Vol 4

This is an appendix to: How To Identify The Despotic Minority - 15

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"The state was entirely organized on the principles of an Eastern despotism: an auto- cratic ruler controlled an omnipotent bureaucracy, which suppressed every trace of self- government while professing to retain it, and a population of serfs, living and working principally for the purposes of the Government. [105]"

"The form of political revolution which was the penalty for undue
delay in making this political adjustment on the Athenian pattern was a temporary political dictatorship (tyrannis), in which some individual man of action was allowed to seize despotic political power by force in order to accomplish, by the same rough and ready method, those social changes which had to be made some how, but which the contending classes and parties were failing to accomplish by voluntary agreement. [222]"

"For the function of the Sicilian despotisms in the field of international affairs see III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, p. 357 [223]"

"The vBpis with which the Papacy exploited its victory over the Empire—in first trampling on a prostrate foe and then attempting to exercise on its own account the oecumenical despotism which it had refused to tolerate in the hands of a Barbarossa or a Frederick II—quickly turned the public opinion of Western Christendom, not only against the Papacy itself, but against the whole principle of oecumenicalism which was now embodied in the Papacy alone. [234]"

"Thus the Holy See was not altogether unschooled in rendering unto Caesar² the things that are Caesar’s by the time when a fullfledged neo-Caesarism asserted itself—first in the persons of the despots who made themselves masters of a majority of the Italian city-states, and later in the persons of their Transalpine emulators: a Spanish Ferdinand and Isabella, a French Louis XI, and an English Henry VII. [235]"

"In 88 B.C., when King Mithradates of Pontic Cappadocia offered the city-states of Greece a ‘liberation' from Roman whips which would merely have exposed them to chastise- ment with the scorpions of a despotism in the Achaemenian tradi tion, Athens light-heartedly enlisted under the Oriental war-lord’s banner, and paid for her folly two years later when the city was taken by storm by Mithradates Roman conqueror Sulla. [285]"

"For example, the Athenian despot Peisistratus employed the Acamanian Amphilytus (Book I, chap. 62); the Samian despot Polycrates employed an Elean (Book I, chap. 13a); [291]"

"If Venice succeeded in gaining and holding an empire without having to sub- mit herself to a despotism at home, this was because she avoided the strain which Imperialism generally imposes upon communities that indulge in it; [296]"

"for Piedmont was a fringe of Northern Italy into which the city- state dispensation had never effectively spread,³ and the Savoyard rulers who established themselves in this never wholly conquered fastness of North Italian feudalism were not the despotic heirs of republican liberties, like the Visconti or the Medici. [304]"

"the Achaemenian expedition against Naxos circa 499 B.C., between the Achaemenian commander Megabates and the Milesian despot Aristagoras, with the similar sequel in which Aristagoras likewise revenges him self by raising an Ionian revolt and procuring the help of the Athenians. [421]"

"In the Ottoman and the Spartan social systems the key-technique of being shepherds of human cattle, or hunters of human game, was idolized side by side with the two master- institutions of the Padishah’s Slave-Household and the standing army of Spartiate ‘Peers’ who were enslaved to the impersonal despotism of the Lycurgean agoge. [442]"

"In the course of the next hundred years these Italian possessions of the Papacy became securely welded together into one of the ten despotically governed principalities into which the sixty or seventy medieval city-states of Central and Northern Italy were consolidated during the transi- tion from the Medieval to the Modern Age. [563]"

"A clamour was artfully propagatedagainst the remnant of a schism in Switzerland and Savoy which alone impeded the harmony of the Christian World. The vigour of opposition was succeeded by the lassitude of despair; the Council of Basel was
silently dissolved; ... all ideas of reformation subsided; the Popes con- tinued to exercise and abuse their ecclesiastical despotism.² [593]"

"And in the intoxication of its victory over the Conciliar Movement in this naked trial of strength the Papacy abandoned itself once more to the lust for power² which had been its besetting sin since the days of Hildebrand.With one hand it clung to the despotic ecclesiastical power over the provinces of the Western Church which it had been unexpectedly successful in retaining; [594-595]"

"with the other hand it continued to build up its secular territorial power in Central Italy, and, in playing their part as fifteenth-century Italian despots, the Popes became steeped in that pride of life which was the dominant note of the medieval Italian culture in its fifteenth-century over-ripeness. [595]"

"Yet, although they distinguished them- selves by this readiness—which was a rare virtue in the Hellenic World—to pay the necessary price for the benefits of solidarity, the strength which the Sicilian Greeks found in their unity under the successive despotisms of the Deinomenidae and the Dionysii and Agathocles and Hiero was still not enough to save them in the end from being trampled under foot when their island became the battleground of the Carthaginians and the Romans. [610]"