356 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

Great Power were both performed in the same act by an Augustus who
combined a revolutionary dictatorship within the Roman body politic
with a providential mission for the salvation of the Hellenic World in a
personal union between the dens ex machina and the boss which made
this Janus-headed statesman as great a hero in the eyes of Rome's
intolerably oppressed subjects as it made him a villain in the eyes of a
tardily chastened Roman senatorial aristocracy which had so long and
so abominably abused its power.

This progressive acceleration of the Romans' pace in the course of
Hellenic history is, of course, merely one outstanding example of the
forced marches made by peoples on the fringes of a society's domain
in order to catch up with more precociously cultivated peoples living
nearer to the society's heart. In Minoan history, for instance, we catch
glimpses—even through Archaeology's dark glass—of the Peloponnese
progressively catching up with the Cyclades and Crete, Central Greece
with the Peloponnese, and Thessaly with Central Greece.1 When
Thessaly passed out of her Neolithic into her Chalcolithic Age circa
2000 B.C., she was no less than 1,000 years behind the Peloponnese, the
Cyclades, and Crete, which had all made the same transition circa 3000
B.C., and was 500 years behind even Central Greece, which had parted
company from Thessaly by emerging from the Neolithic Age circa
2500 B.C. Thereafter, when Thessaly made the subsequent transition
from the Chalcolithic Age to the Bronze Age circa 1580 B.C., she was
only 620 years behind the Peloponnese, which had crossed the same line
circa 2200 B.C., and no more than 820 years behind the Cyclades and
Crete, which had crossed it circa 2400 B.C. At the end of the Minoan
story, circa 1200 B.C., Thessaly plunged out of the civilization of the
Bronze Age into the barbarism of the Iron Age2 neck and neck with all
the other provinces of a dissolving Minoan World—which means that,
during the 380 years 1580-1200 B.C., Thessaly had covered the cultural
distance which it had taken the Cyclades and Crete the 1200 years
2400-1200 B.C. to traverse. This series of comparative dates indicates
that, in Thessaly in the time of the Minoan Civilization, there was a
progressive acceleration of the cultural tempo in the course of eight
hundred years ending at the turn of the thirteenth and twelfth cen-
turies B.C.

Beyond the outermost marches of a civilization's geographical domain
there lies a limbo tenanted by primitive societies whose children are
potential converts to the culture of an adjoining civilization in its growth
stage but become an alienated external proletariat when the civilization
loses its attractiveness as the result of a breakdown.3 In an earlier con-
text4 we have glanced at what happens to these transfrontier barbarians
after the collapse of a universal state's military limes which has been

1 See the chronological chart in Glotz, G.: La Civilisation ]£g4ene (Paris 1923, La
Renaissance du Livre), pp. 28-31. Glotz's dating of strata of debris in the Minoan World
is,based on the presence there of objects of Egyptiac provenance which have made it
possible at least tentatively to translate the relative terms of Aegean stratigraphy into the
absolute terms of Egyptiac chronology from the date of the Eighteenth Dynasty's
1~*"™"ration onwards. a See III. iii. 160-1.

v. 194-310. * In VIII. viii. 45-72.