Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/206

182 to the attainment of that real unity, strength, and security, which alone could guarantee the Greeks against attack from without and slow decay within. And as we contemplate his grand conception now, in the light of later Greek history, we may reasonably think him right. But great ideas are of little practical use, unless they are in harmony with the conditions of life and the feelings of the age; and Pericles, and with him Athens, had clearly overstepped the limits of the of the Greeks. As the tyrant, however excellent his intention, could not but find himself sooner or later outside of the circle of ideas in which he had been trained, so it was with Athens. The consciousness of this is only too apparent in Pericles' own words; for he does not hesitate to tell the Athenians that their empire is a tyranny, and their state a tyrant. "You have come by this tyranny," he tells them, "and you cannot go back from it; you have outrun the tardy motion of the Greek world of political ideas; you must keep your power, but use it for the noblest ends."

No wonder, then, that Athens was at last attacked, and that the ruling ideas of independence and self-sufficingness rebelled against her claims of light and leading. The City-State, in reaching its highest point of development, had broken through the limits of its own proper nature, and was tending to become a different kind of political unit; the threatened to grow into an empire, one State menaced the healthy freedom of the rest. The Peloponnesian war