Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/193

 poetic treasures of the tyrannies and the Homeric king-ships, songs of lyrists dependent on the tyrant's palace or the chieftain's hall, Athenian literature strikes its roots deep into the local life of prehistoric Hellas. The flowers and fruits of Athenian imagination and reason spring from a soil to which every part of Greece in its different degree of culture contributed somewhat; and under these external influences the mind of Athens may be observed progressing in the two directions so profoundly affecting literary growth—the evolution of individual character and the expansion of social life. Athens, gathering up into herself all the past and contemporary Greek life of lower evolution, develops within herself an individualism deeper than the Greeks had ever known before, and a width of social sympathy impossible in days of early Greek isolation. In the synoikism of the Attic demes described by Thucydides we have Athens springing out of isolated village communities; in the days of Macedonian supremacy we have her old political hegemony exchanged for that intellectual centralism of Western civilisation which, from the time of Isokrates to the present, she has never lost. From the isolation and exclusiveness of clan life to world-empire of intellect—such is the brief epitome of Athenian progress; and it is this twofold relation to a narrowly isolated past and a world-wide future that makes Athens the type of the city commonwealth in social and individual development.

To illustrate this typical character we have only to contrast Athens with Rome and the Italian republics. Rome, like Athens, finds the roots of her social life deep down in the clan age. That age, in fact, left upon Roman character marks far more lasting than can be observed in