wrought great structural works. They bestowed happiness of a sort upon many myriads of men. They dealt death or bondage to many myriads more. To political life, to political thought, they contribute little save lessons of negation. The interest of their history is small save to those who would morbidly dissect a body politic full of stagnation, corruption, and decay, or to that honourable enthusiast, the mere antiquarian.'

66

The Greek City State exhibited both Individualism and Freedom in a great variety of forms and with vivid energy. Hence in Greek history two opposing tendencies developed side by side, the one of Unity, the other of Disunion. His individualism made the Greek realise his contrast with the non-Hellene, the alien, the Bápßapos. He produced in consequence a lively theory of "Pan-Hellenism." But in actual life this Greek unity was hardly more than a voluntary association of independent political units dictated by a merely temporary identity of interests. It was the pressure from outside threatening his Freedom which made any such association possible, and only for so long as the pressure lasted. That the facts fell so far short of the theories of Greek historian, philosopher, and poet was due to the second tendency to Disunion or Separation, which is so marked a feature of all Greek history.

The feeling of the worth of the individual himself, and of the responsibility of the individual to himself and to his fellows, is perhaps the chief debt which modern civilisation owes to the Hellene. In due course the Christian religion came to reinforce this sense of Individuality and to give to it a religious

sanction. But earlier in its political development it proved little short of disastrous to that very Freedom wherein it sought to find its most notable expression. Voluntarily to abandon any function of man as a free political agent appeared unworthy of a man. Autonomy, even of the smallest unit, seemed worth more than life itself.

The peril threatened by Persian ambition welded together one-half of the Greek world (and only onehalf) to join forces against the foe. When the invader was driven in hideous rout back to Asia, rival ambitions divided the conquerors. Athens' "Empire" was built upon a goodwill which vanished in a decade. Men were very clear-sighted in those days. If there was no goodwill to be won or created by conciliation, if the subjects' passion for autonomy defied any attempt to modify it, why base an Empire on anything but the Will to Power? Athens' Empire, despite magniloquence, was so based, and it lasted barely half a century. Sparta inherited her task. Owing to her usual stupidity she incurred a speedier failure. Then city challenged city in hatred and envy. Memories of bitter wrong and of violence were always being refreshed. Greek disunion seemed triumphant, and the barbarian was once more knocking at the gates. So reckless had Greek individualism become of the higher synthesis. In its atmosphere science, literature, philosophy, gave the richest of fruit to man. Pure Art's birth was still the Republic's. Yet a price was paid for this great Greek creed of the reasonableness of man's enquiry into all the things of man, of nature, and of God. This price was the political

B

impotence of the Greek City State. Freedom itself bade fair to be sacrificed to the very love of Freedom.

Then in this crisis there came to the rescue the Macedonian. To him, truer Hellene than the degenerate Hellene himself, was due the first manifestation in the Greek world of an actual visible Unity of political institutions. Only an Alexander could cast down the walls of separation between Greek city and Greek city. His Empire planted a victorious Hellenism on the shores of Oxus and of Indus. True, the political independence of the Greek City State was now dead. But the Greek city under Macedonian sway exhibited a sturdy life of its own. And only Macedonian compulsion could Hellenise the East. Surely here was a lasting Empire, based on community of government, of interest, of sympathy, and of language?

It was a short-lived dream. On the homeland Alexander bestowed peace: on the ruder tribes of the East the elements of culture. There was no guarantee of permanence in these gifts. On the death of the monarch his Empire split into fragments. No slow development of natural processes had produced it; no human insight or adaptiveness ensured it. Created by the sword, by the sword it was rent asunder. Alexander had hoped to fuse together Greek and Oriental by encouraging intermarriage. It was a practical device worthy of Aristotle's pupil. But the scheme came to sorry shipwreck on the rock of Greek sentiment. His own folk resented the degradation. Panhellenism

was a wide fair garden, but its very name implied that the barbarian was kept outside its enclosing wall.

Thus Alexander left to the Western world but the memory of a transient "Universal Empire." Already by the end of the third century B.C. this Empire had become a welter of states, a mere σύγχυσις πολιτειών. And if the unit of political life was now larger than the City State, this was due to the simple fact that Providence tended to side with the larger number of battalions. One ever-famous city still recalls the hero's name. Elsewhere among the jostling peoples of the East whom he subdued, a few rare coins or rarer legends alone preserve the memory of the greatest Greek Emperor" in the record of history. To what end served the toil and the fading triumph?

In the year 338 B.C. a single battle, that of Chaeronea, ended the tale of Athens' independence. With it, the glamour and the fascination of the Greek City State pass away. Through the enwrapping mist of the next two centuries are dimly seen shapeless figures of struggling inglorious Federations, of vain statesmen or heroic princes hopelessly pursuing after welfare, of sullen insurgent mobs clamouring for the sole rule of the proletariate. Out of this confusion Order sprang. But this Order was sternly imposed by a Western conqueror. Left to their own devices, the Greeks could no more have fashioned it than can a woodland reverting to the wild yield corn for the life of man.1

1 The history of the Greek world in the third and second centuries B.c. provides a study of extraordinary fascination, which is due in part to Polybius and Plutarch among ancient

It was in this same year, 338 B.C., that two victories gained by Rome in distant Italy over her sister cities of the Latin League mark the most obvious beginnings of an Empire which should be wider than any which Alexander knew, and yet persist. Progress towards it was slow and toilsome. Often it was increased by the operation of the most selfish of motives and wrested to the most unworthy of ends. Often its growth was unrealised by the Romans themselves, or, when realised, was unwelcome to them. Yet the political Unity which Rome created achieved at last the success denied to all earlier Empires. It endured, for many hundreds of years in fact-in consequences, to this our own day.

It is in this fact of permanence that the Roman Empire differs obviously from all its predecessors. Nor was this permanence mainly due to the grim fighting qualities of the race. The Empire was indeed won by the sword. The dead lay strewn over many a Roman battlefield from Britain, Gaul, and Germany in the West to Armenia and Mesopotamia in the East. But the Empire was kept and consolidated by a genius for inclusiveness, for assimilation, which was the one priceless gift bestowed upon Rome by Fortune, a gift which the capricious goddess denied to her spoilt favourite child, the Greek. To this breadth of conception

authors, to Freeman and Mahaffy among modern. Alike the investigator into modern Federal Institutions, and he who traces the tendency of democracies to sell their soul to Bolshevism, find here rich precedent and material for thought. The Oxford student of Roman History may so select his "period" or special subject as to include this. See below, pp. 63–71.