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In Greece, he had been in the grave of one dead civilization—the Hellenic. Then he went on a walking trip in Crete (walking is still Toynbee's chief recreation) through an even more cryptic graveyard. Minoan civilization is vivacious and inscrutable, and, with its underground vaults, its Minotaur legend, its statues of snake goddesses and bullfighting maidens, slightly sinister. What disaster overwhelmed by fire some 1.400 years B.C. the mighty palace of Cnossos? No one knows, for the traces of the flames, still visible upon the stones, are like the Cretan inscriptions—indecipherable. But the doom of this first great thalassocracy (sea power) haunts men's minds like a shriek arrested through the centuries. It haunted Toynbee. Then one day he came upon the ruins of another thalassocracy—a Venetian doge's palace. For Venice had once held the gorgeous East in fee largely through its military occupation of the island of Crete.
The Thalassocrat. There dawned upon the history-sensitive mind of young Toynbee that, as a citizen of the world's No. 1 naval power, he too was a thalassocrat. There was borne in upon him, if not the outlines of his grand design, a presentiment that, in historic time, these three thalassocracies (Crete, Venice, Britain) had more in common than the members of the Triple Entente, were more contemporary than King and Kaiser. And he felt a foreboding of their common fate.
But politics is the present tense of history. The future theoretician of civilizations served his apprenticeship to practical politics by editing a Government pamphlet for Lord Bryce and (during World War I) by working in various intelligence sections of the Foreign Office. (Toynbee speaks five languages; thinks almost as readily in classic Greek as in English.) Then, in 1918, Hindenburg's dinosauric war machine threatened to crush the British drive in France. The Field Marshal failed to break through, but he gave the genesis of A Study of History a new turn. Feverishly in those days Toynbee read and reread Thucydides, finding, as others have found since, that the history of The Peloponnesian War threw more light than any contemporary commentary on the struggles of our times.
At close range, Toynbee had watched the waging of war. As an adviser to the British delegation at the Versailles peace conference,* he finished his education in the history of his own time by watching the powers wage peace. He had seen a war, which cost 85 million dead and settled almost nothing, end in a peace which settled little but the inevitability of another war. Toynbee rounded out his knowledge of the modern world by serving as a newspaper correspondent in the Turko-Greek War and by making a trip to India, Japan and China, returning through Siberia and Russia. He also made several trips to the U.S.
In 1922, Toynbee jotted down, on half a sheet of writing paper, his plan for A Study of History. He estimated calmly that the project would run to some two million words and that he might, the vicissitudes of civilization permitting, finish it in his old age. Meanwhile, he earned a living as director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and research professor of international history at the University of London.