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From, A. Toynbee, History,
in R.W. Livingstone (ed.), The Legacy of Greece, Oxford University Press, 1921.
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Page 24
Lucretius wrote that about a hundred and fifty years after Hannibal evacuated Italy, but the horror is still vivid in his mind, and his poetry arouses it in our minds as we listen. The writer will never forget how those lines kept running in his head during the spring of 1918.
But the victors suffered with the vanquished in the common ruin of civilization. The whole Mediterranean world, and the devastated area in Italy most of all, was shaken by the economic and social revolutions which the Roman wars brought in their train. The proletariat was oppressed to such a degree that the unity of society was permanently destroyed and Greek civilization, after being threatened with a violent extinction by Bolshevik outbreaks—the slave wars in Sicily, the insurrection of Aristonikos and the massacres of Mithradates in Anatolia, the outbreaks of Spartakos and Catilina in Italy—was eventually supplanted by a rival civilization of the proletariat—the Christian Church. The revolutionary last phase in the second act—the final phase before the foundation of the Empire—has left its expression in the cry of the Son of Man: 'The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.' It was one of those anonymous phrases that are in all men's mouths because they express what is in all men's hearts. Tiberius Gracchus used it in his public speeches at Rome; two centuries later it reappears in the discourses of Jesus of Nazareth.
Ergo inter sese paribus concurrere telis Romanas acies iterum videre Philippi, nec fuit indignum superis bis sanguine nostro Emathiam et latos Haemi pinguescere campos.... Di patrii, Indigetes, et Romule, Vestaque mater quae Tuscum Tiberim et Romana Palatia servas, hunc saltem everso iuvenem succurrere saeclo ne prohibete. satis iam pridem sanguine nostro Laomedonteae luimus periuria Troiae.... vicinae ruptis inter se legibus urbes arma ferunt; saevit toto Mars impius orbe; ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae, addunt in spatio, et frustra retinacula tendens fertur equis auriga neque audit currus habenas.
(Georgics, i. 489 seqq.)
Cf. A History of Ancient Greece * Ancient Greek Political Theory * Greek History Resources
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome
A History of Greek Philosophy * Greek Orthodoxy - From Apostolic Times to the Present Day
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/toynbee-history.asp?pg=24
