Small states (“vacua”) become the foci of quarrels between large states. Also a lurid and characteristically negative view of the rise and fall of Rome.
The ambitions, fears, and rivalries of the small states round the Mediterranean – Messana, Syracuse, and Saguntum; Aetolia, Pergamon, and Rhodes – involved their powerful neighbours in wars which did not come to an end till one Great Power, Rome, had eaten up four others – Carthage, Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt. The sequel [of these wars] was universal impoverishment and revolution, and the victorious Power also came to an unpleasant end, like a snake in the Zoological Gardens some years ago which, in a tug-of-war with another snake over the same pigeon, swallowed its rival as well as the bird, and died by inches as the foreign body stiffened in its throat.
The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922
