Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/101

 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 89 under Pericles : (3) Struggle of Athens and Sparta for leadership of the Hellenes ; (4) Spartan and Theban supremacies ; (5) Macedonian supremacy and overthrow of the Persian Empire ; (6) Macedonian supremacy, after the disruption of Alexander's Empire. Period of Achaean and Aetolian Leagues. Our Debt to Athens. The western world owes it to Athens that the Persian Empire was prevented from expanding into Europe. But for Marathon and Salamis, which were her work, there would have been no Plataea, and Greece would have become a Persian Satrapy. But besides this, Athens permanently raised the intellectual and artistic standard of the western world, not only by poetry unsur- passed, sculpture unmatched, and exquisite architecture, but by the thought of the supreme moral teacher Socrates, his pupil Plato, and Plato's pupil and rival — not himself an Athenian — Aristotle, who was himself tutor to Alexander the Great. The City-State and the World-State. The development of cities as complete states owning no external sovereign was perfected among the Greeks, but proved that a different form of organisation was necessary for an extended empire. It was not till the cities were forced into unity by the country — not the city — of Macedon, that the Persian Empire could be overthrown, in spite of its lack of organisa- tion. Rome, on the other hand, though remaining a city-state herself, broke down the city-state system in Italy, and so was able to use her Italian Empire as a basis from which to conquer a world- empire. The Rise of Rome is to be considered under two aspects : the rivalry of Rome with other cities or leagues, leading to her ascendency and gradual dominion over Italy, confirmed in her struggle with Carthage ; and the constitutional development of the city itself. Three race-groups are concerned in the former, the Etruscans, Latins, and Sabellians, Rome belonging on the whole to the second group, but being also akin to the third. In the latter there are three factors to be distinguished : the struggle for political rights, the struggle for social equality, and the struggle for the possession of land, between the original ruling caste and the sub- ordinate tribes ; the principle in each case being resistance to privileges and the demand for equality before the law. The Outer Peoples. In India, Buddhism was at its zenith, and the great Magadha Empire flourished over all Northern India or Hindustan, during the third century. Two Indian monarchs of the period are notable, Chandragupta, and still more Asoka, a sort of Indian Alfred the Great. In China, what may be called a feudal system had grown up under the Chou dynasty, which ruled from