Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 3, 2025
Cities are the centers from which civilization grows and expands. Historically, a number of cities or city-states have competed for survival and supremacy. One by one they have dropped out of the race or have been out-classed, defeated and/or absorbed by the victors in the competitive struggle. One location proved to be more advantageous than others.
If he recognized the claim of a group of city-states, which remotely claimed common origin with his own, it was an academic feeling: if he was conscious of his community with all Hellenes as a nation it was only at moments of particular danger at the hands of a common non-Hellenic foe.
Except for the wealthy Italian city-states and a few other cities which traced their history back to Roman times, most European towns, it must be remembered, dated only from the later middle ages. At first there was little excuse for their existence except to sell to farmers salt, fish, iron, and a few plows.
For a period covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like some of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the dangerous heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her superior in territory and population as to make it inevitable that sooner or later she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to which she had been raised by her own indomitable soul.
The Sumerian conception of a series of supreme Antediluvian rulers is of course merely a reflection from the historical period, when the hegemony in Babylonia was contested among the city-states.
Rome was, first and last and all the time, a city-state as Athens and Corinth had been city-states in ancient Hellas. It had been able to dominate the Italian peninsula. But Rome as the ruler of the entire civilised world was a political impossibility and could not endure. Her young men were killed in her endless wars. Her farmers were ruined by long military service and by taxation.
Among them, as in all societies, there were found temperaments to which transcendental speculation appealed, and these increasing in number, as with the loss of their freedom the city-states ceased to stand for the realization of the highest possible good in this world, made Orphism and other mystic cults prevail ever more and more in Hellas.
Plato, in his latest work, the 'Laws, wishes his model city to be not too near the sea, the proximity of which 'fills the streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begets dishonesty in the souls of men. On the other side Isocrates, the most far-seeing of Athenian politicians, realised that the day of small city-states was over, and that the limited, 'self-sufficient' community would not long maintain its independence.
It has succeeded in maintaining its small, loosely federated city-states suited to trade, industry, and art. It had developed strong resistance toward the Sudan state builders toward the north, as in the case of the fighting Mossi; but behind this warlike resistance lay the peaceful city life which gave industrial ideas to Byzantium and shared something of Ethiopian and Mediterranean culture.
One of the most disquieting facts that history teaches is the inability of the most enlightened and patriotic men to "discern the signs of the times". To us the collapse of the Greek city-states seems natural and inevitable. Their constant bickerings and petty jealousies justly drew down upon them the armed might of the ambitious and capable power which destroyed them.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking