694 RENAISSANCES

unlike the domain of the Far Eastern Society, was not coextensive with
the domain of the antecedent society to which it was affiliated. The
cradle of the Hellenic Civilization had been the basin of the Aegean
Sea;1 but for some two hundred years after the emergence of an Ortho-
dox Christendom the whole of Continental European Greece and the
Morea, save for a few isolated fortresses, was in the hands of pagan
Slav interlopers, while Continental Asiatic Greece and the islands of the
Archipelago, though they were inside the Orthodox Christian fold, were
playing a subordinate part in the nascent civilization's history. Orthodox
Christendom's cradle lay on the Anatolian Plateau, and the antecedent
civilization to whose domain it approximately corresponded was not the
Hellenic but the Hittite. The only important common ground between
a nascent Orthodox Christendom and a pre-Alexandrine Hellas was the
coastline and immediate hinterland of the Black Sea Straits—above all,
of course, an Orthodox Christian imperial capital at a Constantinople
which had once been the Hellenic city-state founded by Megarian
colonists at Byzantium. This province of the Hellenic World beyond
the Dardanelles had, however, lain outside the original domain of Hellas
round the Aegean, and the planting of Hellenic colonies along the coasts
of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus had not begun before the turn of
the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.

As for the relations between the Hellenic Civilization and Western
Christendom, the earliness of the date of the break-up of the Roman
Empire in the West was matched by the extent of the displacement of
the cradle of Western Christendom from the Hellenic World's Aegean
homeland. The cradle of Western Christendom lay in Gaul, north-west
of the Alps and astride the Rhine, in territory that had not been in-
corporated into the Hellenic World until the eve of the establishment of
the Roman Empire; and in the early centuries of Western history the
Mediterranean seaboard of Gaul in Provence and Languedoc, which had
been won for Hellenism by Roman arms a century earlier than the interior
and had been penetrated, long before that, by Hellenic influences radiating
from Marseilles, played no more important a part than was played in
Orthodox Christian history by a ci-devant Roman province of Asia that
had become the East Roman Empire's Thracensian army-corps district.

We have now to inquire whether the historical law' which we have
inferred from a synoptic examination of these three cases stands or falls
if we bring into the picture the other cases known to us. In another
context2 we have classified fifteen 'related' civilizations3—reckoning the
offshoots of the Far Eastern and Orthodox Christian civilizations
separately from their main bodies—on the criterion of the degree of their
geographical displacement from the antecedent societies to which they
are affiliated. Does this widening of our horizon discredit or vindicate
our tentative 'law' to the effect that the evocation of the ghost of an
antecedent civilization's universal state in the history of an affiliated

1 See IX. viii. 419 and 711-12. 2 In I. i. 132.

3 The Sinic Civilization should be added to this list if we are right in concluding, in
the light of the progress of archaeological discovery since the time when the first six
volumes of this Study were being written, that this Sinic Society had a predecessor in
the shape of the Shang Culture.