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The small Hellenic city-states that had hitherto been each for itself a world shrank into nothing. It is as if the old gods could not keep pace with this violent process of expansion. Men felt a craving for a wider and more comprehensive religious concept to answer to the changed conditions, and such an idea was found in the idea of Tyche.
The day the little city-states of old Hellas lost their independence and were forced to become part of a big nation, the old Greek spirit died. And it has been dead ever since. IN the beginning, all the Greeks had been equally rich and equally poor. Every man had owned a certain number of cows and sheep. His mud-hut had been his castle. He had been free to come and go as he wished.
Then for four or five hundred years there was a growth of many little city-states which, in their energy both in peace and war, in their fierce, fervent life, in the high quality of their men of arts and letters, and in their utter inability to combine so as to preserve order among themselves or to repel outside invasion, cannot unfairly be compared with classic Greece.
Within the Holy Roman Empire was a vast hodge-podge of city-states, and feudal survivals arch-duchies, such as Austria; margravates, such as Brandenburg; duchies, like Saxony, Bavaria, and Wuerttemberg; counties like the Palatinate, and a host of free cities, baronies, and domains, some of them smaller than an American township.
Institutionally it was at bottom a federation of city-states, a solution of the political problem with which Greek society had been wrestling since the fifth century B. C. And even the non-municipal element, the centralized bureaucratic organization which Augustus spread like a fine, almost impalpable net to hold his federation of municipalities together, was largely a fruit of Greek administrative experience.
For if the truth be told, the Persian Kings regarded the Greek city-states as very dangerous political institutions and bad examples for all other people who were supposed to be the patient slaves of the mighty Persian Kings. Of course, the Greeks enjoyed a certain degree of safety because their country lay hidden beyond the deep waters of the AEgean.
But the Greeks, removed from the familiar sight of their own temples, removed from the well-known sounds and smells of their own crooked streets, at once lost the cheerful joy and the marvellous sense of moderation which had inspired the work of their hands and brains while they laboured for the glory of their old city-states. They became cheap artisans, content with second-rate work.
In 1099 was established the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, the kingdom of the Crusaders, Latin in creed, French in nationality, feudal in character and precarious in existence. The state of affairs seems now rather to have resembled the relationship which formerly existed between the Hebrews and the Philistines, or, even more analogously, that between the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages.
Whatever might have been its fortune under happier circumstances, the great experiment of democratic self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed, whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its old sanctity was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day.
The cities of Gishkhu and Shirpurla were probably situated not far from one another, and their rivalry is typical of the history of the early city-states of Babylonia.
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