Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/68

 50 HISTORY OF GREECE. CHAPTER XXVIII. PAN-HELLENIC FESTIVALS -OLYMPIC, PYTHIAN, NUIKAN, AND ISTHMIAN. IN the preceding chapters I have been under the necessity of presenting to the reader a picture altogether incoherent and destitute of central effect, to specify briefly each of the two or three hundred towns which agreed in bearing the Hellenic name, and to recount its birth and early life, as far as our evidence goes, but without being able to point out any action and reaction, exploits or sufferings, prosperity or misfortune, glory or disgrace, common to all. To a great degree, this is a characteristic inseparable from the history of Greece from its beginning to its end, for the only political unity which it ever receives is the melancholy unity of subjection under all-conquer- ing Rome. Nothing short of force will efface in the mind of a free Greek the idea of his city as an autonomous and separate organization ; the village is a fraction, but the city is an unit, and the highest of all political units, not admitting of being con- solidated with others into a ten or a hundred, to the sacrifice of its own separate and individual mark. Such is the character of the race, both in their primitive country and in their colonial settlements, in their early as well as in their late history, splitting by natural fracture into a multitude of self-administer- ing, indivisible cities. But that which marks the early histori- cal period before Peisistratus, and which impresses upon it an incoherence at once so fatiguing and so irremediable, is, that as yet no causes have arisen to counteract this political isolation. Each city, whether progressive or stationary, prudent or adven turous, turbulent or tranquil, follows out its own thread of exist- ence, having no partnership or common purposes with the rest, and not yet constrained into any active partnership with them by extraneous forces. In like manner, the races which on every side surround the Hellenic world appear distinct and uncon- uertctl. not yet taken up into any cooperating mass or system.