Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/87

III, and all empires were destructive of man's best chances. The City-State could not join with others in any such union, whether by consent or by compulsion, without giving up some of those precious characteristics which Aristotle postulated as necessary to a perfect State, and therefore as equally essential to the production of perfect man. And in this instinct of his, which Aristotle thus reflected, it can hardly be denied that the Greek was right. So far as he could attain perfection at all, he could attain it only in his peculiar form of State. As that form of State decays, the value of Greek life diminishes with it. There came a time in later Greek history when the cities were forced to unite together in self-defence, and again a time when, falling under the dominion of Macedon and Rome, they were absorbed into a wider and grander system of political union than any they had themselves developed; but the Greek life of those later days was not the life to which we look back with most reverence; it was not the spring-time of the rarest gifts of humanity. It was the Hellas of the true which produced Sappho and Sophocles, Herodotus and Pheidias, and Plato. And in another way the same thing is true also of Rome; as a City-State she developed the germs of all that was most fruitful in her civilisation, and produced the noblest types of Roman character. In ceasing to be a City-State she lost her own individual genius, her stately morale, her inflexible courage. Assuredly it was in this form of union that the gifts and the virtues of both races found their best expression.