Principles of western civilisation

154 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

course of unimagined and unimaginable conquest does the mere recapitulation of such a list represent. For an immense period of time the successive waves of invaders must have continued their impact upon each other, or upon the peoples whom they encountered; conquering and exterminating, taking possession, settling and absorbing, and again moving to repeat the process. Although the advancing waves must again and again have broken and dispersed, the movement as a whole must have continued with little intermission for thousands of years before the dawn of history.

With the opening of the historic period we have ©

it at last in view on European territory in an advanced stage. Illyrians and Letts, Greeks and Latins, Celts, Slavs, and Teutons—these represent but the later waves of the invasions. Viewed in their proper perspective, the histories of the classic civilisations themselves represent but the last phases in which this movement of conquest in Europe is tending to reach its climax. The earliest history of Greece opens with the tribes in conflict with related peoples pressing on their borders. During the period in which it became the destiny of the Greeks to leave their mark indelibly impressed upon the world, they maintained uninterrupted conflict with peoples representing other waves of advance of the same stock. And, later still, as they sink out of sight in European history, their blood is swamped at last in the still incoming tide of Slavs and kindred peoples from the north.

We view the history of Rome in the same perspective. With the first rise of Roman history we