Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/304

280 lively interest in its own political affairs, or even the efficacy and importance of its own religious worships; a feeling inherited from the time when international relations, as we call them, hardly existed, and when the citizen of each State was a total stranger and practically an enemy to the citizen of every other.

Yet it is most interesting to notice, as we pursue the history of the City-State century by century, that our attention is drawn more and more to the appearance both of imperial and federative States. The two forms were in Greece very closely connected together; for federations either came into existence to resist encroaching cities, or they themselves were slowly but surely converted into imperial States. In these tendencies we cannot fail to see evidence of the fading individuality of the true City-State; we see it passing under new conditions of life, which in Aristotle's view and in that of the ordinary Greek of the best age were incompatible with its existence in perfection, and with the "good life" of its individual members.

In order, then, to gain some idea of the external causes, as I have called them, which enfeebled and finally destroyed the City-State, our plan will be to take a rapid survey of the growth of federative and imperial States from the sixth century B.C. onwards; and this is what I propose to do in the remainder of this chapter. Such a sketch must necessarily be very cursory and imperfect, but it may be sufficient to mark out the ground for more elaborate studies, and to give them a definite meaning and object. It