The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2De Quincey, Thomas
General
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays
by sea, systematic robbery by land, tainted as with a curse the
blessings of life and property in great nations! Witness the state of
the Mediterranean under the Cilicians during the very sunset of Marius;
or, again, of the Caribbean seas, in spite of a vast Spanish empire, of
Buccaneers and Filibusters. Witness Bagandae in Roman Spain, or the cloud
of robbers gathering in France through twelve centuries after _every_
period of war; witness the scourges of public peace in Italy, were it in
papal Rome or amongst the Fra Diavolos of Naples.
We believe that, so far from possessing any stronger principle of
vitality than the Roman institutions, those of Greece Proper (meaning
those originally and authentically Greek) had any separate advantage
only when applied locally. They were essentially _enchorial_
institutions, and even _physically_ local (_i.e._, requiring the same
place as well as the same people); just as the ordinances of Mahomet
betray his unconscious frailty and ignorance by presuming and
postulating a Southern climate as well as an Oriental temperament. The
Greek usages and traditionary monuments of civilization had adapted
themselves from the first to the singular physical conformation of
Hellas--as a 'nook-shotten'[14] land, nautically accessible and laid
down in seas that were studded with islands systematically adjusted to
the continental circumstances, whilst internally her mountainous
structure had split up almost the whole of her territory into separate
chambers or wards, predetermining from the first that galaxy of little
republics into which her splintered community threw itself by means of
the strong mutual repulsion derived originally from battlements of
hills, and, secondarily, from the existing state of the military art.
Having these advantages to begin with, reposing upon these foundations,
the Greek civil organization sustained itself undoubtedly through an
astonishing tract of time; before the ship _Argo_ it had commenced;
under the Ottoman Turks it still survived: for even in the Trojan aera,
and in the pre-Trojan or Argonautic aera, already (and perhaps for many
centuries before) the nominal kingdoms were virtually republics, the
princes being evidently limited in their authority by the 'sensus
communis' of the body politic almost as much as the Kings of Sparta were
from the time of Lycurgus to the extinction of the Peloponnesian
independence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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