Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/47

CHAP. II celebrants passed from the city to Eleusis as usual, and the dust it raised was seen from Salamis, though no living Athenian trod the sacred road that day. Though the citizens could not fulfil their duties to the State and its gods, those duties were mysteriously performed for them, in the proper place and at the proper time. Of all the beautiful myths to which Greek fancy gave birth, none was ever more deeply rooted than this in a solid conviction, — the conviction that the city, with its population, divine and human, was the one essential fact in the life of civilised men.

Now it is plain that the City-State and the modern State, differing in this essential point, must have come into existence in different ways; that the conditions, the primary factors, out of which they grew, must have been different. And in order to understand the nature and the history of either form of State, it is necessary to begin at the beginning, and find out what those conditions were, and how the State grew out of them. To understand English political history, it is little use beginning with the Great Charter, or even at the Norman Conquest; we must go back to the first fashioning of English institutions out of elements present before any real State was there. This is no new doctrine or method; it is as old as