Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/207

VI put an end to the claims of Athens and to the ideas of Pericles ; the tyrant city fell. That fatal war was in one sense a struggle between new and old ideas, between the received notion of Greek political life and a new doctrine wholly at variance with it. The new heresy was put down by force, but the old doctrine had received a shock from which it never recovered; the genuine old conception of the, strong as was its hold upon the Greek people, lives more vividly in the ideals of Plato and Aristotle than in the history of any City-State after the great struggle was over. Of all the great wars of antiquity, the Peloponnesian war was the saddest and most useless; for while it humbled the tyrant city, it was the means of irretrievably weakening the true leader of Greek culture; and while the enemies of Athens believed themselves to be asserting the true doctrine of the City-State, they were in reality playing into the hands of another and a far worse tyrant.

I shall recur to this subject in another chapter: we must now once more turn our attention to the progress of the City-State in Italy, where we shall have to notice the same tendency to break the bounds of the, and with a very different result.