554 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
to accept Roman citizenship at the cost of, at long last, merging in an
oecumenical body politic a parochial identity which they had been jealous-
ly preserving through the ages. In earlier chapters of Hellenic history there
had been at least two critical occasions—the first in 431 B.C. and the
second in 228 B.C.1—on which Athens and Sparta had remorselessly
sacrificed the Hellenic Society's prospects of attaining an urgently
needed political unity to their own parochial corporate egotism. There
is no record of the re-emergence of this spirit in either Spartan or
Athenian hearts on the historic occasion at the turn of the second and
third centuries of the Christian Era.2

In the history of the Caliphate a corresponding evolution was accom-
plished more swiftly. Little more than a hundred years elapsed between
the political reunification of the Syriac World by the arms of Primitive
Muslim Arab conquistadores in the fourth and fifth decades of the seventh
century of the Christian Era and the Gleichschaltung of the Arab Muslim
'ascendancy' with their non-Arab ex-Christian and ex-Zoroastrian con-
verts and clients as a result of the Khurasan! Iranian Muslim marchmen's
victorious insurrection against the Umayyad regime in A.D. 75o.3

These precedents from Syriac and Hellenic history were good auguries
for the prospect that, in a post-Modern chapter of Western history, a
supra-national commonwealth originally based on the hegemony of
a paramount Power over its satellites might eventually be put on the
sounder basis of a constitutional partnership in which all the people of
all the partner states would have their fair share in the conduct of com-
mon affairs. A constitutional development on these lines seemed as
probable in the long run as it was desirable, but in A.D. 1952 this was
not the first business on Mankind's political agenda. The rock imme-
diately ahead was a sooner or later inevitable transition from a present
political partition of the Oikoumen$ between two rival Powers to a

* See III. iii. 340-1 and IV. iv. 265.

3 Professor William McNeill comments: 'Was Roman citizenship still a privilege by
the time of Caracalla ? Or was it a burden ? Some historians think that the franchise was
extended to all free men for the purpose of making them liable to the citizens' taxes on
inheritances, etc., [in addition to the subjects' taxes, to which they were liable already].
In any case the willingness of the existing citizen body to see new-comers allected to its
ranks will hardly have counted. The act of enfranchisement was surely an administrative
act of a bureaucracy which was by then more or less immune from public opinion—at
least in most matters.'

The present writer's reply would be, in general, that bureaucratic or autocratic govern-
ments, as well as elected representative governments, are amenable to public feeling and
opinion—though their reaction to it may sometimes be slower, and though they may
perhaps be able to go rather farther in the dangerous game of flouting it without being
called to order. In regard to the case in question, his reply, in particular, would be
that this enfranchisement of virtually the whole of the still remaining non-citizen element
in the population of the Roman Empire was followed by the growth of a corporate sense
of imperial patriotism which eventually expressed itself in the coining of the new word
'Romania' to denote a now undivided and homogeneous Roman imperial people's
oecumenical fatherland. This sequel to the Act of A.D. 212 suggests that this Act was
well timed in the sense of having been enacted at a date at which the public feeling of
the divers elements in the population of the Empire was ripe for it; and if it had not
been 'practical polities' in this sense in A.D. 212 it would not, so the writer would guess,
have been possible to enact it in that year merely because of its fiscal attractiveness in the
professional eyes of an imperial bureaucracy. The writer would also guess that even as
recently as the reign of Hadrian (imperabat A.D. 117-38) it would not yet have been
'practical politics* to enact the provisions of the Canstitutio Antoniniana of A.D. 212,
however attractive the measure might have been to the bureaucracy already at this
earlier date. 3 See II. ii. 141 and VI. vii. 147-52.