Which authors wrote about civilization cycles besides Spengler?
Is there a way to ever break this cycle? The only alternative seems to be permanent struggle but at that point life is not even worth living.
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>Which authors wrote about civilization cycles besides Spengler?
Hegel, Marx.
Marx believes in linear history. Proudhon is a socialist that believes that socialism can return to capitalism.
If Marx and Hegel are anti-cyclical then so is Spengler.
>If Marx and Hegel are anti-cyclical then so is Spengler.
How so?
lmfao dude.
they will never elaborate, they're pulling shit out of their ass.
to answer OP, read Evola
What do you mean Hegelian thought is the prime example of an anti-cyclical account of history and history as progression.
what? are you fricking moronic? OP said cyclical.
this, basically
Vico.
>Is there a way to ever break this cycle?
Nick Land thinks if we just burn bright enough and devote way more ressources towards techno-economic acceleration, we can achieve escape velocity and break the meatspace cycle. But this means also the end of humanity (as we know it).
any thinker not part of the bourgeois secular entanglement?
Dude tried to summon Cthulhu in college with Mark Fisher I don't think that's very secular
won't the robots just start another cycle tho?
His approach changed a bit
https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1648706335406424067
The soul of Western Civilization will be a final battle between Spengler and Land
Nick Land is millennarian priest who should just tell his midwit congregation to drink poison so they can ascend into techno-capitalist neo-china or whatever.
There's little value to his ramblings, which are mostly cope.
Spengler's civilization's (as meaning a dead culture) don't 'die' per se. They just ossify and return into the mire they came from. A final form is reached which is never moved on from. After this final form, the Fellaheen people's can remain indefinitely (hence why China still exists and why egypt lasted so long).
The stages of Spenglerian culture development are best illustrated as life stages
>Pre-culture: Childhood
>Spring: Adolescence, Youth
>Summer: Young-adulthood, 25-40
>Autumn: Middle age, 40-55
>Winter: Old age.
>Final form/Fellaheen: Senility
Also the cycle might have some variation but it usually goes as normal.
>If there was ever a civilization that could break the cycle, it’s this one.
Foolish faustian dreams.
> Foolish Faustian dreams
Not per the author in question…
Cycles are good as they select for genes that will survive in any type of environment.
Enjoy the ride
Well, Spengler thought that a civilization could reach a phase of ossification, so in regard to breaking the cycle at the point of death, it’s possible but the culture never flourishes organically again and the civilization never again matters politically to world history. If there’s ever been a civilization that fit this description it’s China, but whether the bit about mattering politically is true remains to be seen. Arnold Toynbee also wrote on civilizational cycles and seemed to think that the cycle could be broken via religiosity. There was another author, who I just cannot recall the name of right now, who imagined that these culture-civilizations sprouted up largely out of agriculture, which itself settled and became cultural as the result of barbarian pressure, mostly from the Eurasian steppe, and so it’s possible that any one cycle could be reset and modified with a a premature collapse of the civilization and a return to barbarism.
I think it’s really worth pointing out as food for thought that in Spengler, all of his culture-civilizations are classified along religious lines except for the Western, which is curious precisely because of his many comments on the Christian East and especially on Russia. I think it’s entirely possible that Spengler is right, but that for Europeans, and maybe Westerners more broadly, they’re able to access multiple cycles without really knowing they are different cycles. We already often talk about the history of Greece and Rome as if it is our European/Western history. If Russia is to flourish once the West is gone, who is not to say that a German can consider the Russian culture in a manner similar to how an Italian might have considered the early Western? A German renaissance for Russian culture. It’s an interesting thought. Another interesting thought is the unique “going beyond” nature of Western culture. If there was ever a civilization that could break the cycle, it’s this one.
The Faustians aren't going to break the cycle. It's not possible - Essence precedes Existence. 20th century Euro-Nationalisms, above all, National-Socialism, were in a profound sense a disorganized enterprise of this nature. And Organic Morphology has NOT been kind to us since the wars. Our "going beyond" was the Moon landings, but we may have another one on the way - it's likely that the West's senile organism is the civilization (the most 'technical' one, by far) that's going to bring about the Apocalypse.
It is interesting to try and fast-forward possible cultural and genetic metamorphosis, indeed. As the West can be seen as the metamorphosis between the Germanic barbarians and the decrept body of the Western Roman Empire, Russian civilization dawning may become one with decrept Europe.
Spengler was not a hard determinist. He never claimed to understand the way this all works, and he never claimed that this was all predetermined, neither the general morphology, nor the particular phases, or anything else. He merely described an observation of what is, based on what’s been, but not necessarily what will be. He admitted that beneath all of this is something fundamentally ineffable. Moreover, it’s always possible that his model was in some way incorrect. Again, for some reason that’s not clear the West is the only civilization in his entire model that doesn’t fall nearly along religious lines. He never explains it. That to me suggests it’s possible he made an error, not that he did, but that he might have.
Spengler’s biggest worries were Western technics inadvertently destroying itself and perhaps the world, the West coming to hate the civilization it built and committing suicide, the West losing to Russia and facing a Russian Hyksos period, or simply being put down by an East Asian people. He identified Japan as the biggest concern in his time, but nowadays, that’s probably China. All of his concerns are reaching a peak today.
Anyway, I think what’s most interesting in Spengler is not his particular predictions for the future. Frankly, he never should have made them. He knew he shouldn’t have because they couldn’t possibly be that accurate beyond a very general sense and timeline, but they sold his books so he did it anyway. What’s most interesting in Spengler is the manner of thinking. All that said, I think he would’ve been clear that Russian culture would blossom only once the West was basically a gone, so if all goes according to plan, centuries from now. The most interesting thing though is that many of his predictions for the West haven’t come true, but they have in Russia…
I know a Russian who thinks Russia is currently in its spring period, interestingly enough. He argues modern Russian is basically a feudal state.
I'm pretty sure Spengler stated that Fellaheenism could go on indefinitely. Carrying on the legacy of that civilization even though its spirit is essentially dead, this goe son until it is diturbed by more vital people's or the legacy erodes until not being recognozeable. This in fact happens much more often than a proper collapse like in apollonian culture.
My examples are: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Magians, China, India. All of which lasted a long time after ossification.
He did say that fellaheen could go on indefinitely but he also said that such a civilization would never matter again politically in regard to history or world-history, which might be hard to square with China, and besides China, there are really no other civilizations were suspended in fellaheen state indefinitely, not even India. They may have lasted a long time, but they all died. So the question is how they died. They weren’t exactly cut down so much as they allowed themselves to be cut down or else abandoned their own civilization, as is the case in India.
I don't think it's hard to square with china. China has always had it's own little corner of the world to itself, and so I wouldn't say China has ever been politically relevant outside the traditional sinosphere until perhaps today.
Also, I wouldn't say India abandoned it's own civilization, as much as the heartland was repeatedly ravaged by barbarians while the rest just sunk back into the mire. Their civilization was not abandoned, the architecture, the art, the religion, the literature, it was all there, being reproduced eternally. Unless you want to argue Islam devoured India.
>So the question is how they died.
Subsumed by another younger culture, always. Greeks swallowed Egypt. Magians swallowed Mesopotamia and the Greeks.
Nationalism is in accord with our essence. Imperialism is in conflict with our essence.
The greeks?
Well your pic is the Strauss-Howe generational theory
Peter Turchin
>severe case of shape rotation predilection
>what if psychohistory from Asimov's Foundation series was actually le real and worked
>hilarity ensues
At least he uses data
Every historian uses data but only his ilk thinks the data is good enough to build models and make predictions. Maybe with thousands of years with internet age technology we have enough quality data to see some patterns emerge. But employing "psychohistory" on the historical data we have currently is like employing Newtonian physics on the data set of natural phenomena Aristotle describes in a nonsensical way in his physics.
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Cycle of history makes more sense if technology was stagnant. Then you could argue more coherently about there always being this same cycle being repeated. But with technological change, the world changes. At this stage of what the world is like you can’t say that we are repeating some part of history that the romans went through. To go through what the romans went through our world would need to be more similar to the Roman world. But it simply is a completely different world. We are in a completely new part of existence. It’s never been experienced before by humans. Those who are like Spengler and Evola in my opinion are simply wrong.
There are multiple cycles and trends going on at any given point in time. Ray Dalio speaks on this very well. He talks about nearing the peak of the long term debt cycle, the middle of China's rise as a power, yet also near the beginning of a new technological progress cycle with AI. America is definitely in a culturally decadent phase exemplified by incessant reboots and sequels of old franchises. Young people seem to be doing worse on average as seen with increasing rates of mental illness, lower academic performance despite increased spending, in large part due to higher rates of single parenthood. The elderly hold extreme disproportionate power which stultifies dynamism as seen with the average age of politicians, housing prices, zoning laws, safetyist regulations, etc.
>The only alternative seems to be permanent struggle but at that point life is not even worth living.
Yes. Struggle is what makes life worth living. Working hard on projects you find meaningful provides deep satisfaction and long term happiness. Aristotle spoke on this, and said happiness arises from exercising our capacities and practicing virtue. Money, power, and various pleasures are fleeting and do not provide long term happiness.
"…the function of man is to live a certain kind of life, and this activity implies a rational principle, and the function of a good man is the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed it is performed in accord with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, then happiness turns out to be an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. "
John Bagot Glubb wrote an interesting essay, clearly influenced by Spengler, about the cycles of empires. In British fashion, he takes a more rational approach than Spengler.
https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
> [...] in the environment of Chanaan, were constantly renewing and abounding, leading to the formation of previously unknown varieties and types. Such a contest was taking place, because the Phoenicians offered occupation to everyone. The work of its ports, its factories, its caravans, required a lot of arms. Tyre and Sidon, besides being large maritime and commercial cities in the manner of London and Hamburg, were at the same time major industrial centres such as Liverpool and Birmingham; they became the evenings of the populations of earlier Asia, they occupied them all and they were transferring the overflow to the vast circle of their colonies. In this way, through constant immigration, they sent fresh forces and an increase in their own lives. Let's not admire this prodigious act too much. All these advantages of an everincreasing population had their unfortunate reworms: they began by altering the political constitution in order to improve it; they ended up determining its total ruin.
> The first facts about the history of this country not going back very high, only 660 years B.C., Japan would be roughly today in the situation where China was under the leadership of the descendants of the refractory kschattryas, up to the emperor Tsin-chi-hoang-ti. What would confirm the idea that white colonies have primitively civilized the Malay population that forms the foundation of this country, it is that we find, at the beginning of history, exactly the same mythical narratives as in Assyria, Egypt and even China, albeit in a more marked manner. The first sovereigns previous to the positive eras are gods, then demigods.
> Thus, the ultimate, fatal, necessary, increasingly strong predominance of the melaninian principle was the goal of the existence of Anterior Asia and its annexes. One could argue that since the day the first chamite conqueror declared himself master, by virtue of the right of conquest, of these primitive heritages of the black race, the family of the vanquished did not waste an hour in reclaiming it's land and seizing the oppressors at the same time. Day by day, she achieves this with that inflexible and sure patience that nature brings in the execution of her laws.
Dating back to Macedonian times, everything that comes from Anterior Asia or from Greece has the ethnic mission of extending the melaninian conquests.
> In short, the Gauls, who were not barbarians, were people in the midst of decline, and if their good times were infinitely less bright than the periods of glory at Sidon and Tyre, it is no less unquestionable that the dark cities of the Carnutes, the Reams and the Eduens died of the same evil that had ended the existence of the brilliant Canaanite metropolises (1).
John Glubb, I rarely ever see him mentioned in threads like this.
probably because you don't actually read the threads, moron
Describe two civilizational cycles and which parts of the first cycle relate to the second.
Cycle one: the invasion
A large but weak local tribe of people gets attacked and vanquished by a small but strong, invading tribe of people.
The tribe of the victorious establishes a government to keep the power in their hands. The vanquished are not admitted into governmental positions and their attempts to do so severely punished.
This goes on like that for many generations. Whenever the victorious are asked for their right to govern, they fall back to the argument of being victorious.
Cycle two: the progress phase
The victorious administrate the construction of roads, ports, military, temples and force the vanquished to work for those projects under the command of members of the victorious tribe. They force language, religion, customs and morals upon them, the old culture of the vanquished becomes subliminal or forgotten.
Cycle three: the overachiever phase
Overachievers of the class of the vanquished seek for more rights within society. The upper class of the victorious first reacts with punishment, then they admit a few of them into upper society.
Cycle four: the philosophical phase
The overachievers form a new layer within society that is above the lower class but underneath the conservative upper class. They elaborate theorems about equality of the humans and that society should become more equal. The upper class reacts with punishing the distribution of such ideas.
Cycle five: the politics phase
The steadily growing class of the overachievers seeks place in government. They are refused this right in the beginning, but after long negotiations, riots and declamations of human rights, they are admitted a place in government where they debate politics together or against the conservative upper class.
Cycle six: the social mobility phase
The upper class has steadily shrunk, after so many of them have died in foreign conquest wars. The upper class sees itself forced to replace positions othertimes held by people from the class of the vanquished with people from the class of the oppressed under the condition that they take up the values of the upper class.
Cycle seven: the class struggle phase
The class of the overachievers fights against the upper class over political rights. They disseminate their dogmas of equality among the lower classes, riots begin in order to overthrow the upper class. The upper class has two options: to succumb, or to ask a foreign power for help.
Possibility one: the upper class succumbs
The upper class succumbs to the wishes of the lower classes. They continue their existence within the society they have built, but with none of the power they once held over the lower classes, beyond the natural power of family ties and money.
Possibility two: aid by a foreign power
A foreign power helps the upper class of the society in maintaining their rights over the oppressed group by sending troops into their country. The upper class holds power over the local population at the price of be colonized by a foreign power.
>a series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order.
By describing a cycle I meant list actual historical events that happened in a certain order that is then repeated in the same order. What you're listing as multiple cycles are just series of events, it doesn't become cyclical until the first event in the series is repeated which you're not even claiming it does.
Civilizational cycles don't get repeated in the same civilization though. That's impossible. Civilization is founded, it progresses, it flourishes, it expands, it accelerates, it ages, it stagnates, it looses it's power and influence and finally dies.
Someone who actually read the book
Spengler claims cultures have a life cycle that ends in death, not rebirth. A restored culture, in China, Europe, etc, may be influenced by its predecessors, but will be a new thing with its own essence.
How can someone spell and punctuate so well but not know the difference between lose and loose.
It's grim to realize that majority of civilizations have been lost in time completely
humans must all collectively have a poo at once, it'll break the cycle but we must all drop the poo at the same time
Carlyle said that history was a phoenix before all these other guys.
Books about civilization cycles?
soft men make hard men who make soft men. gotcha.
At last I finally understand power bottoms.
>nobody mentioned Ibn Khaldun thirty posts in
wtf
Non-Western references are often neglected dude.
Lemme guess, most anons see themselves as strong men? Kek
The Aztecs whole philosophy was the circle of empires. Which both the elites and the middle class were aware of. This is very unique.
And they thought about it right from the start of their empire. Yup
It lasted 200 years and by the time the Spanish came the Aztec emperor was trying to bring a religious revival.
I think they could of pulled it off too.
I am obsessively into Mesoamerican history and archeology and regularly type up like 4 page posts on Aztec politics for the hell of it, and I have no idea what you're on about here unless you mean the 5 Suns creation myth
Clarify?
2012
So the Maya calendar was right. No one noticed in 2012, but by the year 2024, it can be said with certainty the world is irreversibly going to shit.
soft men make men hard
>civilization cycles besides Spengler?
They are not strictly cycles per se.
>Is there a way to ever break this cycle?
There is no spoon, Neo.
That one Fourth Turning guy. I forget his name, but his ideas are good.
>artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/strauss-howe-generational-cycle-theory/#:~:text=During%20a%20High%2C%20old%20Prophets,period%20after%20the%20Revolutionary%20War.
An article that goes over the core ideas. The original version which I had read doesn't seem to be available any longer.
If you want to diversify your readings on the topic, you can explore Ibn Khaldoun's Al Muqaddimah, a groundbreaking medieval Islamic book that covers the cyclical nature of civilizations' history.
Collapse of Complex Societies by Tainter
Why Civilizations Self-Destruct by Elmer Pendell
Literally all the ancients.
M.C. Lemons introduction of the philosophy of history is probably the go to for an overview. He does Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, etc. theories, Augustine, Vivo, Hegel, etc.
The idea of cycles was the norm in antiquity.
Ibn Khaldun did. He wrote about a social concept called asabiyyah which more or less is the social cohesion between a ruling dynasty and the common people. At the start of any dynasty the rulers will have strong asabiyyah but as generations pass the dynasty will grow decadent and the social bond between the rulers and the people will grow weaker and weaker, sewing the seeds of the dynasty's downfall. Then hardy "barbarians" from the fringes of this nation or empire will take over, thanks to their strong asabiyyah, and the cycle shall repeat.
I recommend Al Muqaddimah if you're into that sort of stuff. The sociological elements are extremely novel for a book written in the 14th century.
Sounds like the mandate of heaven.
I'm halfway through the first volume of Decline of the West, and Spengler doesn't talk about cycles per se, but rather capital C Cultures that are born, mature, and die as any individual or organism. Those Cultures can die in old age or can be killed prematurely (some think the Russian Culture was itself snuffed out by Bolshevism). I can't say for sure if Spengler treats them in discrete ethnic/racial terms (he classes Plotinus and Diocletion as a member of the Magian Culture) as some of his exponents of the radical right who've never read his book might think, for he mentions that the late Latins and Greeks were not of Classical Culture but rather the Magian Culture, which was buried under Classical Civilization (Civilization being a phase in which Cultures have undergone maturation and are on the road of death). Spengler's theory posits that the successive and rapid conquests of the Arabian/Muslims as just claiming a birthright or taking formal ownership of things that were already their Culture's property.
Each culture has a prime symbol:
The Western/Faustian: Infinite Space
The Classical/Apollonian: The Body
The Russian: The Infinite Plain
The Magian/Arabian: The Cavern
The Egyptian: The Way (which I like to call the March to distinguish it more clearly from the Chinese)
The Chinese: The Tao
The Indian: The Zero
Next, in Spengler's theory, number isn't objective but reflects the prime symbol of that Culture. Number in the Apollonian is magnitude; in the Faustian, relation of points; in the Magian, indeterminate. What zero means in the Indian, Apollonian, and Faustian Cultures are not identical. The Faustian Culture treats it as a medial point between the positive and negative. In the Apollonian Culture, zero is unthinkable. Spengler's concept of number as it relates to his Cultures is so far his most brilliant and thought-provoking idea.
It's in the fricking picture. Hard times. Find out what specifically turns boys into strong men and create a system of artificial hardship. I think it would be something like the Spartans but idk too much about them.
Also reminds me of Starship troopers citizenship
>idk too much about them
They lost.
>and create a system of artificial hardship.
Wouldn't work.
History is fractal
Ibn Khaldun in the introduction
I recently read interesting blog article about this topic relating to Fremens from Dune. It touched the topic of "strong men creating good times", but not per say, though hard times do create strong men, due to having to be ready to fight in any circumstance.
Here's the article:
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
The solution is to be mid. Mid men create mid times create mid men and so on and so forth. The state of flow. Not too easy not too hard, the golden path to serenity.
Except this would never work, as women (in our current culture) hate mid men. You have to be successful banker or degenerate gangster, there is no in between.
WW2 proved there's no way to break the cycle
How?
What if hard times don't create strong men?
I recently picked up a full set of Toynbee's a study of history. At the very beginning of book 1 he makes the assertion that, ultimately, regardless of what was done to get there, the end of a civilization is always a form of suicide.
Does this parallel Spengler at all?
What if a civilization is being deliberately destroyed from within?
From what I gather from Toynbee's perspective a civilization still allows the infiltration to happen, that there is no infiltrating a civilization in its prime. Certain individuals and groups within may object, but that just speaks to a splintering that is itself emblematic of a civilization dying and that those elements that "resist" are at best nascent impulses toward something new. Like Spengler there is no going back, no rebirth.
That said it's fricking 12 volumes and I am just going off of his introduction in book one.
Somewhat. Spengler wouldn’t have called it a suicide but basically, he would concede that in the end, the people of the civilization either die out or stop caring about it, which is a sort of suicide. If you look at Rome as the pre-eminent example, by the time of the late empire, the Roman race had been largely replaced by foreigners, Romans had ceased to offer up military service, the would-be political elite grew increasingly disinterested in preserving the power and reach of the Roman state, and what few participating in political power politics just didn’t have their hearts in it that much. Emperors and generals paid the price, obviously while Roman elites retired to their estates or just lived lives of rural decadence and senility and a foreign religion had taken over. Eventually, people stopped seeking renewal and just gave up while the barbarians tore it are apart.
The toughest civilization to square with both Spengler and Toynbee is China. For Spengler, the question is whether China matters to world politics. For Toynbee, the question is whether it lived on for centuries and if so, how if it was supposed to commit suicide. The so-called Magian also presents problems but not model-breaking problems imo.
> The toughest civilization to square with both Spengler and Toynbee is China
The truth is that China still remains as an age-old civilization because they never went through any real demographically changes. Sure, they might have a huge population, but pretty much the only influx of people they have received from their foundation onwards was steppe Aryans, then Mongols. Both races already known in the Chinese civilization from it's foundation, they never challenged the Chinese culture, because they were always culturally inferior to them for one, and because they were capable of perfectly assimilating into Chinese culture for two.
Meanwhile, most other civilizations dwelt amongst swathes of different ethnicities, ethnicities that sometimes were culturally superior to the civilization and thus had the power of overthrowing them and replacing them with a new civilization. This is what happened in Assyria, in Egypt, in Greece and in Rome, and what almost happened hundreds of times in India, if the Brahmins hadn't taken the victory in the long game every single time. That's what happened with the Indian Greeks, that's what happened to the Muslim conquerors, that's what happened to the English men. Attacking, looting the country, until finally, after a span of a generation or two, forced to leave.
Wouldn't it be best to accept that the collapse is going to happen, up to a point, and leave things in place to safeguard whatever matters?
Do we even want to save every Empire? If something has become decadent and stupid, maybe it's time for it to go.
What are we defending at this point, by trying to save "the West"? A lot of Bureaucracy and bullshit, and certainly not the people or the ideals that build anything in the first place. Let it go. Who cares?
Spenglerian cycles aren't cycles in the sense of wheels turning: that is, every 1000 years, a certain set of things happen. This is not a proper reading.
If we want to think of Spenglerian cycles, we ought to consider them as internal life cycles. In the same way a plant or an animal has a lifespan, and a natural organic lifecycle, so do higher cultures. These natural cycles do not presume, for instance, a perfect and infinite set of cycles. An individual life can deviate by some circumstance or mutation, or an internal fact that is purely unique to itself. Just because there is a cycle, does not mean one has to follow it, though usually deviation means only early death, or at best an atypical prolonging of life, like an elderly man past his years.
Robert E Howard, unironically
Meimonedes, Nietzsche, Hinduism, Zaraostrianism, pretty much every ancient civ’s preception of time was cyclic.
Probably Guenon too.
I think these cycles (at least on a societal level) happen due to younger generations reacting to older generations. For instance, if Gen A is conservative then Gen B will be more progressive and so on. Did any author arrive at a similar conclusion?
Generations only antagonize each other when the new generation becomes racially different to the old generation.
Patently false. You can read ancient Greeks whining about how the new gen was le different.
Nahh that's all made up modern bullshit projected onto antiquity. If there ever was ancient Greeks complaining about the youth, it was during the times of mass immigration and consequently, mass mongrelization, much like in 20th and 21st Century Europe and US.
This book is a neat introduction to cyclical philosophers of history
Plato obviously in the Republic.
Hippocrates sorta does in Airs, Waters and Places. He says that the regimes of Asia and Anatolia tend towards despotism because of the climate of the region and that the leaderless people of the Scythian steppe both developed that form of society from environmental conditions. The Greeks who inhabit Asia as mercenaries have stronger countenances because they work for themselves while the Anatolian and Asians developed weak countenances as their jobs revolve around others and not the self. In his view, Greek settler states establish this sort of freedom in areas of Asia or the Phasis for instance where despotism are on the way out.
Literally “weak men exist because of good times”
> And with regard to the pusillanimity and cowardice of the inhabitants, the principal reason the Asiatics are more unwarlike and of gentler disposition than the Europeans is, the nature of the seasons, which do not undergo any great changes either to heat or cold, or the like; for there is neither excitement of the understanding nor any strong change of the body whereby the temper might be ruffled and they be roused to inconsiderate emotion and passion, rather than living as they do always in the state. It is changes of all kinds which arouse understanding of mankind, and do not allow them to get into a torpid condition. For these reasons, it appears to me, the Asiatic race is feeble, and further, owing to their laws; for monarchy prevails in the greater part of Asia, and where men are not their own masters nor independent, but are the slaves of others, it is not a matter of consideration with them how they may acquire military discipline, but how they may seem not to be warlike, for the dangers are not equally shared, since they must serve as soldiers, perhaps endure fatigue, and die for their masters, far from their children, their wives, and other friends; and whatever noble and manly actions they may perform lead only to the aggrandizement of their masters, whilst the fruits which they reap are dangers and death; and, in addition to all this, the lands of such persons must be laid waste by the enemy and want of culture. Thus, then, if any one be naturally warlike and courageous, his disposition will be changed by the institutions. As a strong proof of all this, such Greeks or barbarians in Asia as are not under a despotic form of government, but are independent, and enjoy the fruits of their own labors, are of all others the most warlike; for these encounter dangers on their own account, bear the prizes of their own valor, and in like manner endure the punishment of their own cowardice. And you will find the Asiatics differing from one another, for some are better and others more dastardly; of these differences, as I stated before, the changes of the seasons are the cause. Thus it is with Asia.