marriage-politics (against the claims of the Electors), by Ferdinand of Aragon, Henry VII of England, and Louis XI of France.[1]
But with the increasing emphasis upon the Classical here and now, the priesthood, which had the beginnings of an Estate in it, became pari passu a mere aggregate of city officials. The capital, so to call it, of the Homeric kingship, instead of being the centre for the radiation of State influence in all directions into the distance, contracted its magic circle until State and city became identical. Thereby, of course, the nobility was fused with the patriciate, and if even in the Gothic the representation of the young cities (for example, the English Commons or the French States-General) was exclusively by patricians, how much more so in the powerful city-state of the Classical! Not indeed in idea, but in fact, it was a pure kingless aristocratic State. The strictly Apollinian "form" of the growing Polis is called oligarchy.
And thus, at the close of the early periods of both these Cultures, we see two principles parallel and contrasted, the Faustian-genealogical and the Apollinian-oligarchic; two kinds of constitutional law, of Dike. The one is supported by an unmeasured sense of expanse, reaches back deep into the past with form-tradition, thinks forward with the same intense will-to-endure into the remotest future; but in the present, too, works for political effectiveness over broad expanses by well-considered dynastic marriages and by the truly Faustian, dynamic, and contrapuntal politics that we call diplomacy. The other, wholly corporeal and statuesque, is self-limited by its policy of autarkeia to the nearest and the most immediate present, and at every point stoutly denies that which Western being affirms.
Both the dynastic state and the city-state presuppose the city itself. But there is this difference, that a seat of government in the West, though it may be (and frequently is) far from being the greatest city of the land, is a force-centre in a field of political tensions such that every occurrence, in however remote a corner, vibrates generally throughout the whole — whereas in the Classical, life huddles closer and closer until it reaches the grotesque phenomenon of Synœcism — the very acme of the Euclidean will-to-form in the political world. It is impossible to imagine the State unless and until the nation sits physically concentrated in one heap, as one body; it must be seen, and even seen "at a glance." And while the Faustian tendency is more and more to diminish the number of dynastic centres — so that even Maximilian I could see
- ↑ Estate or Class was the basis, too, of the two great political associations in Byzantium, which are quite wrongly described as "Circus parties." These Blues and Greens called themselves "Demoi" and had their regular leaders. The circus was simply like the Palais Royal of 1789, the scene of public manifestations, and behind them were the class-associations of the Senate. When in 520 Anastasius I gave effect to the Monophysite tendency, the Greens sang orthodox hymns all day there, and so forced the Emperor publicly to cry off. The Western counterpart to this is formed by the Parisian parties under the "three Henries" (1580), the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Savonarola's Florence, and above all the insurgent faction in Rome under Pope Eugene IV. The suppression of the Nika Rebellion by Justinian in 532 was thus also the foundation of State-absolutism vis-à-vis the Estates.
