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Updated: May 29, 2025
Gauls, Samnites, Latins, all that ever attacked her, were but taking a house-cloth to dry up a running spring. The Crest-Wave was coming to Italy; whose vital forces, all centrifugal before, must now be made to turn and flow towards the center. That was Rome; and as they would not flow to her of their own good will, out she must go and gather them in.
All of which amounts to saying that she began with a habit of empire-winning, which must have been created in the past. On her toughness the spirited Gaul broke as a wave, and fell away. On her narrow unmagnanimity the chivalrous mountain Samnite bore down, and like foam vanished. She had none of the spiritual possibilities of the Gaul; but the Crest-Wave was coming, and the future was with Italy.
Because of the astral mold, certainly. It is race-consciousness that makes race, and not the other way; and there is something behind that makes race-consciousness; so that even where calamity has smashed up the latter and put it altogether in abeyance, the seeds of it remain, in the soil and on the inner planes, to sprout again in their day; when the Crest-Wave rolls in; when Souls come to revive them.
The simple fact to note is this: that at a certain period in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. the Crest-Wave of Evolution was, so far as we can see, flowing through a very narrow channel.
His reign would fall, roughly, in the third quarter of the cycle, which is the best time therein; but his successor would have to hold out through the last quarter, which is the very worst. The Crest-Wave would then be passing from Italy: Rome would be becoming ever a harder place for a Real Man to live and work in.
The Crest-Wave rolled in to her; the spiritual forces descended far enough to create a cultural illumination, but not far enough to create political stability. We have seen before that they touch the artistic creative planes, in their descent, before they reach the more material planes. So her position is perfectly comprehensible. The old European manvantara was dying; elsewhere it was dead.
Greece holds such an eminence in history because the Crest-Wave rolled in there when it did. She was tenant of an epochal time; whoever was great then, was to be remembered forever. But the truth is, Greece served the future badly enough. The sixth and fifth centuries B. C. were an age of transition, in which the world took a definite step downward.
Then in due season it must be quickened: on the outer plane by an impulse from abroad, intercourse with allies, or resistance to an invader; and on the inner, by an inrush of Crest-Wave egos.
Later he taught Platonism for thirty years at Athens; then in the two-sixties went east to the court of Zenobia at Palmyra, whose brilliant empire, though it fell before the Illyrian Aurelian, was a sign in its time that the Crest-Wave had come back to West Asia.
By the time Camlan had been fought, and the Crest-Wave had left Wales, Findian had made a channel through which it might flow into Ireland, and in the five-forties the Irish illumination began. We must say a word or two as to the kind of institution he founded.
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