Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/497

 «HAP. II. THE ROMAN CONQUEST. 491 protecting gods, because they there found a prytaneum, a holy fire, festivals, prayers, and liymns, and because beyond its borders they no longer found either gods or 41 worship. This patriotism was faith and piety. But when the domination had been withdrawn from the fiacerdotal caste, this sort of patriotism disappeared with other old religious notions. Love of the city still sur- vived, but it took a new form. Men no longer loved their country for its religion and its gods ; they loved it only for its laws, for its institutions, and for the rights and security which it afforded its members. We see in the funeral oration which Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles what the reasons are that Athens was loved ; they are be- cause this city " wishes all to be equal before the law;" ^' because she gives men liberty, and opens the ways of honor to all ; because she maintains public order, as- sures authority to the magistrates, protects the weak, and gives to all spectacles and festivals, which are the •education of the mind." And the orator closes by say- ing, " This is wliy our warriors have died heroically rather than allow their country to be torn from them ; this is why those who survive are all ready to suffer, and to devote themselves for it." Man, therefore, still owes duties to the city; but these duties do not flow from the same principle as before. He still gives his blood tind his life, but it is no longer to defend his national divinity and the hearth of his fathers; it is to defend the institutions which he enjoys, and the advantages which the city procures liim. Now, this new patriotism had not exactly the same effects as that of the ancient ages. As the heart was no longer attached to the prytaneum, to the protecting _gods, and to the sacred soil, but simply to the institu