large empires and causes social breakdown. But militarism is a 
form of industrialism or the concentration of large amounts of 
homogenized energies into a few kinds of production. The 
Roman soldier was a man with a spade. He was an expert 
workman and builder who processed and packaged the 
resources of many societies and sent them home. Before 
machinery, the only massive work forces available for 
processing material were soldiers or slaves. As the Greek myth 
of Cadmus points out, the phonetic alphabet was the greatest 
processor of men for homogenized military life that was known 
to antiquity. The age of Greek society that Herodotus 
acknowledges to have been “overwhelmed by more troubles 
than in the twenty preceding generations” was the time that to 
our literary retrospect appears as one of the greatest of human 
centuries. It was Macaulay who remarked that it was not 
pleasant to live in times about which it was exciting to read.