By request I've saved the Toybee material and it's available here. See particularly p. 26.

{VIII.A.p.2}...The fluid from of a running warfare is neither so definite nor impassable a barrier as is the military frontier (limes) into which the fluid front crystallizes when the stage of stationary warfare is reached.¹ The contrast in configuration and character between an original limen-zone and an eventual limes-line is the geographical expression of the conditions that generate an heroic age.

An heroic age is, in fact, the social and psychological consequence of the crystallization of a limes, and our purpose in this Part is to trace this sequence of events by our customary empirical method of investigation. A necessary background to this undertaking is, of course, a survey of the barbarian war-bands that had breasted the divers sectors of the limites of divers universal states during the history of Man in Process of Civilization up to date. A survey of this kind has already been attempted in a previous Part.² In that place, a considerable muster of barbarian war-bands has been reviewed, and in passing, we have also there taken note of their distinctive achievements in the two fields of sectarian religion and epic poetry. In our present inquiry this foregoing survey can be drawn upon for purposes of illustration without having to be recapitulated.

¹ See V. v. 208. Ibn Khaldūn defines the frontier of an empire as the lines at which the imperial government's authority peters out. 'A dynasty is much more powerful at its seat of government than it is at the extremities of its empire'. He compares the loss of energy in the radiation of its power to the gradual dying away of rays of light streaming out from the central point, or of the circular ripple which spread over the surface of a piece of water when one strikes it (Muqaddamāt, translated by de Slane, Baron McG. (Paris 1863-8, Imprimerie Impériale, 3 vols.) vol. I, p. 332).
² In V. v. 210-237


(1) A Social Barrage
(2) The Accumulation of Pressure

The Wreckful Siege of Battering Days'

{VIII.C.p.13}...'A long period of '"education"', in which a semi-civilized people has been profoundly affected from without by the influence of a civilized people,³ is the necessary prelude⁴ to the 'heroic age' in which the barbarians have their fling when a sagging and tottering limes at last collapses.

³ Chadwick, The Heroic Age, p. 458.
⁴ Apropos of the Serb heroic age at the climax of the Orthodox Christian Time of Troubles, after the Bulgarian and East Roman Empires and before the imposition of the Pax Ottomanica, Chadwick points out in op. cit., on p. 448, that, 'here again..., as in the Teutonic and Cumbrian heroic ages, we have the case of a semi-civilized and "juvenile" nation exposed for a long period to the influences of a civilized but decaying empire'. Chadwick has, in fact, established an historical 'law' to the effect that the precipitation of an heroic age is normally the cumulative effect of the radiation of a decaying civilization into a primitive society over a period of time that is to be measured not in years, but in generations. Since the publication of Chadwick's The Heroic Age in A.D. 1912 it had, however, been demonstrated by Hitler that a diabolically perverse process of mis-education can artificially produce the same psychological effect in a community that has advanced as far along the path of civilization as pre-Nazi Germany, and that, under these artificial conditions, the process of barbarization can be so greatly speeded up as to be 'telescoped' into the span of a single generation. The deliberate uprooting of the boys and youths of Nazi Germany from the habit, expectation, and love of a settled life by the systematic application of Modern Western methods of mass-suggestion had evoked a caricature of an heroic age by a process of 'speeding-up' that was counterpart, on a psychological plane, of the visual effect produced by speeding up the display of a film.

The Impracticality of a Policy of Non-Intercourse

The erection of a limes sets in motion a play of social forces which is bound to end disastrously for the builders. A policy of non-intercourse with the barbarians beyond is quite impracticable. Whatever the imperial government may decide, the interests of traders, pioneers, adventurers, and so forth will inevitably draw them beyond the frontier.

The Barbarians Exploitation of their Civilized Neighbours' Weapons

{VIII.C.p.16} The transfrontier barbarian is not, however, content simply to practice the superior tactics which he has learnt from an adjoining civilization without proceeding to adapt them to the local terrain.
Ex hypothesi he already has the initial advantage of being at home in a theatre of military operation in which his opponent is a stranger, since the limes is situated in barbarian territory which the civilization has occupied, up to this line, by force of arms in an aggressive previous chapter of history. When the barbarian combines his hereditary mastery of the local situation with a creative adaptation of borrowed weapons and tactics, superior to his own, to suit the local conditions of warfare, he becomes formidable indeed. His best opportunities for putting his civilized adversary at this military disadvantage arise where the local terrain displays some strongly pronounced physical characteristic which is unfamiliar and adverse to the civilized belligerent and yet at the same time lends itself to the employment, with adroit modifications, of weapons and tactics that have been borrowed from him by his barbarian antagonist.

The Barbarians Exploitation of their Native Terrain

{p.19} On the local anti-barbarian frontiers of the still surviving parochial states of a Westernizing World which, at the time of this writing, embraced all but a fraction of the total habitable and traversable surface of the planet, two of the recalcitrant barbarian's faithful non-human allies had already been outmanœvered by a Modern Western industrial technique. The Forest had long since fallen victim to cold steel, while the Steppe, from its parkland fringe to its desert heart, had been penetrated by the petrol-driven internal combustion engine of the aeroplane and the terrestrial motor vehicle travelling on the treads of a revolving belt over
{p.20} terrain where wheels could no longer convey it. The barbarian's mountain ally, however, had proved a harder nut to crack, and the nineteenth-century Russian feat of taming the Caucuses and twentieth-century French feat of taming the Atlas and the Rīf had not yet been emulated by any corresponding domestication of either the western of the eastern rim of the Iranian Plateau. At this date the serried tiers of the Zagros Range, astride a theoretical Perso-Turkish and Perso-‛Irāqī frontier, were still serving as fastnesses for wild Kurds, Lūrs, Bakhtiyārīs, and the motley wild highlanders of Fars, while the Sulaymān Range and its ramifications were performing the same service for wild Pathans and Balūchīs who were hardly conscious of a theoretical Indo-Afghan frontier that had been drawn across the map of their homelands in A.D. 1893 and had been inherited in A.D. 1947 from a British Indian Empire by a Pakistan that was one of its three successor-states.

{p.22} 'The elaborate and costly equipment which had been invented on the European battlefields of the General War [of A.D. 1914-1918], in operations on level ground between two highly organised armies, was very much less effective when employed against parties of tribesmen lurking in a tangle of mountains.'¹

On the other hand,

'as a fighting man the Wazīr and the Mahsūd, always more particularly the latter, when in his own country, may be classed very high, Agile and enduring, he is possessed on his own hillsides of an astonishing mobility, which is intensified by complete disregard of impedimenta, as well as by a natural hardiness that greatly simplifies all supply problems. His skill with the small -bore rifle is considerable, and is only surpassed by a great capacity to exploit the slightest weakness shown by his enemy. Disregard of methods of security on the one hand, a too slavish routine in these faults have been repeatedly penalized by the Mahsūd and Wazīr. The tribesman is gifted with untiring patience and vigilance in observing an enemy when the latter is on the move, a characteristic which makes it extremely difficult to outflank or to surprise him. He is an expert in the attack of detached posts and in the surprise of small parties. This skill may be enhanced by the employment of ruses which can justly be stigmatized as closely akin to treachery.' ²

¹ Toynbee, A.J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. i (London 1927, Milford), p. 557).
² de Watteville, H.: Waziristan, 1919-1920 (London 1925, Constable), p. 23. Evidence bearing out this appreciation will be found passim. There are striking examples on pp. 130, 156, 207-9, and 213. The quotations from this book have been made with the permission of the publishers.

The Besieged Civilization's Inability to Redress the Balance by Recourse of Organization and Technique

{p.25} In an economically complex civilization with a money economy, any increase in the numerical strength of a regular standing army entails a corresponding increase in the pressure of taxation upon national income. The division of an intolerably large, and still insatiably growing, proportion of a dwindling national income to meet rising costs of public services is the most conspicuous of the social maladies that were the death of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century and in the Centre and East in the seventh century of the Christian Era; and, while the cause of this cancerous growth of the fiscal burden on the backs of the Roman Imperial Government's subjects was an increase in the personnel of the Imperial Civil Service to fill an administrative vacuum arising from the progressive decay of local-government,⁵ a second cause—which would probably turn out to have been by far the more potent of the two, if all relevant figures were known to us—was the increase in the man-power of the Imperial Army which was required in order to meet the increase in the transfrontier barbarians' military efficiency. We do know that, in the annual budgets of the British Rāj in India during the last century of its existence, the coast of defence (which, in practice, meant the defence of the North-West Frontier) was an item that absorbed a disconcerting proportion of the revenue.⁶

{p. 26} Thus, if the chronic warfare between the defenders and assailants of a limes is waged in terms of competitive staying power, the defence is bound to collapse sooner or later, since, so far as it is able to hold its own, it can achieve this only by exerting an effort which becomes more and more disproportionate to the effort exacted from its increasingly efficient barbarian adversaries.¹ In this situation there are two obvious courses to which the defence may resort in the hope of arresting, by one means or other, the progressive deterioration of its own capacity for organization and technique, in which a civilization is superior to its barbarian neighbours almost ex hypothesi or its barbarian adversaries' capacity for taking military advantage of the local terrain through which the limes runs. These two policies of elaborating its own organization and armaments and of recruiting barbarian man-power are not, of course, mutually exclusive, and a harassed Power behind a limes had usually resorted to both in its desperate search for some means of reversing the accelerating inclination of the scales of war in its barbarian opponents' favour which is the inexorable effect of the passage of Time on a frontier where the civilized party is content to remain passive.

¹ The difference in the degree of the effort required from a civilized army and from a barbarian war-band in order to produce an equal quantum of military effect was once expressed in quaintly concrete financial terms by a correspondent of the present writer's in a comparison between the respective performances of the British Army and the Hijīzā Army against the Turkish Army in the General War of A.D. 1914-18. 'From first to last, the military operations of the Hijīzā Army accounted for 65,000 Turkish troops at the cost of less than £100 per head of subsidy, whereas in the British Army's operations against the Turks, each Turkish casualty or prisoner cost from £1500 to £2000' (Toynbee, A.J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. i (London 1927, Milford), p. 283, n. 2).

{p.28} This attempt to solve the problem of defence by an improvements in organization, which was such a brilliant failure in the military history of the Diocletianic Roman Empire, had brought in better returns to Powers burdened with anti-barbarian frontiers in a Modern Western World. General Sir C.C. Monro's lightning victory over the Afghans in A.D. 1919 was a triumph of organization in a sudden emergency; Marchal Lyautey's gradual pacification of the Atlas highlands between A.D. 1907 and A.D. 1934³ was a still more signal triumph of organization applied to the deliberate execution of a long-term plan; and these are merely two illustrations out of a multitude lying ready to the historian's hand. In the policy of Modern Western imperial governments, however, the resort to organization as a means of redressing an unfavourable inclining balance in the defence of a limes was overshadowed by the resort to technique in an age when Western technology was advancing at an unprecedented pace in to a previously undreamed-of wonderland of scientific discovery and practical 'know-how'.

In such circumstance the Western parties to the conflict between Civilization and barbarism might well feel confident of being able to set so hot a pace in the progressive application of technology to border warfare that their barbarian competitors would find themselves run off their
{p.29} feet. If the barbarian had shown himself able to procure from abroad and even passably imitate at home a relatively simple product of the Modern Western technique, such as an up-to-date breach-loading rifle, was it not the obvious retort for his Western adversary to raise the technological level of competition in armaments from small-arms to artillery, from fire-arms to the aeroplane, and—in terms of the release of atomic energy—from the non-fissile to the fissile type of explosive for the manufacture of bombs? For, even if the barbarians could procure aeroplanes from abroad and could learn to become as skillful an air-pilot as he had already become a marksman, it was hardly conceivable that he could provide for the servicing of aeroplanes, not to speak of installing the plant for manufacturing them, and it was virtually out of the question for him to procure atom bombs from abroad, and quite out of the question for him to acquire and apply the 'know-how' of manufacturing them and detonating them. When Western Man had crowned a century of scientific achievement by discovering how to harness atomic energy to the service of War, it looked indeed as if it now lay in his power (if he could reconcile this with his conscience) literally to annihilate the last unsubdued territory of Barbarism in their last remaining pockets of unsubdued territory—always supposing that these condemned barbarian prisoners of a ubiquitous industrial Western Civilization were not reprieved, after all, by seeing the Western masters of the World destroy one another first in an atomic fratricidal warfare.

This thesis that technique is a winning card in Civilization's hand is forcefull presented in a passage from the pen of a brilliant observer of a campaign in which a Modern Western Power overthrew a barbarian opponent on his own ground by bringing into action against him the Western technique of the Pre-Atomic Age.

'Halfa is nearly four hundred miles from Atbara; yet it was the decisive point of the campaign; for in Halfa was being forged the deadliest weapon that Britain has ever used against Mahdism—the Sudan Military Railway. In the existence of the railway lay all the difference between the extempore, amateur scrambles of Wolseley's campaign and the machine-like precision of Kitchener's. When Civilization fights with Barbarism it must fight with civilized weapons; for with his own arts on his own ground the barbarian is almost certain to be the better man. To go into the Sudan without complete transport and certain communications is as near madness as to go with spears and shields. Time has been on the Sirdar's side, whereas it was dead against Lord Wolseley; and of that, as of every point in his game, the Sidar has known to ensure the full advantage. There was fine marching and fine fighting in the campaign of the Atbara; the campaign would have failed without them; but without the railway there could never have been any campaign at all. The battle of the Atbare was won in the workshops of the Wady Halfa.'¹

¹ Stevens, G.W.: With Kitchener to Khartum (Edinburgh and London 1898, Blackwood) chap. 3, ad imit., pp. 22-23.

{p.30} A generation later, when this Western feat of harnessing steam-power had been eclipsed by the more extraordinary feat of harnessing atomic energy, it was a temptation for Western minds to assume that the problem of anti-barbarian frontiers had now been solved decisively by the progress of Western technology up to date. At the time of writing, however, atomic energy had not yet been used for the destruction of either Barbarism or Civilization; and the recent experience of Western Powers in trying to offset their barbarian opponents' skill in adapting the use of Modern Western weapons and tactics to the local terrain by bringing into action, on their own side, additional Modern Western weapons of ever more elaborate kinds, had demonstrated that the elaborations of technique, like the elaboration of organization, carried with it certain inherent drawbacks in addition to the untoward social effect of its crushingly heavy cost to the tax-payer and the untoward educational effect of its initiation of the barbarian into the ever more formidable tricks of his civilized adversary's trade.² these inherent drawbacks to an elaboration of technique might go far towards neutralizing even the military effect of this expedient for redressing the balance of power between Civilization and Barbarism along a static limes.

² 'The development of an strategic perception or of a more far-seeing or reasoned leading among the frontier tribes is perhaps improbable. On the other hand, should any such tendencies creep into their conduct of war, and should the tribesman ever, by any chance, be supported by skilled advice, or find themselves in the possession of efficient artillery, numerous machine guns or stocks of grenades and analogous adjuncts of war, the prospect of entering on a campaign of this nature without highly trained troops is not alluring' (de Watteville, op. cit., p. 210).

The Barbarian's Military Elusiveness and Economic Parasitism

{p.35} The fact is that punitive measures defeat their own object by accentuating an already prevalent tendency in the transfrontier barbarian's social evolution which is precisely what has made him such an awkward neighbour.³ If the transfrontier barbarian had remained an unmodified primitive man living in the static Yin-state in which the genuinely primitive societies were found as far back in Time as the existing evidence carried a twentieth-century western historian's knowledge of them, a decidedly greater proportion of his total energies would have been devoted to the arts of peace and a correspondingly greater coercive effect would have been produced upon him by the punitive destruction of the products of his pacific labours. The tragedy of a ci-devant primitive society's moral alienation from an adjoining civilization by which it has previously been attracted is that the consequent deterioration of their relation from one of progressive cultural radiation-and-mimesis to one of chronic hostilities leads the barbarian to neglect his former peaceful avocations in order to specialize in the art of border warfare—first in self-defence, in order to save himself from subjugation or annihilation at the hands of a civilization that has turned savage, and later—when his growth in military efficiency on his own terrain has gradually reversed the balance of military advantage in his favour—as an alternative means of making his livelihood. To plough and reap vicariously with sword and spear ⁴ is more lucrative for the barbarian now that a civilization which has been thrown on the defensive can be mulcted of its wealth by way of either loot or subsidies, and this is also more congenial to him now that the
{p. 36} barbarian has become a warrior first and foremost and has remained only secondarily a husbandman. The barbarian adjoining a limes thus ceases to be economically self-supporting and becomes an economic parasite on the civilization on the other side of the military front.

¹ While this economic retrogression of the barbarian in a 'reservoir' damned back by a limes is one of the general effects of the erection of a limes in any physical environment, the effect naturally varies in degree in proportion to the extent of the difference between the regions segregated from one another by the limes in point of relative economic attractiveness of unattractiveness. Evidently the ‘reservoir’ barbarian will be the more prone to seek his livelihood by plundering his civilized neighbour's garden than to seek it by cultivating his own wilderness, the more forbidding the wilderness is, and the more smiling the garden. A case in point is the poverty of the Pathan highlands by comparison with the adjoining lowlands of Afghanistan as well as Pakistan (see Toynbee, A.J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. i (London 1927, Milford), p. 546-7).
This point is of some importance, because one of the considerations that are apt to decide an empire-builder to draw his limes along a particular line, short of having reached 'a natural frontier', is that, along this line, he has found himself at the limit of the area that he can reckon on being able to exploit economically, with profit to himself, by means of the economic technique of which he is master—at whatever stage of technological 'know-how' he may happen to be at the time when he is choosing the line for his limes. This last qualification has to be added because a country-side that is economically profitable for a society at one level of economic technique may be economically unprofitable for a society at another level. For the Romans round about the beginning of the Christian Era it was economically unprofitable to saddle themselves either with Northern European territories in which the post-glacial forest still had the upper hand over a primitive agriculturist's attempts to clear it, or with an Arabian desert which the sedentary husbandman could never hope to dispute with the stock-breeding Nomad. Accordingly the Romans drew their European limes just short of the coal-deposits in the Ruhr, and the Syrian limes short of the oil-deposits in Arabia.
The Romans did not live to regret this economic blindness of theirs, since their empire came and went before the technique for turning coal and mineral oil to economic account was discovered by the latter-day children of a Western Civilization sprung from the Roman Empire's ruins. On the other hand, there were Modern Western governments that had had the provoking experience of seeing territories in which they had lightheartedly disinterested themselves, in the belief that they were valueless, turn out to be of inestimable economic value in terms of new technological discoveries. The Powers more or less interested in a latter-day Arabia had no sooner completed the delimitation of frontiers in that peninsula after the General War of 1914-18 than they were made aware, by the subsequent pioneer work of Western oil-prospectors, that the sub-soil of the desert which they had been dividing between them was oozing with oil An equally undreamed-of wealth of oil had likewise belatedly been discovered to underlie the surface of lands in the eastern part of the State of Oklahoma that had become the property of Indians descended from 'the five civilized nations' who had been relegated there since A.D. 1825 in the belief that, for the White Man, this was the least desirable piece of country within the whole vast area of the United States. In A.D. 1952 there was a strange irony in the contrast between the respective current economic values of these oil lands in Oklahoma, to which 'the five civilized nations' had been deported, and the cotten-lands of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, from which they had been evicted. A similar reflection was suggested at the same date in England by the grass-clad solitudes that had replaced, on the Downs, the cultivation which the Romans had once found there in an age when the forest-clad plains of Britain were inaccessible to the Celtic husbandman as the forest-clad plains of North America were to the Indian hunter at the time of the arrival of the White Man in the New World.
On the morrow of a latter-day Western discovery of the technique of splitting the atom of one particular chemical element, it looked as if a revolution of the planet's wealth in terms of uranium instead of gold might produce even more sensational surprises; and such surprises were bound to evoke the correspondingly poignant regrets in the hearts of the makers of frontiers in a politically divided society embracing the entire surface of the globe.

The Self-Defeat of a Policy of Setting a Thief to Catch a Thief

{p. 39} This striking inequality in the material consequences of border warfare for the two belligerents is reflected in a great and growing inequality between them in moral for the children if a disintegrating civilization that is standing on the defensive―at any rate for a demilitarized majority that is standing in the interior, as distinct from a barbarianized minority in the marches―the interminable border warfare wit the barbarians beyond the limes spells the burden of an ever-increasing financial charge and the anxiety of a never solved military and political problem. For the barbarian belligerent, on the other hand, the same warfare has the very opposite psychological associations. For him, it is not a burden but an opportunity, not an anxiety but an exhilaration. A contest that is always harassing for the civilized party―and utterly devastating for him when he finds himself no nearer to being within sight of the end of it after he has mobilized all his resources of organization and technique―is the very breath of life for the militarized barbarian. This great and always
{p. 39} increasing inequality in 'psychological armament' makes the discomfiture of the civilized belligerent inevitable sooner or later.¹

{p.41}...In this place we need only to recall our previous finding² that this alluring expedient for averting a collapse of the limes actually precipitates the catastrophe which it is designed to forestall, and we may proceed to inquire into the explanation of this apparent paradox.

Part of the explanation is, of course, to be found in the consideration that, in taking the barbarians into his service, the Power behind the limes is also taking them into his confidence and is thereby subjecting them to an intensive course of instruction in a military and political 'know-how' which they can afterwards employ, if they choose, to their own profit at their teachers' expense.

'It can be said of the Roman, Chinese and British Indian empires alike that the method that worked best was one of enlisting the services of the very tribes that were supposedly excluded by the boundary, thus turning them about so that they faced away from the boundary instead of toward it ... nevertheless, it was a method that haunted the imperial state responsible for it, because it created a sword of two edges capable of striking outward when held in a strong hand but of cutting inward when the had weakened. From border societies of this kind, linked with boundary-maintaining empires, were drawn the "barbarian auxiliaries" of Rome and the "tributary barbarians" of China; from a similar society the British Empire in India recruits both regular troops and tribal levies. From the same societies came invaders and conquerors of both Rome and China; and the people of the same kind with whom the British now deal are as dangerous as they are useful.'²

² Lattimore, O.; Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York 1940, American Geographical Society), pp. 245-6.

{p.43} The truth is, in enlisting the barbarian in its service, the Power behind the limes is attempting, under altogether unpropitious psychological conditions, to recapture the relation between Barbarism and Civilization that prevailed in days when the civilization had not yet broken down, and the limes had not yet some into existence. The defence of the civilization by an inner ring of barbarians against an outer ring of barbarians was something that happened of itself, without any contract between the parties, so long as the growing civilization was attracting the barbarians by its charm. Under these psychological conditions an inner ring of barbarians served spontaneously both as a conductor through which the civilization radiated its cultural influence into barbarian societies at a farther remove and as a buffer which absorbed the shocks of the se outer barbarians' attempt to take by force¹ a cultural kingdom which, in its heyday, had for them the fascination of the Kingdom of Heaven. In these happy psychological circumstances the inner barbarian proselytes of the one day became the cultural converts the next, while today's outer barbarian assailants became tomorrow's inner barbarian proselytes. The growing civilization progressively extended its borders through the successive assimilation of one ring after another of its barbarian neighbours―a very different story from the subsequent history of a broken-down civilization’s expansion by force, up to the

¹ Matt. xi. 12.

{p.43} limit to which sheer force could carry it, at the expense of barbarians whom it has ceased to charm.

{p.44}...In these psychological circumstances a corps of barbarian foederati will never turn into a unit of the Imperial Regular Army; it will always remain an unassimilated barbarian war-band retaining its own weapons and tactics, taking its orders from its own war-lord, feeling its own esprit de corps, nursing its own ambitions. In the same circumstances a settlement of barbarian laeti⁵ will never turn into a civil community of imperial citizens; it will remain an unassimilated imperium in imperio which, short of being annihilated, will find its political destiny sooner ore later in becoming the nucleus of a dissident successor-state doomed to failure; and, as this expedient is the last forlorn hope of the tottering Power behind the limes, its failure is immediately followed by the limes collapse.

(3) The Cataclysm and its Consequences

A Reversal of Roles

{VIII.D.p.45}...This episode in Man's contest with Physical Nature is an apt simile of what happens in Man's struggle with Human Nature, in his neighbours and in himself, upon the collapse of the military barrage of a limes. The resulting social cataclysm is a calamity for all concerned; but in the human, as in the physical, disaster the incidence of the devastation is unequal, and in this case likewise the distribution of the damage is the reverse of what might have been expected a priori. There is, in fact, here a paradoxical reversal of roles.² So long as the representatives of a disintegrating civilization were successful in saving a tottering limes from collapse, the tribulation which it cost them to perform this tour de force was progressively aggravated, as we have see, ³ out of all proportion to the progressive increase in the pressure exerted by the transfrontier barbarians. On the other hand, now that the disaster, so long dreaded and so long averted by the Power behind the limes, has at last duly descended upon the doomed civilization's devoted head, the principal sufferers are no longer the ex-subjects of the defunct universal state, over whose fields and cities the deluge of barbarian invasion now rolls unchecked, but the ostensibly triumphant barbarians themselves. The hour of their triumph, for which they have thirsted so long, proves to be
{p.46} the occasion of a discomfiture which they nor their defeated adversaries had foreseen.

The Demoralization of the Barbarian Conquerors

What is the explanation of this apparent paradox? The answer is that the limes, whose resistance the transfrontier barbarian has been seeking all the time to overcome, has served, not only as the bulwark of the Civilization that its builders and defenders had intended it to provide against an outer Barbarism, but also as a providential safeguard for the aggressive barbarian himself against demonically self-destructive psychological forces within his own bosom.

...provided by the existence of the very limes which the barbarian is bent on destroying for the limes, so long as it holds, supplies a substitute, in some measure, for the indispensable discipline of which Primitive Man is deprived when the breaking of his cake of primitive custom³ converts him into a transfrontier barbarian. This discipline is partly imposed on him externally; for, so long as the perennial border warfare continues, the barbarian belligerent, whether his role be that of raider, hostage, or mercenary, is being trained continually perforce in a stern yet at the same time instructive military school; but the limes disciplines him most effectively in the psychological sense of giving him tasks to perform, objectives to reach, and difficulties to contend with that call forth his highest powers and constantly keep his efforts up to mark.

With the sudden collapse of the limes sweeps this safeguard away, the nascent creative powers that have been evoked in the transfrontier barbarian by the challenge of the limes are daunted and defeated by being called upon, suddenly and prematurely, top perform new tasks that are altogether too great and too difficult for them to cope with; and in this hour of bewilderment, when there is no more spirit in them,⁴ these frail

³ See the phrase quoted from Bagehot in II.i.192.
⁴ 2 Chron. ix. 4.

{p.47} shoots of tender wheat are quickly stifled by the tares in the spiritual field of the barbarian's soul―his abandon¹ and his ferocity―which find boundless opportunities for luxuriant growth now that the former raider and mercenary has entered into his long-coveted kingdom. If the transfrontier barbarian is more brutal, as well as a more sophisticated, being than his ancestor the primitive tribesman, the latter-day barbarian who has broken through the limes and carved a successor-state out of the derelict domain of a defunct universal state becomes differentiated from his already barbarian predecessor beyond the pale in the same two senses in still a higher degree. As soon as the barbarian has left no-man's-land behind him and set foot in a ruined world which is for him an earthly paradise, his malaise rankles into demoralization...

{p.48}...the barbarians in patribus civilium cast themselves, as we have observed by anticipation,⁴ for the sordid role of vultures feeding on carrion or maggots crawling in a carcass; and it has been noticed by Ibn Khaldūn that they are apt to display a most unheroic prudence in keeping at a safe distance from their dying victims body until the life has gone out of him that there is no danger any longer of his being able to offer any resistance.

'[The future founders of a successor-state] give way to baseless fears whenever they hear talk of the [flourishing] state of the existing empire and of the vast resources that it has at its command. This is enough to deter them from attacking it, and so their chief is obliged to have patience and to bide his time. But, when the empire has fallen into complete decadence, as invariably happens, and when its military and financial strength has suffered mortal injuries, this chief is rewarded for having waited so long by now finding himself able to take advantage of the opportunity of conquering the empire....When the will of God has made itself manifest, and the old empire is on the point of collapse, after having reached the term of its existence, and has become disorganised in all its parts, its feebleness and exhaustion attract its adversary's notice....Encouraged by this open discovery, the people of the new empire prepare with one accord to open the attack; the imaginary dangers that had shaken their resolution up to that moment now disappear, the period of waiting comes to an end, and the conquest is accomplished by force of arms.' ⁵

⁵ Ibn Khaldūn: Muqaddamāt, translated by de Slane, Baron McG. (Paris 1863-8, Imprimerie Impériale, 3 vols.) vol. ii, p. 134-5.

The Bankruptcy of a Fallen Civilized Empire's Barbarian Successor-states

{VIII.D.p.52} A barbarian successor-state blindly goes into business on the strength of the dishonoured credits of a universal state that has already gone into bankruptcy; and these boors in office hasten the advent of their inevitable doom by a self-betrayal through the outbreak, under stress of a moral ordeal, of something fatally false within;¹ for a polity based solely on a gang of armed desperados' fickle loyalty to an irresponsible military leader,² while it may be adequate for the organization of a raid or, at a pinch, for the administration and defence of a march, is morally unfit for the government of a community that has made even an unsuccessful attempt at civilization.³ It is far more unfit than would have been the unsophisticated yet respectable primitive rule of custom interpreted by the living leaders of the tribe⁴ into whose swept and gar-

² 'Irresponsible power, uncontrolled by any traditions of ordered freedom, will often assert itself of defend itself by savage cruelty. The catalogue of such enormities is too long and monotonous to be told in detail' (Dill, S. Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London 1926, Macmillan), p. 133, introducing an anthology of Merovingian atrocities).

{p.53} nished house¹ this gangster-constitution has forced its entry since the radiation of a disintegrating civilization has perverted that decadent society's once primitive neighbours into bands of adolescent barbarians.²

The Restraining Inluences of Aidôs, Nemesis, and Hilm.

The barbarian trespassers in partibus civilium have, in fact, condemned themselves to suffer a moral breakdown as an inevitable consequence of their own adventurous act.⁴ Yet they do not yield to their

¹ Matt. xii. 44; Luke xi. 25.
² The moral inferiority of the adolescent barbarian to his predecessor has been pointed out by H. G. Wells in The Outline of History (London 1920, Casell). p. 298, in a passage which is a fine example of his intuitive genius. In order to transpose this passage into the terminology of the present Study, Wells' term 'barbarism' has. Of course, to be construed as 'primitive life', and his term 'savage' as 'primitive'.)
'It is frequently said that Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries relapsed into barbarism, but that does not express the reality of the case very well. Barbarism is social order of an elementary type, orderly within its limits; the state of Europe beneath its political fragmentation was a social disorder. Its moral was not that of kraal, but that of a slum. In a savage krall a savage knows that he belongs to a community, and lives and acts accordingly; in a slum the individual neither knows of, nor acts in relation to, and greater being.'
⁴ Ibn Khaldūn traces the stages of this demoralization with a masterly hand, and with a wealth of illustrations from the histories of Arab and Berber barbarian interlopers, in op. cit., vol. i, especially pp 292-7 and 342-59: Muqaddamāt, translated by de Slane, Baron McG. (Paris 1863-8, Imprimerie Impériale, 3 vols.) vol. i, p. 134-5.

{p.54} self-decreed doom without a spiritual struggle that has left its traces in their literary records of myth and ritual and standards of conduct.

'The great characteristic of [Aidôs and Nemesis], as of Honour generally is that they only come into operation when a man is free: when there is no compulsion. If you take people ... who have broken away from all their old sanctions and select among them some strong and turbulent chief who fears no one, you will first think that such a man is free to do whatever enters his head. And then, as a matter of fact, you find that, amid his lawlessness, there will crop up some possible action which somehow makes him feel uncomfortable. If he has done it, he "rues" the deed and is haunted by it. If he has not done it, he "shrinks" from doing it. And this, not because anyone forces him, nor yet because any particular result will accrue to him afterwards, but simply because he feels aidôs....²
'Aidôs is what you feel about an act of your own; Nemesis is what you

² It will be seen that, in H. G Wells' term (see the passage quoted on p. 53, n. 2, above), Aidôs is essentially a virtue of 'a slum' in which 'the individual neither knows of, nor acts in relation to, any greater being.'—A.J.T.

{p.55} feel for the act of another. Or, most often, it is what you imagine that others will feel about you....But suppose no one sees. The act, as you know well, remains νεμεσητόν—a thing to feel nemesis about; only there is no one there to feel it. Yet, if you yourself dislike what you have done, and feel aidôs for it, you inevitably are conscious that somebody or something dislikes or disapproves of you....The Earth, Water, and Air [are] full of living eyes; of theoi, of daimones, of kêres....And it is they who have seen you and are wroth with you for the thing which you have done.'¹

In contrast to Aidôs and Nemesis, which enter into all aspects of social life, Hilm is a vertu des politiques.⁴ Before the inauguration of Islam the practice of Hilm had been learnt by Abu Sufyān, the father of a Mu‛āwīyah who was to found the Umayyad power, in the school of the mercantile republic of Mecca:⁵ a cultural as well as physical oasis in the desert of Arab barbarism where the rudiments of city-state life had been propagated by a radiation of Syriac and Hellenic influences which, at earlier dates, had produced more brilliant fruits of the kind at Palmyra and at Petra.⁶ Abu Sufyān's son the Caliph Mu‛āwīyah I claimed that Hilm was an Umayyad family virtue,⁷ and Mu‛āwīyah himself came ot figure as the classical exponent of it.⁸ On of Mu‛āwīyah's dicta was that 'Hilm would be universal if everyone had Abu Sufyān for an ancestor'.⁹ But 'the qualities which, when found in combination, the Arabs designed by the name of Hilm' were 'as rarely met with as

¹ Murray, Gilbert: The Rise of the Greek Epic, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1924, Clarendon Press), pp. 83-84.
⁵ Lammens, S.J., Père H.: Études sur le Règne du Calife Omaiyade Mo‛âwia Ier (Bayrūt 1908, Imprimerie Catholiquee; Paris 1908, Geuthner), p. 89.
⁷ See Lammens, op. cit., p. 88, n. 3.
⁸ See Lammens, op. cit., p. 66-67. A monograph entitled The Hilm of Mu‛āwīyah is on of the lost works of the Classical Arabic literature (Lammens, op. cit., p. 89), but Lammens has collected anecdotes on the subject, from surviving works, in op. cit. 9. 91-103.
⁹ ibid., p. 88, n. 3.

{p.56} they were highly prized among a passionate people whose temperament was a bundle of nerves—nerves almost showing the skin and reacting the slightest external shock'¹

'Hilm is thus something more sophisticated than Aidôs and Nemesis, and consequently also something less attractive. Hilm is emphatically not an expression of humility; it's aim is rather to humiliate an adversary: to surprise him by displaying the contrast of one's own superiority; to surprise him by displaying the dignity and calm of one's own attitude' ³ The practice of Hilm is not incompatible with inward feelings of resentment, animus, and vindictiveness.⁴ Hilm is not within the competence of anyone who is not rich and powerful, and it presupposes order to injure one's neighbour without having to fear the consequences of one's action.⁵

'in the desert, every true "gentleman" must have in his moral coach-house (remise—or, as we are tempted to say, in his moral stable (ècurie—two steeds to choose between at his pleasure. On the one, he makes a parade of clemency. The other—is the one which he prefers to mount—allows him to show himself in his true colours....⁶
'At bottom, Hilm, like most Arab qualities, is a virtue for bravado and display, with more ostentation in it than real substance: one form of Nomad stoicism—a stoicism tinged with pharisaism. Among a theatrical people that is the devitalised heir of a race which has been initiated into civilization at a very early date, but which has since relapsed into the state of nature, a reputation for Hilm can be acquired at the cheap price of an elegant gesture of a sonorous mot: it does not pre-suppose a serious spiritual struggle against passions, against pride, or against desire for vengeance. It can be combined with brutality in daily life...⁷
'In reality Hilm (as Ahnaf has remarked with profound insight) was not so much a virtue as an attitude—a prudent opportunism serving as a safeguard against abuses of authority, which are always regrettable, under a régime which in principle was democratic; opportune above all in as anarchic milieu, such as the Arab Society was, where every act of violence remorselessly provoked a retaliation. It was no feeling of humanity, but a fear of the thar (émeute), that inspirited the Badawī with a horror of bloodshed. And thus the virtue of Hilm was revealed to him by the disagreeableness of the consequences of a passionate word or gesture. From this point of view, Hilm was something that could not be ignored by the chiefs, who obliged by their situation to maintain an equilibrium between the elements of disorder that were rife within the bosom of the tribe. Given the parliamentary institutions [of the Arab heroic age], Hilm became, for the depository of [political] power, a virtue of the first order....⁸

¹Lammens, op. cit., p. 69.
² Ibid. p. 67
³ Ibid. p. 68
⁴ See ibid, p. 69
⁵ See ibid, pp. 72 and 79
⁶ Ibid. p. 76
⁷ Ibid. p. 81
⁸ Ibid. p. 87

{p.57} 'Hilm as practiced by [Mu‛āwīyah Umayyad successors], facilitated their task of giving the Arabs a political education; it sweetened for their pupils the bitterness of having to sacrifice the anarchic liberty of the Desert in favour of sovereigns who were condescending enough to draw a velvet glove over the iron hand with which they ruled their empire.'¹

As Aidôs and Nemesis thus fade from view, their disappearance draws a cry of despair from the weary watcher of the skies. 'Pain and grief are the portion that shall be left for mortal men, and there shall be no defence against the evil day'⁴ Hesiod is harrowed by his illusory conviction—which it never occurs to him to doubt—that the withdrawal of the glimmering light that has sustained the children of the Dark Age through their vigil is a potent of the onset of an unmitigated and perpetual night; and he has no inkling that, on the contrary, this extinguishing of beacons is a harbinger of the return of day. The truth is that Aidôs and Nemesis reascend into Heaven as soon as the imperceptible emergence of a nascent new civilization has made their sojourn on Earth superfluous by bringing into currency other virtues that are socially more constructive though aesthetically they may be less attractive. The Iron Age into which Hesiod lamented that he had been born, because it was the age that had seen Aidôs and Nemesis shake the dust of this Earth from off their feet, was in fact the age in which a living Hellenic Civilization was arising out of a dead Minoan Civilization's ruins; and the ‛Abbisids, who had no use for the Hilm that had been their Umyyad predecessors' arcanum imperii, were the statesmen who had set the seal on the Umayyad's tour de force of profiting by the obliteration of the Syrian limes of the roman Empire through the demonic outbreak of the Primitive Muslim Arabs in order to reinaugurate a Syriac universal state that had been prematurely overthrown, a thousand years before, by Alexander the Great.⁵

'With the ‛Abbisids, Hilm will lose its value in the sphere of government, to become a virtue of private life. After the destruction of the former

¹ Ibid. p. 103.

{p.58} Arab supremacy and Arab society....absolutism, now firmly established from one end the Islmaic world to the other, no longer felt the necessity of resorting to Hilm in order to overcome the recalcitrance of a public opinion which, thenceforward, was condemned to silence....In undermining, at its foundations, the organisation of the former Arab Society and in forcing all necks to bow before beneath the dead level of despotism, the ‛Abbisids régime was to obtain more decisive results than the lectures (mercuriales) delivered [by Umayyad governors] from the tribunes at Kūfah and Basrah.'¹

It was significant that, in order to ensure the salvaging of the Syriac Civilization from the chaos of a post-Hellenic Arab heroic age, there had to be a change of political régime, a barbaric turbulence of Arab war-bands could be reduced to order at the price of suppressing their aristocratic freedom; for the Primitive Muslim Arabs had been perhaps the most gifted of all barbarian warriors, and the Umayyads of all barbarian statesmen, that had so fat fitted across the stage of History. Umayyad statesmanship had achieved the unparalleled feat of transforming an Arab barbarian successor-state of the Roman Empire in Syria in an avatar of the universal state that had originally been provided for the Syriac Civilization, eleven hundred years before, by the Empire of the Achaemenidae. This was an achievement of which the Umayyads' Ghassanid forerunners had never dreamed, and to which the Ghassanids' Palmyrene predecessors had aspired with disastrous consequences for themselves. Yet the raw material of Arab barbarism proved so intractable even to the Umayyad genius² that an Umayyad David's work had to be completed by an ‛Abbisid Solomon. The exacting, though misguided, task of evoking, in a noscent Far Eastern Western Christian Society, a ghost of the antecedent civilization’s universal state was likewise beyond the interloping barbarians' powers. It is not surprising that, before this task could be taken in hand
{p.59} in Western Christendom, the fainéant Merovingian epigoni of Clovis had to make way for the Carolingians. It is more remarkable that, in the Far East, the epigoni of the Eurasian Nomad barbarian interlopers, who had been so receptive in their attitude towards the legacy of the Sinic culture,¹ should have had likewise to make way of for the sedantary barbarian To Pa, and these still more receptive barbarians,² in their turn, for successor-states, which were harbingers of the imperialo Sui and T’ang.

The Outbreak of an Invincible Criminality

To employ the terminology of the post-Hellenic Arab age, Hilm is worsted—and is bound to be worse—sooner or later by its antithesis and adversary Jahl. While the literal meaning of the Arabic word is 'ignorance', it has a connotation of 'passionateness (emportement), violence, and a brutality which, among Arabs, was sometimes confused with virility',⁴ The nick-name Abu Jahl means, not 'the ignorant', but 'the impetuous' or 'the emotional (le passionneé)'. ⁵

'In its usage as conveying the antithesis of Hilm, Jahl incarnates all the faults of deriving from rusticity and drom lack of savoir-vivre, all the passionateness (l'emportement) of youth, all the excesses committed by brute force when it escapes from the control of the Reason. The jāhil is the enemy of the peace-lovers of peace-makers,⁶ he is destitute of the strict idea of justice,⁷ he is the victim of pleasure, and allows himself to be captivated by the seductive charms of women.⁸ He is also the unreflective character, the impotens sui of the Latins—incapable of mastering the angry passions. Jahl is ... the roughness of the manners of the Desert, the absence of restraint in language, an obliviousness of decorum. It is Jahl that betrays its addicts into violations of the code of honour laid down in the customs of the Desert, and into failures to live up to the convenances of social inter-

¹ Lammens, S.J., Père H.: Études sur le Règne du Calife Omaiyade Mo‛âwia I^er (Bayrūt 1908, Imprimerie Catholiquee; Paris 1908, Geuthner), p. 106 and 86-87. For the anti-aristocratic egalitarianism of the despotic ‛Abbisid régime, see the present Study, VI. vii. 149-52.

{p.60} course, the laws of hospitality, the duties of friendship, and, in short, "the new spirit", inaugurated by Islam, to which ... the Badu never succeeded in conforming.'¹

Indeed, when the Badawī frankly looked back to the Jāhilīyah as 'the good old times when people were able to live without constraint, "without suspecting the existence of Muhammad"'. ² In the social and psychological landscape of the Arab heroic age the jāhil and the halīm were complementary characterizations which, between them, provided a temperamental classification for the whole of Mankind;³ but the issue of the struggle between the two temperments was a foregone conclusion, since the weights on the respective scales were utterly unequal. Not only did the juhalā outnumber the hulamā, and this by an overwhelming majority; the most deadly weakness of the exponents of Hilm was not their numerical inferiority but their lack of genuine belief in, and sincere devotion to, their own principle. Hilm, as we have seen,⁴ 'was not so much a virtue as an attitude'. For Mu‛āwīyah himself, who was the halīm par excellence,

'Hilm was something that appealed to the ambition of this man of genius, not as an end, but as a means; nos to much as a moral quality perfecting [the character of] the individual as for its utility as an instrument of government.' ⁵

When the halīm himself is jāhil at heart, it is evident that an attitude thus struck, without conviction, by a sceptically sophisticated minority has no prospect of prevailing.

The works of the Jahl that Hilm has failed to chasten and that Aidôs and Nemesis have been impotent to abash have left scares which have been the barbarian's authentic marks in the record of history. His characteristic brutality declares itself at his first break-through...

¹ Lammens, op. cit., pp. 85-86.
² Ibid., p. 83, quoting Ahtal, 321. 4.
³ Ibid., p. 82, quoting Al-Mubarrad: Kamil, 425. 9.
⁴ In the passage quoted, on p. 56, above, from Lammens, op. cit., p. 87.
⁵ Ibid. p. 91.

{p. 61} Such wholesale atrocities are the individual crimes of violence that are the outstanding features of the Heroic Age both in history and legend. The demoralized barbarian society in which these dark deeds are perpetrated is so familiar with their performance and so obtuse to their horror² that the bards whose task it is to immortalize the memory of the war-lords do not hesitate to saddle their heroes and heroines with sins of which they have been innocent in real life, when a blackening of the characters can heighten the artistic merit of the story.³ This readiness to magnify a character's artistic interest at the cost of his moral reputation might incline the latter-day critic to discount the evidence of legend unsupported by independent historical testimony, were it not that almost every enormity celebrated in epic and saga is accredited by historically recorded parallels for which the evidence is impeccable.

'In A.D. 1723 [Mahmūd] put to death in cold blood some three hundred of the nobles and the chief citizens, and followed up this bloody deed with the murder of about two hundred children of their familiars. He also killed some three thousand of the deposed Shah's bodyguard, together with many other persons whose sentiments he mistrusted or whose influence he feared.' ²

On the 7th of February, 1725, Mahmūd went on to murder all surviving members of the imperial family except Husayn himself and two of his younger children—a crime which was overtaken by poetic justice when, on the 22nd April following, Mahmūd in his turn was assassined by his own cousin Ashraf for the prize of an usurped Iranian imperial crown.³

The murder of a defenceless prince is the highest rung on a descending ladder of barbarian criminality. At the next level below this in the inferno of the Heroic Age we behold the barbarian war-band, murdering, not an enemy prince, but their own leader—in violation of the personal duty of the retainer to his chief which is the most sacred obligation in the barbarian moral code. This offence is so outrageous in the eyes even of a barbarian bard and his audience that it might be difficult to find a legendary counterpart of the historic murder of the Caliph ‘Uthmān by a soldiery who had been thrown off their balance by the intoxification of victory.⁴ At the next level below this we see a drunken Alexander murdering Cleitus who can boast of having saved his slayer-leader's life at the battle of Granicusū—and this in the presence of Hellenes whose already decadent civilization still shines so bright by contrast with a Macedonian barbarism that it makes these horrified witnesses look like demi-gods.⁵. From the murder of a fosterkinsman⁶ comrade-in-arms it is a short step downwards in the progressive demoralization of the Heroic Age to the murder of a kinsman by blood.

² See Browne, E. G." A Literary History of Persia, vol. iv (Cambridge 1928, University Press), pp. 130.
³ See Ibid., p. 131.

{p. 64} When the members of a barbarian war-lord's kin-group turn their murderous hands against one another, it is not surprising to see a dead leader's royal blood exterminated by the hands of impious alien usurpers in the next chapter of the story—as the family of Alexander was liquidated by Cassander, and the grandson of Muhammad by the Umayyads.³. A slaughtered Husayn received the posthumous recompense of being idealized as a martyr whose etherialized blood mingled with his father's⁴ to become the seed of the Shī‘ī Church; but Olympus, Roxana, and the child Alexander IV did not even find a pagan bard to make poetry of their painful deaths.

Such mass-murders are mere incidents in civil strife within the bosom of barbarian communities that are highly enough organized to be swift and facile conquests of derelict worlds in the heroic ages of the Western Christian Spanish conquerors of the Aztecs and the Incas, the Hellenized Macedonian conquerors of the Achaemenidae, the subsequent Hellenic conquerors of the Mauryan Empire of India,⁵ and the Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors of the Romans and the Sasanidae—Arabs who, to damn them with faint praise, had been perhaps the least barbarous of all barbarians up to date. These episodes need not be recapitulated here, since they have been surveyed already, in a different context,⁶ as examples of the militarist's 'burden of Ninevah'. In this place we need only point to the manifest conclusion that 'every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand'. ⁷

³ In justice to the Umayadds it should not be forgotten that Husayn brought his death upon himself by his own folly. The Umayyad Government would have given a fortune to see him die in his bed as their pensioner, like his elder brother Hasan after his abdication from the succession to their father. ‛Ali (the allegation what Hasan met his death, not by disease, but by poison, has been dismissed as non-proven by Lammens, S.J., Père H.: Études sur le Règne du Calife Omaiyade Mo‛âwia I^er (Paris 1908, Geuthner), pp 149-53.
⁴ ‛Ali's assassin was a fellow Arab, but, so far from being an agent of Mu‛āwīyah's, he was a Kharijite.
⁶ In IV. iv. 484-6.
⁷ Matt. xii. 25. Cp. Mark iii. 24-25; Like xi. 17.