Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/201

VI there always have been, and always will be, to every social organisation which human nature can devise and develop; and at Athens these were so serious and so far-reaching in their consequences that the remainder of this chapter must be occupied in a brief consideration of them.

In two ways, while thus realising "the good life" to such extent as was practically possible in a City-State, Athens impinged upon what we may be disposed to call the rights of other individuals and States. She was, in the first place, a slave-owning State, a character which she had in common with all the City-States of the ancient world. Secondly, in this golden age of hers she was an imperial State whose so-called "allies," including nearly all the most important cities in and around the Ægean Sea, were obliged to follow her lead, to contribute to her treasury, and generally to obey her orders, or risk the chance of severe punishment. Had she been neither a slave State nor an imperial State, it is hardly possible to suppose that she could have attained the high political and intellectual level which I have been describing; and this reflection, a somewhat melancholy one, needs a word of explanation.

I have been all along treating Athens as a democracy, and such, in the view of every Greek, she actually was. But we must not entirely forget that, judged by the standard of the nineteenth century, she was not really a democracy, but a slave-holding aristocracy. It is true that she did not thus violate any of the sentiments or traditions