Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/205

VI so many men of genius. The whole tone of her life would have been duller, without the same intensity and the same resonance. But now we have to face the fact (to which I shall have to return in another chapter) that the small City-State, — even such an one as Athens, with her peculiar advantages of situation and climate, and with all the great natural gifts of the race, — could not reach the highest level of human life attainable in that day, without sacrificing the freedom and interests of other States whose capacity for good may have been as great as her own. Athens deprived the subjects of her empire of independence, — of the true political life of the Greek State, — and used their resources for her own glory and adornment. And in doing so, she showed at the very same time that she herself was no longer in the true sense self-sufficing; she could not supply even her daily wants from within her own territory, much less could she live the noble life of which Pericles spoke without encroaching on the rights of others.

Pericles sought to justify his own policy, and the new and startling position into which Athens had drifted, by an argument such as Cicero used in defence of the Roman Empire, though nobler indeed and more generous. Athens was to be teacher of Greece; to inspire the Greek States with her own lofty spirit, and to be a central light diffusing warmth and vitality throughout the Hellenic world. To him, first perhaps of all Greeks, the system of the must have seemed small and petty, unequal