Vol 7

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

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"In the Roman Empire the political expression of the corresponding social revolution was the replacement of an Augustan 'principate’ by a Diocletianic despotism after a long-protracted bout of disorder which, in its most acute phase, rankled into outright anarchy. [181]"

"This masterly portrayal of the features of the Abbasid regime in which it presented so striking a contrast to its Umayyad background could be adapted with little change to portray the corresponding revolu- tion in the Roman Empire which substituted the Diocletianic despotism for the Augustan 'Principate'. The Augustan regime, like the Umayyad Caliphate, had respected in large measure the liberties of an ‘ascendancy’ as against the Imperial Government at the price of tolerating the main- tenance of this ‘ascendancy’s’ privileged position as against the subject population of the Empire. [187]"

"The despots who imposed an imperfect and precarious political unity on the Greek city-states in Sicily and the toe of Italy in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (see III. iii. 357, n. i) [251]"

"Still less willing were the Macedonian nobility to serve a despotic master when their lawful King Alexander was replaced by a batch of noble- born usurpers of the royal title, in whose shoes any other Macedonian noble military adventurer might have found himself standing if the luck of the game, in the scramble for power after Alexander’s death, had happened to come his way instead of playing into the hands of his peers the Ptolemies, Antigoni, and Seleuci. [385]"

"But, as the Consulate passed into the Empire, and as the growing palsy of despotism spread over France, the quality of the work declined. [389]"

"Resolutely closing his eyes to unpleasant facts, Napoleon insisted that his servants should be blind also, and, being despotic and irritable, he was able to exact a constant supply of nutriment for his illusions. [389]"

"The tradition of autocracy, which Hitler, Mussolini, and Napoleon had ultimately derived — through eighteenth-century Transalpine ‘enlightened monarchs’ and fourteenth- century Italian despots — from the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen,^I had been conveyed to this official successor of Charle- magne by the political atmosphere of his Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which was a successor-state of Leo Syrus’s East Roman Empire. [475]"

"The communion between the Soul and the One True God cannot thus degenerate into the bondage of a slave to a despot, for in each of the higher religions, in diverse measure, the vision of God as Power is transfigured by a vision of Him as Love; [559]"

"The members of the highest order in the Christian hierarchy came to be known as ‘overseers ... and the initial preposition, as well as the literal meaning, of this compound Greek word are likewise to be found in the title ... which had been given in the Spartan body politic to the members of a board of supreme executive officers who were appointed by election but were constitutional despots during their term of office. [563]"

"‘Let us grasp the full significance of Frederick’s Italian-Roman State: a mighty pan-Italian seignory, which for a short time united in one state Germanic, Roman and Oriental elements — Frederick himself, Emperor of the World, being the Grand Signor or Grand Tyrant thereof, the first and last of these princes to wear the diadem of Rome, whose Caesarhood was not only allied with German kingship like Barbarossa’s but with Oriental-Sicilian despotism. [572]"

"for the North Italian city-state despot- isms² that were multiple replicas of Frederick’s abortive oecumenical Caesaro-papacy reproduced themselves, in their turn, on the nation- state scale, in the Transalpine and Transmarine outer circle of an Italianized Western World at the opening of the so-called Modern Age of Western history³ and these epigoni of the diadochi of Frederick the frustrated despoiler of Pope Innocent III were the successful despoilers of Innocent’s successors⁴ when a golden opportunity was offered to them by the folly of a Martin V and a Eugenius IV in crowning Innocent IV’s pyrrhic victory over Frederick’s natural heirs⁵ with a not less pyrrhic victory over the Conciliar Movement. [573]"

"5 Frederick’s ‘Oriental- Sicilian despotism’, as Kantorowicz calls it, was, of course, a ‘successor-state’, not only of the East Roman Empire, but of the Arab Caliphate as well, since the greater part of the East Roman dominions west of the Straits of Otranto which Frederick’s Norman predecessors had conquered in the eleventh century of the Chris- tian Era had previously been reconquered by the East Romans from North-West African Arab conquistador es who, in the ninth and tenth centuries, had overrun a Lombard Apulia and an East Roman Sicily (see IV. iv. 343-4, 356-7, and 401-2). [574]"

"While the unwaveringly loyal Phoenician city-states along the coast of Syria were rewarded by being invested with miniature empires — imperia Punica in imperio Persico — astride one of the vital lines of Achaemenian com- munications,³ the persistently refractory Hellenic city-states along the west coast of Anatolia had to be held through the agency of local despots, acting in the Achaemenian interest, whom their subjects regarded as ‘quislings’; [617]"

"1 ‘Darius’s assessment of tribute and other similar measures of his provoked the Per- sians into coining the mot that Darius was a huckster, Cambyses a despot and Cyrus a father — in allusion to Darius’s vice of dealing in a huckster’s spirit with all affairs of state, to Cambyses’ vices of irritability and contemptuousness, and to Cyrus’s virtue of gentleness and to the consequently invariable beneficence of his acts’ (Herodotus, Book III, chap. 89). [648]"