Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/119

IV idea of duty, as extending beyond the family to the State. Naturally, application of this idea was limited to the members of their own class, from a deeply-rooted conviction that all others were not worth the cultivation, and could not repay it by any valuable results; these were in no true sense a part of the State, but only, as it were, the natural appendages of it, whose destiny was to do the necessary and inferior work without which it could not exist. But they themselves, the nobles, were the real men of the State; on them devolved all its higher duties; and if in the early life of the City-State these nobles really worked out an idea of public duty which first made the position of the citizen an honourable and arduous one, they made a discovery for which the later Greeks and Romans might well have been more thankful than they were.

And we may reasonably believe that this discovery was really theirs, though we have little positive evidence of it. When history opens, the aristocracies were indeed a thing of the past, but the idea of the good citizen was there, and can only be due to their influence. The passionate lamentations of Theognis over the overthrow of the "good men" in his own city carry us back in imagination to a time when Megara was not yet governed by a narrow oligarchy, but by a nobility which was really excellent, as well as rich and high-born, and was bent on developing all its best powers, bodily and mental, for the good of the whole community. Even as late as the fifth century the same idea is seen in the Odes of Pindar,