The Hellenistic Age seems at first sight to have entered on an inheritance such as our speculative Anarchists sometimes long for, a _tabula rasa_, on which a new and highly gifted generation of thinkers might write clean and certain the book of their discoveries about life--what Herodotus would call their '_Historiê_'. For, as we have seen in the last essay, it is clear that by the time of Plato the traditional religion of the Greek states was, if taken at its face value, a bankrupt concern. There was hardly one aspect in which it could bear criticism; and in the kind of test that chiefly matters, the satisfaction of men's ethical requirements and aspirations, it was if anything weaker than elsewhere. Now a religious belief that is scientifically preposterous may still have a long and comfortable life before it. Any worshipper can suspend the scientific part of his mind while worshipping. But a religious belief that is morally contemptible is in serious danger, because when the religious emotions surge up the moral emotions are not far away. And the clash cannot be hidden. This collapse of the traditional religion of Greece might not have mattered so much if the form of Greek social life had remained. If a good Greek had his Polis, he had an adequate substitute in most respects for any mythological gods. But the Polis too, as we have seen in the last essay, fell with the rise of Macedon. It fell, perhaps, not from any special spiritual fault of its own; it had few faults except its fatal narrowness; but simply because there now existed another social whole, which, whether higher or lower in civilization, was at any rate utterly superior in brute force and in money. Devotion to the Polis lost its reality when the Polis, with all that it represented of rights and laws and ideals of Life, lay at the mercy of a military despot, who might, of course, be a hero, but might equally well be a vulgar sot or a corrupt adventurer. What the succeeding ages built upon the ruins of the Polis is not our immediate concern. In the realm of thought, on the whole, the Polis triumphed. Aristotle based his social theory on the Polis, not the nation. Dicaearchus, Didymus, and Posidonius followed him, and we still use his language. Rome herself was a Polis, as well as an Empire. And Professor Haverfield has pointed out that a City has more chance of taking in the whole world to its freedoms and privileges than a Nation has of making men of alien birth its compatriots. A Jew of Tarsus could easily be granted the civic rights of Rome: he could never have been made an Italian or a Frenchman. The Stoic ideal of the World as 'one great City of Gods and Men' has not been surpassed by any ideal based on the Nation.