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One city-state could be traversed, devastated, or annexed, without in the least degree affecting neighbouring areas. It is true that the population of Syria has always been predominantly Semitic, for she was on the fringe of the great breeding-ground of the Semitic race and her landward boundary was open to the Arabian nomad.
Their flowering time of genius was due to the same causes which produced similar results in the Italian Renaissance. The city-state is a forcing-house of brilliant achievement, though it quickly uses up its human material. We cannot even regard the Greeks as a homogeneous mixed race. The Spartiates were almost pure Nordics; the Athenians almost pure Mediterraneans.
Section 2. The Relation of the State to the Citizen. First, let us consider the relation of the state to the citizens that is to say, to that portion of the community, usually a minority, which was possessed of full political rights. It is here that we have the key to that limitation of size which we have seen to be essential to the idea of the city-state.
The city-state and its culture were to be propagated under his aegis, but this vision vanished with Alexander's death, and Macedonian militarism proved a disappointment. The feuds of these crowned condottieri harassed the cities more sorely than their own quarrels, and their arms could not even preserve the Hellenic heritage against external foes.
Julian's Vicisti Galilaee marked the end of one strain or tradition in ancient political thought which, originating in the local worships of the City-State, had lasted on, with gathering momentum, until, all over the known world, men bowed the knee before the altar of Caesar, the God-Emperor.
Thereafter Genoa remained some years subject to the French, but in 1528 the resolution of an able citizen, Andrea Doria, freed the state from foreign invaders and restored to Genoa her republican institutions. The famed city-state of Florence may be taken as the best type of the democratic community, controlled by a political leader.
Just as, in the fifteenth century, civilisation had suddenly passed from the stage of the city-state or the feudal principality to the stage of the great nation-state, so now, while the European peoples were still struggling to realise their nationhood, civilisation seemed to have stolen a march upon them, and to have advanced once more, this time into the stage of the world-state.
Before we take leave of the Italian states of the year 1500, mention should be made of the insignificant duchy of Savoy, tucked away in the fastnesses of the northwestern Alps, whose duke, after varying fortunes, was to become, in the nineteenth century, king of a united Italy. The city-state was the dominant form of political organization not only in Italy but also in the Netherlands.
This was the time when the Greek mind, still in its full creative vigour, made its first response to the twofold failure of the world in which it had put its faith, the open bankruptcy of the Olympian religion and the collapse of the city-state. Both had failed, and each tried vainly to supply the place of the other.
Although the Peking administration was still nominally the Central Government of China, it was amply clear to observers on the spot that by a process of successive collapses all that was left of government was simply that pertaining to a city-state of the antique Greek type a mal-administration dominated by the enigmatic personality of Liang Shih-yi.
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