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Updated: June 29, 2025
For some hundreds of years, culminating in the three or four centuries A.D., the dominant feature in the picture was of a triumphant city-state, Rome, gradually subduing and embracing the world. Then for some thousand years the picture was of a religious organization leading the civilized world, and nationalities were only emerging as somewhat dim and ill-defined figures.
A great city-state like Venice was well able to send out her galleys against Mediterranean pirates, to wage war against the rival city of Genoa, to make treaties with Oriental potentates, and to build up a maritime empire. Smaller towns were helpless. But what, as in the case of the German towns, they could not do alone, was partially achieved by combination.
Greater honour than this no man ever had or ever can have. Thus, although the Greek city-state seemed to perish in mockery with Demosthenes, yet the Greek spirit of free discussion which died in the great orator was set free in another form in that same year; leaving Aristotle's body, it ranged through the world conquering and civilising.
In their free youth the Asiatic Greeks carried into fullest practice the Hellenic conception of the city-state, self-governing, self-contained, exclusive.
In the period which corresponds to the later kingdom, and roughly to the sixth century before Christ, and which we have called "Servian" for convenience, we have watched a primitive pastoral community, isolated from the world's life, turning into a small city-state with political interests, the beginnings of trade and handicraft, and various rival social classes; and we have seen how along with the coming of these outside interests there came various new cults connected with them, most of them implying entirely new deities, and only one or two of them new sides of old deities.
But however the historian may analyse the plot and group it into acts, it must be borne in mind that the action is continuous, and that the first emergence of the Greek city-state in the Aegean and the last traces of municipal self-government in the Roman Empire are phases in the history of a single civilization. It may seem a paradox to call this civilization a unity.
In terms of social history the growth of structure has proceeded from the horde, tribe and clan to the family, village, city, city-state, nation, empire, civilization. These steps are not necessarily sequential. Under varying social conditions they have been determined and modified by particular historical situations.
In this way, and in this way alone, the people of Cornwall and of Northumberland could bring their wishes to bear and play their part, together with the people at the centre, in the government of a country many times the size of a city-state of ancient Greece. There had been assemblies before in all ages of history: but this was something different. It was a Parliament.
But it is impossible not to perceive that with the decline of the Greek city-state something passed from the world which it can never cease to regret, and the recovery of which, if it might be, in some more perfect form, must be the goal of its highest practical endeavours.
The latter made much show of an impartible and inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in the people; but in practice its exercise is impossible outside the confines of a city-state. Once, that is to say, we deal with modern problems our real enquiry is still the question of Locke what limits shall we place upon the power of government? Rousseau has only emphasized the urgency of the debate.
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