of the hegemony of one of the
leading parochial Powers of the day;3 and at least two Powers in turn

1 There could be no doubt that this idea -which was at the same time an ideal had
made its epiphany in the Hellenic World in the course of its Time of Troubles; the only
point in dispute between latter-day Western scholars was the question: Whose soul was
it that was to be given the credit for having caught the vision first? For the debate
between the respective champions of Alexander of Macedon and Zeno of Cmum, see V.
vi. 6, n. 4. Since the publication of that volume of the present Study, the debate had
been carried farther. Alexander's advocate, Sir W. Tarn, had expounded his theory more
fully in his masterly work Alexander the Great (Cambridge 1948, University Press, 2
vols.); and, according to this exposition (in op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 447-8), Alexander's ideas
about Brotherhood and Unity could be seen to be 'three facets of a single idea':

'The first is the statement that all men are brothers; Alexander was the first man
known to us, at any rate in the West, to say so plainly and to apply it to the whole Human
Race, without distinction of Greek or Barbarian. The second thing is bis belief that he
had a divine mission to be the harmonizer and reconciler of the World, to bring it to
pass that all men, being brothers, should live together in Homonoia, in unity of heart
and mind. . . . The third thing . . . was the desire, expressed in the libation and prayer
at Opis, that all the peoples in bis realm should be partners and not merely subjects/

In Classical Philology; vol. xlv, No. 3, July 1950, Tarn's contentions had been disputed
by Philip Merlan in a paper under the title * Alexander the Great or Antiphon the
Sophist?' in which the writer argues that 'the idea of the equality of all men, Greeks and
Barbarians alike', had been "proclaimed, a century before Alexander the Great', by the
fifth-century Athenian man of letters Antiphon in his work called Truth.

2 See III. iii. 187 and V. v, 416-19.

3 The first h£gem£n in the series, Huan, the prince of the parochial state Ts i, secured