SINIC AND HELLENIC UNIVERSAL STATES 657
ceed in threading their southward way through this watery maze and
floundering out again without having been bogged, they would then
straightway find themselves confronted with a broad belt of forest-clad
highlands over which they would have to force a passage if they were
bent on descending upon their Sinic victims' last ditch on the South
China Coast. The strength of this Sinic Testung Siidland' was demon-
strated in A.D. 383, when a supreme effort to conquer the refugee 'Tsin*
Dynasty's Southern Empire was made by a northern barbarian empire-
builder of Tibetan origin, 'Ts'in* Fu Kien (imperabat A.D. 350-85),x
who had momentarily united under his own rule all the barbarian
successor-states of the former 'United Tsin' Empire in the North. This
barbarian invasion of the South in A.D. 383 met with a crushing disaster
before it had penetrated beyond the basin of the River Huai ;2 and the
barbarian rulers of the North learnt this lesson so well that, as we have
seen, the indigenous Southern Empire survived thereafter for 172 years
(A.D. 383-555) intact, and for 206 years (A.D. 383-589) in an attenuated
form, till it was eventually united with the North by a Northern Power
with barbarian antecedents in whose £thos a hereditary barbarism had
been winnowed out, by the date of the Sui Dynasty's accession to
power in A.D. 581, through the persistent counter-influence of a still
radioactive Sinic culture that had been playing upon the barbarian
interlopers in the North for no less than four hundred years by the
date of the Sui's conquest of the Ch'en.

Thus the continental physiography of the Sinic World enabled Han
empire-builders to provide the Sinic culture with a natural fortress in
the South which proved impregnable to the Eurasian Nomad barbarian
conquerors of the North. In contrast to the physical structure of the
Sinic World, the physiography of the Hellenic World was not con-
tinental but maritime, and the corresponding structure of the Roman
Empire partly accounts for the Hellenic universal state's relative ill-
success in foiling its barbarian invaders.

Whereas the Sinic Civilization had spread from river basin to river
basin—originating in the Basin of the Yellow River and expanding into
the Basin of the Yangtse—the Hellenic Civilization had spread from
the shores of a lesser inland sea round the circumference of a greater
one. It had come to birth between the Asiatic and European shores of
the Aegean;3 and in the penultimate phase of its decline4 it had been
unified politically by Roman empire-builders within the framework of
a 'thalassocracy' commanding the entire perimeter of the Mediter-

1 See Franke, O.: Gesckichte des CMnesischen Reiche$> vol. ii (Berlin and Leipzig 1936,
de Gruyter), pp. 80-101.

2 See ibid., pp. 95-97. The date of this decisive battle, -which was fought in the
angle between the Huai and its tributary the Fei, is given as A.0. 387, not 383, by
C. P. Fitzgerald in China, A Short Cultural History (London 1935, Cresset Press),
p. 257. 3 See IX. viii. 711-12.

4 The first attempt to provide the Hellenic World with a universal state had been
made within the confines of Hellenism's Aegean cradle; but by the year 478 B.C,, -which
saw the establishment of this abortive Athenian 'thalassocracy', the Hellenic World had
already expanded far beyond these original limits; and, when, in 415 B.C., the Athenians
sought to make their 'thalassocracy' coextensive with the contemporary domain of
Hellenism by attempting to conquer Sicily, this enterprise proved to be so much beyond
their strength that it led them into a disaster which was ultimately fatal to their 'thalasso-
cracy' even within its more modest previous Aegean bounds.