Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/63

 ATHENS AND SPARTA 5i Asiatics. The separate states showed that they possessed the power of organisation in a high degree. They were about to display an intellectual brilliancy never equalled elsewhere. There was among them no lack of desire for conquest. Never- theless, as an actual fact, they did not achieve conquest until Alexander the Great led them to overthrow a later Darius ; and almost from the moment of Alexander's death the vast dominion he had conquered ceased to be an empire. The reason of this failure is that the Greeks never combined to form one nation. Every great city with its outlying territories, and perhaps some subject towns, formed a separate want of state and had its own system of government, Unity, its own ambitions, and its own rivalries with its neighbours. All recognised an entire distinction between Hellenes and non- Hellenes, to whom they gave the indiscriminate name of 'barbarians.' They spoke the same language, with no greater differences than those between the dialects of Yorkshire and Somerset. They worshipped the same gods, with the same ritual. Delphi with its temple and its oracle sacred to Apollo had the same supreme sanctity for all of them. But there their unity ended. They were capable of some degree of united action against the onslaughts of the barbarian when each individual state felt that it must help to shield its neighbour from destruction lest its own doom should be sealed; but none was willing to move a single step for its neighbour's glorification, still less to submit itself to its neigh- bour's dictation. It was only in the moment of extreme emergency that individual rivalries and jealousies were forced into the background, and even then they had come near to producing disaster. A true unity could have been reached only by the voluntary subordination of all to a single central authority voluntarily created by common consent, but such a voluntary u g^g union was never fully realised in the ancient world. Supreme. The next possibility was that a single state should establish a supremacy so marked that the rest would acquiesce in its leadership. That did happen for a very short time in the days of Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great.