upright — melting in the Gracchan disorders. And (what is unparalleled elsewhere) it was not between states that the final rounds of the battle for Imperium were fought, but between the parties of a city — the form of the Polis allowed of no other outcome. Of old it had been Sparta versus Athens, now it was Optimate versus Popular Party. In the Gracchan revolution, which was already (134) heralded by a first Servile War, the younger Scipio was secretly murdered and C. Gracchus openly slain — the first who as Princeps and the first who as Tribune were political centres in themselves amidst a world become formless. When, in 104, the urban masses of Rome for the first time lawlessly and tumultuously invested a private person, Marius, with Imperium, the deeper importance of the drama then enacted is comparable with that of the assumption of the mythic Emperor-title by the ruler of Tsin in 288. The inevitable product of the age, Cæsarism, suddenly outlines itself on the horizon.
The heir of the Tribune was Marius, who like him linked mob and high finance and in 87 murdered off the old aristocracy in masses. The heir of the Princeps was Sulla, who in 82 annihilated the class of the great merchants by his proscriptions. Thereafter the final decisions press on rapidly, as in China after the emergence of Wang Cheng. Pompey the Princeps and Cæsar the Tribune — tribune not in office, but in attitude — were still party-leaders, but nevertheless, already at Lucca, they were arranging with Crassus and each other for the first partition of the world amongst themselves. When the heirs of Cæsar fought his murderers at Philippi, both had ceased to be more than groups. By Actium the issue was between individuals, and Cæsarism will out, even in such a process as this.
In the corresponding evolution within the Arabian world it is, of course, the Magian Consensus that takes the place of the bodily Polis as the basic form in and through which the facts accomplish themselves; and this form, as we have seen, excluded any separation of political and religious tendencies to such an extent that even the urban bourgeois urge towards freedom (marking, here as elsewhere, the beginning of the Period of Contending States) presents itself in orthodox disguise, and so has hitherto almost escaped notice.[1] It appeared as a will to break loose from the Caliphate, which the Sassanids, and Diocletian following them, had created in the forms of the feudal state. From the times of Justinian and Chosroes Nushirvan this had had to meet the onset of Frondeurs — led by the heads of the Greek and Mazdaist Churches, the nobility, both Persian-Mazdaist (above all Irak) and Greek (particularly the Asiatic), and the high chivalry of Armenia, which was divided into two parts by the difference of religion. The absolutism almost attained in the seventh
- ↑ For the politico-social history of the Arabian World there is the same lack of deep and penetrating research as for the Chinese. Only the political evolution of the Western margin up to Diocletian, regarded hitherto as within the Classical pale, is an exception.
