TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 529
also to be other bones of contention between Rome and Parthia besides
Armenia, and these divers chronic disputes were to erupt into occasional
wars. Nevertheless, the detente of 23-20 B.C. was as auspicious as it was
historic; for it set a tone which governed the relations between the
Roman Empire and its eastern neighbour on the whole for not much
less than six hundred years thereafter;1 and the tradition of moderation
that thus came to prevail in the relations between the western and the
eastern Power in a partitioned Hellenic World was not easily overcome
by the deliberately banned spirit of militancy.

When Trajan strained Roman resources almost to breaking-point by
reverting to the Alexandrine Oriental ambitions of Mark Antony,
Caesar, and Crassus, the Augustan policy of self-restraint was promptly
readopted by Trajan's immediate successor Hadrian; and, after this
Hadrianic liquidation of a Trajanic adventure, a 'temperate and undeci-
sive' border warfare that continued occasionally to interrupt a normal
state of peace was not converted into a holy war either by the hold that
Zoroastianism gained over the later Arsacid princes of the Parthian
line or by their Sasanid successors' act of officially establishing the
Zoroastrian Church as the state church of their empire. The friction
between the Roman trustees of Hellenism and the Iranian trustees of
a temporarily submerged but never extinguished Syriac Civilization
did not rankle into a life-and-death struggle until the two Powers fell
into the reduplicated Romano-Persian war of A.D. 572-91 andA.D. 603—
28; and it was only in the course of the second of the two bouts of this
long-drawn-out struggle that a political conflict came to be inflamed
into an ordeal by battle between the fanatical adherents of two rival
faiths.

In the particular social circumstances of a Westernizing World in
the twentieth century of the Christian Era, in which time was needed
for the breeding of familiarity, the danger of an atomic world war, which
loomed large in A.D. 1952, might be expected to recede if American
and Russian statesmanship could contrive to keep the peace even for
a much shorter period than the time for which it had been kept between
the Roman and Parthian empires in virtue of the detente of 23-20 B.C.;
but in this case, as in that, the task of statesmanship would not be
easy.2 A consideration that seemed likely to tell hi favour of a preserva-

1 From first to last the Euphratean frontier of the Roman Empire endured for nearly
seven hundred years, running from Fompey's organization of the province of Syria in
64 B.C. to the irruption of the Primitive Muslim Arab barbarian invaders into the Roman
and Sasanian empires simultaneously in and after A.D. 632 (see I. i. 75).

z Professor William McNeill comments: 'I feel that the Rome-Carthage relationship
is a far more convincing parallel to contemporary conditions than the Rome-Parthia
relationship. In the relations between Rome and_ Parthia mortal fear and the density of
contact were, I believe, absent/ The present writers comment on this comment is that
it was not too much to expect of American and Russian statesmanship in the sixth decade
of the twentieth century of the Christian Era that it should stabilize the relation between
the United States and the Soviet Union on a Romano-Parthian basis and save it from
degenerating into a Romano-Carthaginian 'irrepressible conflict'. Some of the obstacles
to the achievement of the statesmen's task in the encounter between the United States
and the Soviet Union are examined in the remainder of this chapter. These obstacles
were manifestly formidable. Yet the present writer would submit that, when the
obstacles had been looked in the face and had been estimated at their highest possible
magnitude, it would still be a culpable surrender to despair—or, more culpable still, to
mere impatience—if the statesmen were to resign themselves to the conclusion that a