Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/334

310 already seen of Alexander's Hellenic feeling, we can hardly avoid the inference that the idea was present to his mind of Hellenising the world by means of cities and communications, and that he looked upon Hellenic civilisation as the only existing cement capable of holding together the structure of a universal empire.

It is hardly necessary to point out what would have been the result for the City-State of such an empire as this, had it been possible for Alexander or his successors to realise it. The Greek race as a whole might have gained much, but the would have sunk into the position of a municipal town. Each State would have lost at once and for ever those very conditions of life in which had been nurtured all that was most brilliant in the Greek character; that absolute freedom and independence of all others, which brought thought and action into such perfect harmony, and gave to the life of every citizen a unique value in relation both to himself and his State. This at least would have been the loss of a people who had proved that they could bring their form of State very near to perfection. But the last two chapters will have shown in some degree that this form of State was very far from being any longer perfect; and from such an empire as that which Alexander's imagination suggested, something at least might have been gained for the Greeks, if not for their. Had he lived to carry out his great schemes, a new prospect of life, social, political, intellectual, might have opened before the Greek race; the whole stream of their