Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/30

6 refuge on the approach of an enemy. But the Greek of a more civilised age came to give this word a much wider and deeper meaning, which it is the object of the following chapters to explain and trace out. By this word and its derivatives he sought to express the whole life, and the whole duty, of man; that union of human beings for a common end, which could alone produce and exercise all the best instincts and abilities of every free individual. The Latin race had no word which was an exact equivalent to this; for "urbs" never attained to a meaning so profound, and "civitas" which comes nearest to it, is less explicit. The Latin race, indeed, never realised the Greek conception of a in quite the same degree; but this was rather owing to their less vivid mental powers than to the absence of the phenomenon among them. Their form of State was of the same kind, their idea of their relation to it was not less definite; but they had not the instinct to reflect on it or inquire into its nature, and had eventually to fall back on the Greeks themselves for their philosophy of it.

What, then, was this this form of political union in which both these races developed their best faculties, and made their lasting contributions to European civilisation? Our modern notions of a State hamper us much in our efforts to realise what the was; nor is it possible to do so completely until we have gained some knowledge of the conditions under which it arose, of its constituent elements, of its life in its best days, and of the causes which sapped its vitality and finally let it be