The Wages of Defeat
When Rome broke Antiochus the Great at Apamea in 188 BC it did not merely take his land; it invoiced him.
When Rome broke Antiochus the Great at Apamea in 188 BC it did not merely take his land; it invoiced him. The bill — fifteen thousand talents, the better part of four hundred tonnes of silver — looks survivable set against the empire’s headline revenue and ruinous set against the only figure that ever governs a state’s freedom of action: the thin surplus it actually has left to spend. That distinction, between what a great power earns and what it can dispose of, is the quiet arithmetic behind the rise and fall of hegemons. It was doing its work then. It is doing its work now.
Keywords: Treaty of Apamea; Antiochus III; Seleukid empire; Roman Republic; war finance; fiscal-military state; war indemnities; ancient economy; fiscal capacity; great-power rivalry; economic statecraft; US–China competition
Thesis. The defeat of Antiochus III is usually told as a story of battles — Thermopylae, Magnesia, the Scipios, the elephants. But the decisive instrument was not the legion; it was the ledger. The settlement imposed at Apamea was a structured fiscal transfer of remarkable precision, and its weight is badly misjudged when it is measured, as it almost always is, against the gross revenue of the Seleukid empire. Measured that way it looks heavy but bearable. Measured against the quantity that actually constrains a state — its free fiscal capacity, the discretionary surplus left after the standing costs of being a great power have been met — it was something closer to a mortgage on the future, levied annually for twelve years, at the precise moment when the empire’s richest revenue-bearing provinces were stripped away. The same arithmetic governs great-power rivalry in general: the cost of the contest is paid not out of headline wealth but out of slack, and the loser’s slack is the first thing the winner captures. What follows offers the contemporary parallel as a structural homology — a shared mechanism — and emphatically not as a prediction.
A king goes looking for money
In 187 BC the most powerful monarch in the world broke into a temple.
Antiochus III — Antiochos Megas, the Great, heir of Seleukos who had been one of Alexander’s marshals, the man who had marched an army to the borders of India and back and reassembled a fractured empire by main force — was in the eastern province of Elymais, in the mountains beyond Susa, and he was there to rob a sanctuary of its treasure. The sources are terse and a little stunned by it. Diodorus and Strabo and the epitome of Trogus all record the same essential fact: the king, pressed for funds, attempted to plunder a wealthy temple of Bel, and the local population rose and killed him for it. The greatest king of the age died in a failed act of sacrilegious larceny in a provincial backwater, with his soldiers around him, trying to lay hands on enough silver to keep his creditors satisfied.
His creditor was Rome.
Hold that image, because it is the whole argument in miniature, exactly as the iron collar that the consul Glabrio fitted to the necks of the Aetolian envoys was the whole argument of an earlier story about this same war. Antiochus did not die in battle, gloriously, against the legions. He died doing arithmetic — or rather, failing to. He had agreed, three years earlier, to pay Rome a sum so large that it could only be met by squeezing every corner of a vast empire, and the squeezing had taken him, in the end, to a temple in the hills with a war-band and a desperate plan. The man who had once been able to field one of the largest armies the Hellenistic world ever saw had been reduced to a tomb-robber by a clause in a treaty. That is what a great-power defeat looks like when you follow the money instead of the swords. It does not look like Magnesia. It looks like a king with a shortfall.
The bill
So let us follow the money. What, precisely, did Apamea cost?
The terms are preserved in three ancient accounts of partly overlapping dependence — Polybius, writing closest to the events and with access to documents; Livy, whose fuller narrative draws on Polybius but adds and occasionally garbles; and Appian, looking back from the Roman imperial centuries. Where they agree we can be confident; where they diverge, as they do over the size of the fleet Antiochus was allowed to keep, the divergence is itself instructive, and an honest reconstruction carries both readings rather than smoothing them away. On the central financial clause they agree, and its internal arithmetic is exact.
The indemnity was fifteen thousand Euboic talents. It was not demanded all at once — no ancient treasury, however full, could have produced it on the spot — but on a schedule of almost bureaucratic care: five hundred talents down, a further two thousand five hundred on the ratification of the treaty by the Roman Senate, and the remaining twelve thousand in twelve equal annual instalments of one thousand talents each, every one of them to be delivered to Rome. Polybius gives the schedule; Livy gives it; Appian gives the total. It is, as a piece of fiscal design, strikingly modern: a large capital sum, a down payment, and a decade-plus of servicing.
What does fifteen thousand talents mean in any tangible sense? Here we have to descend, briefly, into metrology, because the figure is meaningless until it is weighed. A talent was a unit of silver, six thousand drachmae, and on the Attic–Euboic standard that the treaty invokes a drachma ran to roughly 4.31 grams of silver — so a talent came to about 25.86 kilograms, with the various authorities clustering between 25.8 and 26.2. Do the multiplication and the indemnity resolves into something you can almost see: on the order of three hundred and eighty-eight tonnes of refined silver, to be conveyed across the Mediterranean to Rome over twelve years. It is a quantity of bullion large enough to distort an economy, and over the following decades, as it and the indemnities extracted from Carthage and Macedon flowed into the Republic, it helped to do exactly that — a point to which the Roman side of this story will return.
The silver was not the whole of it. There was also Eumenes II of Pergamon, Rome’s indispensable ally in the war, who had to be paid out of Antiochus’s defeat as surely as Rome did. Polybius preserves, with a precision that is almost comic in its specificity, the commutation of a grain obligation owed to Eumenes into cash: one hundred and twenty-seven talents and two hundred and eight drachmae — the drachmae carried, evidently, straight off an accountant’s tablet — alongside a separate payment of three hundred and fifty talents in five annual instalments. When a settlement is recorded down to the last two hundred and eight drachmae, you are looking at the work of men who counted carefully, and who meant the losing side to feel every unit of the counting.
And then there was the land. Apamea did not merely fine Antiochus; it amputated him. He was made to surrender everything in Asia Minor north and west of the Taurus range — the wealthy, monetised, Hellenised coastlands and their cities, the most productive and most liquid part of his western empire — to be parcelled out between Rome’s allies, Eumenes and the Rhodians. He gave up his war elephants. He gave up all but a token remnant of his fleet. He undertook to hand over Hannibal, who did not wait to be handed over. The territorial clauses and the financial clauses were not two separate penalties; they were one compound instrument, and the genius of the compounding is the heart of this essay. Rome took the indemnity and the provinces that might have paid it. It demanded an enormous stream of silver and simultaneously confiscated the most fertile part of the catchment from which that silver would have to be drawn.
That is why the king ended up in a temple in Elymais. The bill was payable from a revenue base that the same treaty had just cut down.
Why “gross revenue” is the wrong number
Here is where almost every casual account of Apamea goes wrong, and where the economic history has something genuinely useful to say.
The natural move, confronted with a fifteen-thousand-talent indemnity, is to ask how it compares to the empire’s income. And we have, thanks to the patient reconstruction of George Aperghis in The Seleukid Royal Economy, a serious estimate of that income. Aperghis builds his figures from the ground up — population, agricultural yield, tribute, the mints, the great royal taxes — and concludes that total Seleukid royal revenue ran, in normal years, to something on the order of ten to fifteen thousand talents annually, rising toward perhaps twenty thousand at the empire’s height under a successful king, which is to say under Antiochus III himself before the fall. (The figures are necessarily tentative, and Aperghis says so; the point is the order of magnitude, which is what matters here.)
Set the indemnity against that and it looks, frankly, survivable. A thousand talents a year against a revenue of fifteen or twenty thousand is a tax of five to seven per cent on the gross — heavy, unwelcome, but the sort of thing a large state absorbs. If that were the right comparison, Apamea would have been a humiliation rather than a catastrophe, and Antiochus would have had no need to go temple-robbing.
But gross revenue is the wrong number, and the reason it is the wrong number is the single most important idea in this essay. A state cannot spend its gross revenue. Most of what comes in is already committed before the king has a free hand with any of it. And in the Seleukid case the largest commitment, by a wide margin, was the one thing a Hellenistic monarchy could least afford to cut: the army.
Aperghis is explicit that military expenditure was the dominant item in the royal budget — that, as he puts it, the army was by far the main source of expenses, as was always the case in antiquity — and that once the standing costs of the state were met, any surplus was small. That last phrase is the hinge. It means that the figure against which the indemnity should be measured is not the ten-to-twenty thousand talents of gross revenue but the much smaller quantity left over after the army, the fleet, the satrapal administration, the court, the fortifications, and the perpetual demands of campaign had been paid: the free fiscal surplus, the discretionary slack, the portion of the budget the king could actually choose what to do with.
We cannot recover that figure exactly — no Seleukid finance ministry left us a balance sheet, and anyone who claims a precise number is inventing it. But we can bound it. If Aperghis is right that expenses were high and surplus small, then the free surplus was some modest fraction of gross revenue — plausibly somewhere in the range of one in twenty to one in five, which on a fifteen-thousand-talent revenue is a discretionary margin of perhaps seven hundred and fifty to three thousand talents a year. And now do the comparison that actually matters. A thousand-talent annual instalment, set not against the gross but against a discretionary surplus of that size, is no longer a five-per-cent nuisance. It is a claim on something between a third and the whole of the empire’s room for manoeuvre — every year, for twelve years, payable in hard silver, while the provinces that fed the surplus were being handed to Pergamon.
That is the arithmetic that killed Antiochus in a temple. Not the gross, which he could have borne. The surplus, which he could not. The indemnity did not tax his wealth; it confiscated his freedom of action, and a great power with no freedom of action is a great power in name only, going through the provinces with a war-band looking for silver that the treaty has already spoken for.
What it cost to be great in the first place
To see why the surplus was so thin — why so much of that gross revenue was spoken for before the king touched it — you have to understand what a Hellenistic empire was for, and what it cost to keep one standing.
The Seleukid state was, in the most exact sense, a military enterprise. It had been won by Alexander’s spear and divided by his marshals’ spears, and it was held by the spear thereafter. Its frontiers were enormous and everywhere contested; its provinces were prone to revolt; its rivals — Ptolemaic Egypt to the south, Macedon to the west, the steppe and the Iranian plateau to the north and east — were permanent. A king who could not field a great army did not stay a king for long, and the armies the Seleukids fielded were genuinely vast. At Raphia in 217, Polybius tells us, Antiochus brought something like sixty-two thousand infantry, six thousand cavalry, and one hundred and two elephants into the field against Ptolemy. At Magnesia, the battle that broke him, Livy puts his host at around seventy thousand. These were not militias summoned for a season. At their core stood a standing professional army — the royal guard, the settled military colonists, the mercenary contingents recruited from across the Greek world and beyond — and standing professional armies have to be paid whether or not there is a war.
And Hellenistic soldiers were not cheap. The going rate for an infantryman in the Greek world ran to something like a drachma a day, with cavalry and specialists higher; the scholarship of Griffith on the mercenaries and Bar-Kochva on the Seleukid army itself lets us put rough but real numbers on the wage bill. Even the standing core — never mind the full mobilised host — represented a permanent annual charge on the treasury running into the low thousands of talents, before a single campaign was mounted, before a fleet was launched, before a frontier fortress was rebuilt. Add the satraps and their administrations, the splendour of a court that was itself an instrument of rule, the benefactions and temple-building by which a king advertised his legitimacy, and the extraordinary costs of war in the years — which were most years — when war came, and you can see where the gross revenue went. It went on being a great power. The surplus was what survived the expense of greatness, and the expense of greatness was crushing.
There is a comparison buried here that the military narrative of the war usually misses, and it sharpens the fiscal point. Rome, the state that broke Antiochus, fought its wars with a fundamentally cheaper instrument. The Roman army of the middle Republic was, in this period, a citizen militia: property-owning Romans served as a duty of citizenship, paid a modest stipend — Polybius records the legionary’s wage at two obols a day, a third of a drachma, against the drachma a Hellenistic professional commanded — and returned to their farms when the campaign ended. A republic that could draw on a deep reservoir of citizen-soldiers at a third of the unit cost of professional manpower was, in the most literal sense, fighting at a discount. The dynastic empire, dependent on expensive standing professionals and hired foreigners, paid full price for every spear. When two such systems collide in a long contest of attrition, the cheaper system has a structural advantage that has nothing to do with courage or generalship and everything to do with the wage bill. The Seleukid empire was expensive to defend in a way the Roman Republic, at this stage, simply was not — and an empire that is expensive to defend has a thin surplus, and a thin surplus is exactly what an indemnity is designed to seize.
The comparative ledger
Apamea was not Rome’s first invoice, and reading it alongside the others reveals that the Republic had learned to calibrate its extractions with some care — and that it was escalating.
The pattern begins with Carthage. After the First Punic War, the peace of 241 imposed an indemnity that was hardened, when the Carthaginians tried to haggle, to three thousand two hundred talents over ten years — three hundred and twenty a year. After the Second Punic War, the far more punitive settlement of 201 demanded ten thousand talents, but stretched over fifty years: two hundred a year, a deliberately long and shallow schedule that kept a defeated but still useful Carthage solvent and subordinate for two generations. (The Romans understood the difference between bleeding a rival and killing one, and chose, with Carthage in 201, to bleed.) Against Philip V of Macedon in 197, the indemnity was a relatively modest thousand talents, half down and the rest over ten years, paired — significantly — with the reduction of his army and the surrender of his fleet.
Then Apamea: fifteen thousand talents over twelve years, a thousand a year. Set the schedules side by side and the escalation is plain. Carthage in 201 paid two hundred a year; Philip paid fifty; Antiochus paid a thousand — five times the annual charge laid on Carthage at the height of Rome’s vengeance against Hannibal’s city, and twenty times what was asked of Macedon. The Seleukid indemnity was the heaviest annual fiscal burden Rome had ever imposed, and it was imposed on the empire whose discretionary surplus, as we have seen, was least able to bear an annual charge of that weight.
What an indemnity of this kind does, structurally, is capitalise a battlefield outcome into a durable transfer. Magnesia was a single afternoon; the indemnity converted that afternoon into twelve years of guaranteed silver, a stream of value flowing from the defeated treasury to the victorious one long after the armies had dispersed. It is the financial technology by which a momentary military superiority is made to keep paying — and, in this case, the financial technology was wedded to a territorial amputation that ensured the defeated state could never rebuild the capacity to resist a second time. The indemnity drained the surplus; the loss of the western provinces shrank the base from which surplus could be regenerated. Together they did not merely punish Antiochus. They demoted the Seleukid empire, permanently, from the first rank of powers — and they did it with clauses, not legions.
The Roman side of the ledger
There is a second half to this fiscal story, and it is the half that turns a tale about one empire’s ruin into a tale about how hegemony is financed.
The silver that flowed out of Antiochus’s treasury flowed into Rome’s, and it did not flow alone. The Apamea indemnity joined the streams already running from Carthage and Macedon, and the cumulative effect of these transfers — together with the plunder of the wars themselves and, a little later, the opening of the Macedonian and Spanish mines — was to pour an unprecedented quantity of bullion into the Roman fiscal system over the first half of the second century. Philip Kay, in his study of Rome’s economic transformation in exactly this period, has argued that this influx of monetary silver was one of the engines of a genuine financial revolution at Rome: a deepening of the money supply, an expansion of credit, a quickening of commercial life. Indemnities were not merely punishments inflicted on the defeated; they were revenue for the victor, and that revenue helped finance the next round of expansion. James Tan has shown how lightly, in consequence, the Republic was able to tax its own citizens in this era — because it had learned to make conquest, and the indemnities that crowned conquest, pay for empire.
This is the deep structure that the single case illuminates. A great power that can convert its military victories into durable fiscal transfers from the defeated has found a way to make hegemony partly self-financing — to extract from rivals the surplus that pays for the forces that defeat the next rival. Rome, in the decades after Apamea, was running exactly such a machine. The fiscal weakening of the Seleukid empire and the fiscal strengthening of the Roman Republic were not two stories. They were one transaction, recorded from opposite sides of the same ledger: the surplus drained from Antiochus was the surplus accruing to Rome. That is what makes the gross-versus-surplus distinction more than an accounting nicety. The whole logic of great-power rivalry, reduced to its fiscal skeleton, is a contest over who captures whose discretionary capacity — and the indemnity is the instrument that makes the capture explicit, annual, and enforceable.
The uncomfortable mirror
Now turn the case toward the present, carefully, with the caveats loaded first, because they carry the weight.
What I am about to draw is a structural homology, not a historical equivalence, and the distance between the two cases is enormous. Rome is not the United States; the Seleukid empire is not the People’s Republic of China; a treaty indemnity paid in bullion is not a tariff schedule or an export control or a sanctions regime. Modern great powers possess instruments and constraints that Antiochus could not have imagined: fiat currencies and deep sovereign debt markets that let a state spend far beyond its current revenue; central banks; dense economic interdependence that makes the rupture of a rivalry costly to both sides in a way the shallow integration of the Hellenistic Mediterranean never was; and, above all, nuclear weapons, which place a ceiling on escalation that no calculation at Apamea had any reason to contemplate. Those differences cut in every direction. Some make our situation safer than Antiochus’s; some make it sharper. The point of the comparison is not to forecast that today’s rivalry will end as the Roman–Seleukid one did — in total victory for the established power and the dismemberment of the rising one. Nothing here predicts that, and to read it as prophecy would be to commit the precise error of false certainty that an honest use of history should warn against. The comparison earns its keep only at the level of mechanism. And at that level the resemblance is hard to unsee.
The mechanism is this: the cost of great-power rivalry is paid out of fiscal slack, not out of headline wealth, and the contest is, at bottom, a struggle over whose slack is consumed.
Consider how a modern great-power competition is actually financed. It is paid for in defence budgets that must be sustained year after year; in the subsidies and industrial policy with which states try to secure supply chains and onshore strategic production; in the deadweight losses imposed when trade between the rivals is taxed, restricted, or severed; in the diversion of scientific and industrial effort from growth toward security. None of these costs is trivial, and none of them is drawn from a state’s gross product in any meaningful sense. They are drawn from the discretionary margin — the slice of the budget not already committed to the vast mandatory obligations of a modern state, to pensions and health care and the service of existing debt. A country can have an enormous economy and a vanishingly thin fiscal margin, exactly as the Seleukid empire had an enormous revenue and a thin surplus, and it is the margin, not the economy, that determines how much rivalry it can actually sustain. The relevant question about any great power’s capacity to compete is not “how large is its GDP?” any more than the relevant question about Antiochus was “how large is his revenue?” It is “how much can it actually free up to spend?” — and that is a question about slack.
The instruments of the contest have their own fiscal logic, and it echoes the ancient one. When the established power and the rising one impose tariffs and counter-tariffs on each other, the measurable cost — the careful empirical work on the 2018–2019 exchange between Washington and Beijing found an aggregate real-income loss running into the low billions of dollars a month, falling substantially on the importing economy that levied the tariffs — is a deadweight subtraction from exactly the discretionary surplus that might otherwise fund growth or guns or guns-and-butter both. Economic statecraft, like an indemnity, is a transfer and a destruction at once: it shifts some value and burns the rest, and the burning falls on slack. And the deepest parallel of all is the one Rome understood instinctively and that the fiscal-military historians from Brewer to O’Brien have anatomised in the modern record: that the sinews of power are financial before they are military, that the capacity to extract, to borrow against, and to service revenue is the true ceiling on what a state can do in the world, and that a great power runs into trouble not when its armies are beaten but when its fiscal slack runs out. Paul Kennedy gave the syndrome its enduring name — imperial overstretch, the condition of a power whose strategic commitments have outrun the surplus available to fund them. Antiochus, paying a thousand talents a year out of a surplus of perhaps two thousand while his richest provinces flew Pergamene colours, is imperial overstretch rendered in silver.
None of this is destiny, and that is the most important thing the ancient case teaches, not the least. The Seleukid catastrophe was not written in the stars; it was assembled out of choices — the choice to fight Rome at all, the choice to fight it expensively and lose, the acceptance of a settlement that drained the surplus and confiscated the base together. The fiscal trap was real, but it was a trap the king walked into, and at several points he might have walked elsewhere. The lesson for any great power is therefore not fatalism but fiscal self-knowledge: the discipline of measuring your own freedom of action against the right number, of knowing how thin your slack really is, of recognising that a rivalry funded out of a discretionary margin you have not honestly counted is a rivalry that can hollow you out long before any battle is lost. The states that endure are the ones that watch the surplus, not the headline — and that decline to let a contest consume the margin on which their freedom of action depends.
What the dead can tell the living
The value of Antiochus’s ruin is not that it predicts ours. It is that it strips a familiar process down to its load-bearing parts, in a case far enough away to see clearly, and shows us where the parts can fail.
It says: do not measure a burden against your gross. Measure it against your slack, because the slack is what you actually have, and a charge that is trivial against the one can be mortal against the other. It says: the most dangerous fiscal blow is the compound one — the demand that drains your surplus and the loss that shrinks the base from which surplus is regenerated, arriving together, as they arrived for Antiochus when Rome took the indemnity and the provinces in a single instrument. It says: the cost of being a great power is the standing cost of the forces that make you one, and that cost is paid in every year, war or no war, so that the surplus is always thinner than the revenue suggests. And it says — this above all — that the contest between great powers is, beneath the armies and the rhetoric, a contest over fiscal capacity, a struggle to preserve your own freedom of action while draining your rival’s, and that the side which loses that struggle loses everything that the armies were supposedly defending, whether or not its armies are ever beaten in the field.
Antiochus the Great had the larger empire, the more glorious lineage, the vaster army, and, on paper, the greater revenue. He lost anyway, and he lost first in the ledger and only afterward in the temple at Elymais, killed reaching for silver that a Roman clause had already claimed. The legions at Magnesia delivered the verdict. The treaty at Apamea collected the debt. And the king who had marched to India died a tomb-robber because he had been made to pay, out of a surplus he did not have, the price of having been a rival to Rome.
The bill for greatness always comes due. The only question that ever mattered — for him, and not only for him — was whether anyone had honestly counted what was left to pay it with.
He had not. The counting is still the thing.
A note on sources and further reading
Every figure and episode above rests on the surviving record and on the published scholarship, not on invention; where the ancient accounts diverge or fall silent, the essay says so. The terms of the settlement come from Polybius, Histories 21.42–43 (the indemnity, its schedule, and the commutation of the grain debt to Eumenes, given to the exact drachma), with Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 38.37–39, and Appian, Syriaca 38, supplying the fuller and the later accounts; the divergence over the size of the permitted Seleukid fleet is a genuine one between these witnesses. The army figures are from Polybius 5.79 (Raphia) and Livy 37.37–40 (Magnesia), and the Roman and Hellenistic rates of military pay from Polybius 6.39. The death of Antiochus while plundering a temple in Elymais is reported by Diodorus Siculus 28.3 and 29.15, Strabo 16.1.18, and Justin, Epitome 32.2.
For the Seleukid economy and the all-important question of revenue and surplus, the essential work is G. G. Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy: The Finances and Financial Administration of the Seleukid Empire (Cambridge, 2004); the underlying figures are page-auditable in the author’s open-access doctoral thesis of the same title (University College London, 2000; UCL Discovery), where the revenue range, the peak near twenty thousand talents, the fall after the loss of Asia Minor, and the conclusion that any surplus was small are set out at pages 199 and 247–249. On the Seleukid army and its costs, see Bezalel Bar-Kochva, The Seleucid Army: Organisation and Tactics in the Great Campaigns (Cambridge, 1976), and on mercenary wages G. T. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (Cambridge, 1935). For ancient metrology, weights, and prices, Richard Duncan-Jones, The Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1982).
On the Roman fiscal transformation that the indemnities helped to drive, the indispensable studies are Philip Kay, Rome’s Economic Revolution (Oxford, 2014), on the bullion influx and the deepening of credit, and James Tan, Power and Public Finance at Rome, 264–49 BCE (Oxford, 2017), on taxation, conquest, and the politics of Roman public finance; for the comparative framing of premodern fiscal regimes, Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel (eds.), Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States (Cambridge, 2015). The narrative of the war itself is best followed in John D. Grainger, The Roman War of Antiochos the Great (Leiden, 2002), and the structural reading of Rome’s entry into the Greek east in Arthur M. Eckstein, Rome Enters the Greek East: From Anarchy to Hierarchy in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, 230–170 BC (Oxford, 2008); Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley, 1984), remains the great sceptical counterweight on Roman motive and contingency.
On the broader theory of war finance and the fiscal sinews of power, the foundational works are John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989), and the essays collected in Patrick K. O’Brien‘s long study of fiscal states; on the fate of powers whose commitments outrun their means, Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987), and the concept of imperial overstretch. For the contemporary economic rivalry referred to in closing, the empirical literature on the 2018–2019 tariff exchange — in particular M. Amiti, S. J. Redding, and D. E. Weinstein, “The Impact of the 2018 Tariffs on Prices and Welfare,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33:4 (2019), and the subsequent work of P. D. Fajgelbaum and colleagues on the welfare and trade-reallocation effects of the trade war — supplies the measured costs; and Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston, 2017), names the danger, with the caveat, argued throughout, that the contest is decided in the fiscal margin and not in the headline figures of national wealth.