Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/261

 The Age of Spartan Leadership 211 and takes no account of the dignity and immense importance of labor in human society. Moreover, Plato's ideal state is the self-contained, self-controlling city-state as it had in times past supposedly existed in Greece, He fails to perceive that the real question in Greece is now the relation of these cities to each other. He does not discern that the life of a cultivated state unavoidably expands beyond its borders, and by its needs and its contributions affects the life of surrounding states. It cannot be confined within its political borders, for its com7nercial borders lie as far distant as its galleys can carry its produce. Thus boundary lines cannot separate nations ; their life over- Growth of a laps and flows together with the life round about them. It was ^^oj-ld so within Greece, and it was so far beyond the borders of Greek territory. There had grown up an ancient world which was read- ing Greek books, using Greek utensils, fitting up its houses with Greek furniture, decorating its house interiors with Greek paint- ings, building Greek theaters, learning Greek tactics in war — a great Mediterranean and Oriental world bound together by lines of commerce, travel, and common economic interests. For this world, as a coming political unity, the lofty idealist Plato, in Lack of spite of his travels, had no eyes. To this world, once dominated calleackrshi'p by oriental culture, the Greeks had given the noblest and sanest ^" ^^^ ^y°^'J ^ ' '^ dominated by ideas yet attained by the mind of civilized man, and to this world Hellas likewise the Greeks should have given political leadership. Men in practical life, like Isocrates, a very able Athenian isocrates writer of political pamphlets, clearly understood the situation at this time (first half of the fourth century B.C.). Isocrates urged the Greeks to bury their petty differences, and expand their local patriotism into a loyalty for the united Greek world. He told his countrymen that, so united, they could easily over- throw the decaying Persian Empire and make themselves lords of the world, whereas now they were but the feeble creatures of the king of Persia. Xenophon also, who had marched into the Xenophon heart of the Persian Empire with the ten thousand Greek troops hired by Cyrus the Persian prince to assist him in overthrowing