746 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

chances of royal and ministerial talents are multiplied, at least, with the
number of its rulers; and a Julian, or Semiramis, may reign in the North,
while Arcadius and Honorius again slumber on the thrones of the South.
The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual influence of fear and
shame; republics have acquired order and stability; monarchies have
imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at least, of moderation; and some
sense of honour and justice is introduced into the most defective constitu-
tions by the general manners of the times. In peace, the progress of know-
ledge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many active rivals:
in war, the European forces are exercised by temperate and undecisive
contests. If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary,
he must repeatedly vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous
armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen
of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common defence.
Should the victorious Barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the
Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit
the remains of Civilised Society; and Europe would revive and nourish in
the American World, which is already filled with her colonies and institu-
tions.'1

In this brilliant appreciation of the cost, in loss of liberty, initiative,
and variety, which is the price of gaming unity and fraternity under
the aegis of an oecumenical empire, Gibbon is implicitly contradicting
his own major thesis that the Antonine Age had been the Golden Age
of Hellenic history. Yet even in the present passage he shows no sign of
any awareness of the obvious truth that, if, in the generation of Augus-
tus, the Hellenic World did bring itself to buy unity and fraternity at an
exorbitant price, this purchase must have come, by Augustus's day, to
be a matter of life and death for the Hellenic World. In other words,
Gibbon fails to recognize the two historical truths that the Pax Augusta

f's tardy response to the challenge of
Troubles and that the weak points, as
well as the strong points, of the Roman Empire only become intelligible
when they are viewed against this historical background; and his blind-
ness to these two truths is the penalty for an antecedent failure to recog-
nize a prior truth; for he has also failed to recognize that an Hellenic
Time of Troubles which had preceded and evoked the organization of a
Roman Peace had arisen out of the breakdown, in the fifth century B.C.,
of a felicitous but also precarious equilibrium between the two conflict-
ing social forces of oecumenicalism and parochialism which had been a
counterpart, in fifth-century Hellas, of the delicate equilibrium between
the same two forces in the Western World of Gibbon's day.

The virtues of this regime of diversity-in-unity, which have been
indicated by Gibbon in an introductory paragraph already quoted in
this Annex, are enlarged upon in the present paragraph with the same
masterly touch. Yet, in spite of the fact that the parallel between a classi-
cal Hellas and an eighteenth-century Western Christendom is explicitly

x* [in the original, 8] 'America now contains about six millions of European blood and
descent; and their numbers, at least in the North, are continually increasing. Whatever
may be the changes of their political situation, they must preserve the manners of
Europe; and we may reflect with some pleasure that the English language will probably
be diffused over an immense and populous continent.'