Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/329

X consists at once its peculiarity and its significance in Greek history. As in all true federations, the members were quite free to manage their own local affairs, but by uniting into one great State they now at last made confession that those local affairs were no longer of absorbing interest. Even now it is curious to notice that the more famous cities, Athens, Sparta, Corinth, which had once drawn their health and strength from the older system, were always reluctant to come into the League; but among the lesser ones at least the old passion for autonomy has fretted itself away, and they are now able to unite without misgivings or jealousies.

But this new form of State proved hardly more capable of defending or uniting Greece than the one which had gone before it. To increase its strength the Achæan League sought to compel other cities to join it, and to attain this object it allied itself with the very enemy whose encroachments had called it into existence. The rivalry and hatred between the League and Sparta is the saddest fact in the last pages of Greek history; and when we find Achæans under such a Greek as Philopœmen united with Macedon in crushing the noblest of all Spartan kings on the heights of Sellasia, we feel that the City-State and Pan-Hellenic feeling are vanishing away together, and that with them passes also all that is best and noblest in the most gifted of all races.