F. THE STRAITS AHEAD

IF the foregoing appreciation of the prospects of the Western Civiliza-
tion hi A.D. 1952 has not fallen altogether wide of the mark, the general
conclusion that is to be drawn from it is not obscure. At this date the
feat that had to be performed by Western navigators on the face of
the waters of History was to pilot their vessel, without disaster, through
perilous straits in the hope of making their way into more open waters
beyond; and in this post-Christian Odyssey there was more than one
passage to be negotiated and more than one kind of ordeal to be faced,

In terms of our Mediterranean maritime simile, we may compare the
social and spiritual enterprise to which these Western adventurers were
committed in the twentieth century of the Christian Era with the navi-
gational task confronting Hellenic mariners m the sixth century B.C. who
had bidden farewell to their Ionian homeland and had set sail westward
rather than submit to the alien dominion of un-Hellenic-minded Achae-
menidae. Following in Odysseus' wake, these Phocaean seafarers would
have first to negotiate the straits between Sicily and Italy without ap-
proaching either an Italian shore where they would be pounced upon by
the monster Scylla or a Sicilian shore where they would be engulfed by
the whirlpool Charybdis; but, if, by managing to steer their course along
the narrow fairway through this first danger-zone, they should succeed
in making the friendly port of Marseilles, they would not there find
themselves at rest in the haven where they would be;1 for their bold and
skilful negotiation of the Straits of Messina would merely have carried
them from the inner basin into the outer basin of the Mediterranean,
without having liberated them from the imprisoning shores of their land-
locked native sea.

If they were to reach the boundless waters of a globe-encompassing
Ocean, these voyagers must put to sea again from the sheltering harbour
of their mother country's daughter city in order to make for the Straits
of Gibraltar between the Pillars of Hercules, where this pair of menacing
mountains, towering above the African and the European shore and
threatening, from either flank, to fall upon any ship audacious enough to
run the gauntlet without their leave, were visible embodiments of Im-
perial Carthage's decree that no Hellenic vessel was ever to sail on through
this golden gate leading out from the landlocked waters into the main.
And here woe betide the Hellenic mariner who allowed himself to be
intimidated by his adversary's veto into following the Theban Pindar's
poor-spirited advice to his Agrigentine patron Th6r6n.

*And now Ther&n's achievements have carried him to the limit: they
have brought him to the Pillars of Hercules on his long voyage from home;
and what lies beyond this terminus is out of bounds (afiarov) for all men,
wise or witless. I will not pursue this venture. I should deserve to lose my
senses if I did this senseless thing!'2

1 Ps. cvii. 30.

* Pindar: Odes in Honour of Victors in the Olympic Games, Ode iii, 11. 43-45.