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Updated: July 3, 2025
The Romans then marched southward to Attica and informed the Greeks that they had come to "deliver the Hellenes from the Macedonian yoke." The Greeks, having learned nothing in their years of semi-slavery, used their new freedom in a most unfortunate way. All the little city-states once more began to quarrel with each other as they had done in the good old days.
The older Greek City-states had been large, wealthy, and independent; magnificent buildings and sumptuous festivals were as natural to them as to the greater autonomous municipalities in all ages. But in the Macedonian period the individual cities sank to be parts of a larger whole, items in a dominant state, subjects of military monarchies.
Their civilisation was one of "city-states", not of kingdoms and empires; and their whole political outlook was necessarily determined by this condition. Generalising from their own experience, they had formed for themselves a conception of the state not the less interesting to us that it is unfamiliar; and this conception it will be the business of the present chapter to illustrate and explain.
The only Italy he could conceive was a republic, and Italy was not ripe for a republic, which was, for the rest, a form of government too much bound up with the disruptive traditions of the City-States to be acceptable. But if Italy was not to be a republic, she must be a monarchy, and where could she find a prince to put at the head of her united State?
The great intellectual and spiritual change which came over western Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the result of a number of converging causes, of which the most important were the diffusion of classical literature consequent upon the break-up of the Byzantine Empire at the hands of the Turks, the brilliant civilization of the Italian city-states, and the establishment, in France, Spain and England, of powerful monarchies whose existence ensured the maintenance of order and internal peace.
This mediaeval movement of expansion, which is commonly called the Crusades, but which made itself felt in Spain and Sicily and the Aegean as well as in the 'Holy Land', is a remarkable parallel to the propagation of Ancient Greek city-states round the same shores between about 750 and 600 B. C. In drifting back upon the Mediterranean, the mediaeval West was searching for new realms to conquer, but it was really captured by the romance of its ancestral home.
Strictly speaking, this was simply a trading State, like the city-states of Turkestan: its basis was the transit traffic that brought it prosperity.
Europe struggled for centuries to free itself from Asian invasion and occupation. At the same time Europe was improving its agriculture, restoring its trade and expanding its hand-craft industries and its commerce. Towns grew in population and productivity. Life-standards rose in the cities. Cities based on trade and commerce extended their authority and became city-states.
The modern attitude is radically different; a revolution has been effected both in the conditions of industry and in the way in which they are regarded; and the practice and the speculation of the Greek city-states have for us an interest which, great as it is, is philosophic rather than practical. Section 9. Sparta.
In the old city-states, where the area of government corresponded to the actual range of human vision and memory, a kind of local emotion could be developed which is now impossible in a 'delocalised' population. The solidarity of a modern state must therefore depend on facts not of observation but of imagination.
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