polity were undermined and vitiated from the outset by the destructive death-oriented myths which attended . . . the exorbitant expansion of physical power and technological adroitness." To have such power by extension of their own bodies, men must explode the inner unity of their beings into explicit fragments. Today, in an age of implosion, we are playing the ancient explosion backward, as on a film. We can watch the pieces of man's being coming together again in an age that has so much power that the all-destructive use of it appears meaningless, even to the dim and skew of wit. Historians see the forms of the great cities in the ancient world as manifesting all facets of human personality. Institutions, architectural and administrative, as extensions of our physical beings necessarily tend toward world-wide similarities. The central nervous system of the city was the citadel which included the great temple and palace of the king, invested with the dimensions and iconography of power and prestige. The extent to which this central core could extend its power safely depended on its power of acting at a distance. Not until the alphabet appeared, together with papyrus, could the citadel extend itself very far in space. (See the chapter on Roads and Paper Routes.) The ancient city, however, could appear as quickly as specialist man could separate his inner functions in space and architecture. To say that the cities of the Aztecs and the Peruvians resembled European cities is only to say that the) shared and extended the same faculties in both regions. The question of direct physical influence and imitation as if by diffusion becomes irrelevant.