Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/365

Rh Only when there emerges the feeling of being different from the two symbolic "lives" — Freidank's Bescheidenheit comes into our minds — does this life become an Estate, the nourishing estate in the fullest sense of the word, the root of the great plant Culture, which has driven its fibres deep into Mother Earth and darkly, industriously, draws all juices into itself and sends them to the upper parts, where trunks and branches tower up in the light of history. It serves the great lives not merely by the nourishment that it wins out of the soil for them, but also with that other harvest of mother earth — its own blood; for blood flowed up for centuries from the villages into the high places, received there the high forms, and maintained the high lives. The relation is called (from the noble's point of view) vassalage, and we find it arising — whatever the superficial causes may be in each case — in the West between 1000 and 1400 and in the other Cultures at the "contemporary" periods. The Helotry of Sparta belongs with it, and equally so the old Roman clientela, from which after 471 the rural Plebs — that is, a free yeomanry — grew up. Astonishing indeed is the force of this striving towards symbolic form in the Pseudomorphosis of the Late Roman East, where the caste system of the principate founded by Augustus (with its division into senatorial and equestrian officialdom) evolved backwards until, about 300, it haa returned, wherever the Magian world-feeling prevailed, to a condition parallel to that of the Gothic in 1300 — the condition, in fact, of the Sassanid Empire of its own time. Out of the officialdom of a highly Civilized administration came a minor nobility of decurions, village knights, and town politicians, who were responsible to the sovereign in body and goods for all outgoings — a feudalism formed backwards — and gradually made their positions heritable, just as happened under the Egyptian Vth dynasty and the first Chóu centuries and the Europe of the Crusades. Military status, of officers and soldiers alike, became hereditary in the same way, and service as a feudal obligation, and all the rest of what Diocletian presently reduced to formal law. The individual was firmly bound to the status (corpori adnexus), and the principle was extended as compulsory guild-membership to all trades, as in the Gothic or in old Egypt. But, above all, there necessarily arose from the ruins of the Late Classical slave-economy of "Latifundia" the colonate of hereditary small farmers, while the great estates became administrative districts and the lord was made responsible for its taxes and its