Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/84

60 thought is suggested by this little sentence, and how true it is to the facts! Thucydides describes the Greeks before the era of the as scraping together just sufficient subsistence to live upon, and he was probably thinking of the conditions of life known to him in parts of Greece where the State had not yet been generated. Almost exactly the same language is used by Sir H. Maine of the village community in India, and the picture drawn by Mr. Wallace of life in the Russian mir suggests precisely the same limit to the field of human enterprise. But in rising out of the life of the village into that of the State, man rises, or at least may rise, from the idea of material supply to that of moral and intellectual advance. Aristotle is careful to make us understand what he means by "good life"; it is the life which best realises the best instincts of man. The law and the education of the State will make the citizens good and just men, enjoying "a perfect and self-sufficing life," developing the unimpeded activity of their moral and intellectual excellence. Art, literature, law, philosophy, could not ripen in the family or the village; the narrow limits, the insecurity, the constant toil of that earlier life, impeded all activity in such directions, though the instincts might strive to assert themselves. And so too with justice — the perfectly