Greece -- History; Greece -- Politics and government; Imperialism
the need of regulating the Nile's overflow in Egypt, and the model and
influence of the Roman empire in Mohammedan and Christian Europe.
The city enables men to coöperate easily. In it ideas and feelings
spread quickly. Life, property, and privileges are there protected by
walls, and, if need be, by street barricades. "Two voices are there,"
wrote Wordsworth in 1807, his vision limited by the peril of England
and Switzerland,--
"one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
They were thy chosen music, Liberty."
The voice of a city mob--that of Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople,
Florence, or Paris, for example--was generally raucous and often cruel.
But it made tyrants tremble and limited absolutism when the fear of
assassination was powerless.
Fortunately, it is not with the origins, but with the characteristics,
of the Greek city-states that we have to do mainly when we seek to
discover the grounds of their hatred of all imperialistic projects.
Let us, therefore, try to form a concrete impression of the salient
features of the hundreds of little states with which the progressive
parts of Greece were honeycombed at the beginning of the classic
period, in the sixth century B.C. Each political cell, so to speak, had
its nucleus in a walled town and its substance in a small circuit of
grain, pasture, and garden land which the inhabitants of the town owned
and cultivated. Most of the towns were simply hives of farmers. Whether
the farmers were landlords, small proprietors, or peasants; however
much they were divided by lines of social cleavage, they were all able
to meet on the common ground of a single occupation. And every day from
March to November, from the out-cropping of the grass and foliage in
the spring, through the season of the grain harvest, the vintage, and
the picking of the olives, to the fall planting and seeding, the ebb
and flow of agricultural life carried the population of the city to the
country in the morning and back to the city again in the evening.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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