I. THE INDIVIDUALISM OF THE STATE
THE two rival zeniths of European culture—ancient Hellas and Renaissance Italy—rested upon no larger political organization than the citystate. Geographical conditions presumably contributed to this result in Greece. Everywhere mountains or water intervened; bridges were rare and roads were poor; and though the sea was an open highway, it bound the city with its commercial associates rather than with its geographical neighbors. But geography does not altogether explain the city-state. There was as much separatism between Thebes and Plataea, on the same Boeotian plain, as between Thebes and Sparta; more between Sybaris and Crotona on the same Italian shore than between Sybaris and Syracuse. Diversity of economic and political interest kept the cities apart; they fought one another for distant markets or grain, or formed rival alliances for control of the sea. Distinctions of origin helped to divide them; the Greeks considered themselves to be all of one race,1 but their tribal divisions—Aeolian, Ionian, Achaean, Dorian—were keenly felt, and Athens and Sparta disliked each other with an ethnological virulence worthy of our own age. Differences of religion strengthened, as they were strengthened by, political divisions. Out of the unique cults of locality and clan came distinct festivals and calendars, distinct customs and laws, distinct tribunals, even distinct frontiers; for the boundary stones limited the realm of the god as well as of the community; cujus regio, ejus religio. These and many other factors united to produce the Greek city-state.
It was not a new administrative form: we have seen that there were citystates in Sumeria, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Crete hundreds or thousands of years before Homer or Pericles. Historically the city-state was the village community in a higher stage of fusion or development—a common market, meeting ground, and judgment seat for men tilling the same hinterland, belonging to the same stock, and worshiping the same god. Politically it was to the Greek the best available compromise between those two hostile and fluctuating components of human society—order and liberty; a smaller community would have been insecure, a larger one tyrannical. Ideally—in the aspirations of philosophers—Greece was to consist of sovereign city-states co-operating in a Pythagorean harmony. Aristotle conceived the state as an association of freemen acknowledging one government and capable of meeting in one assembly; a state with more than ten thousand citizens, he thought, would be impracticable. In the Greek language one word—polis—sufficed for both city and state.
All the world knows that this political atomism brought to Hellas many a tragedy of fraternal strife. Because Ionia was unable to unite for defense it fell subject to Persia; because Greece, despite confederacies and leagues, was unable to stand together, the freedom which it idolized was in the end destroyed. And yet Greece would have been impossible without the city-state. Only through this sense of civic individuality, this exuberant assertion of independence, this diversity of institutions, customs, arts, and gods, was Greece stimulated, by competition and emulation, to live human life with a zest and fullness and creative originality that no other society had ever known. Even in our own times, with all our vitality and variety, our mechanisms and powers, is there any community of like population or extent that pours into the stream of civilization such a profusion of gifts as flowed from the chaotic liberty of the Greeks?