Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/39

I Yet on the whole it must be allowed that the idea of the State, with all its fruitful civilising results, has never again been so fully realised since the was swallowed up in the Roman Empire; the ties that hold a State together have never been seen working together with such strength and vitality.

Does it not follow, then, that the life-history of this small but highly-organised form of State must be in some respects peculiarly valuable? If the history of France is a more instructive study than that of less perfect modern States, the history of a must be more instructive still; as the biography of a man of strong character and original genius, even if his life be passed in a comparatively limited sphere of activity, has often more to teach us than the life of a man of coarser fibre, whose interests and influence reach over a much wider area. If the best history — history in the truest sense of a word of wide meaning — is that of the life of the State which most fully expresses the needs and aspirations of men bound together in social union, then the history of the is so far more valuable than that of any modern State.

It may indeed be argued, in criticism of this view, that we have no adequate and complete account of the life of any one from its birth; and that even in tracing the history of Athens and of Rome, we continually find ourselves beset with doubts and difficulties which arise from the scantiness of our information. Here and there a sudden light is flashed on the scene we are exploring, and