garchy about the middle of the sixth century; the latter as referring to the slow disintegration of the feudal power of the (may we say) Homeric kingship by the aristocratic city-state, before the "foundation," so-called — the crisis, probably, in which the prætors emerged, as the Archons and Ephors emerged elsewhere.
This Polis was no less strictly aristocratic than the Western class-State, with its nobility, clergy, and higher burgesses. The residue of the people belonging to it was merely its object, but — in the West the object of its political care, and in the Classical the object of its political carelessness. For here "Carpe diem" was the motto of the oligarchy as well as of others. It proclaims itself aloud in the poems of Theognis and the Song of Hybrias the Cretan. It made Classical finance till right into its latest phases — from the piracy practised by Polycrates upon his own people to the proscriptions of the Roman Triumvirs — into a more or less hand-to-mouth seizing of resources for the moment. In jurisprudence it emerges with unparalleled logic in the limitation of Roman edict-law to the term of office of the one-year prætor.[1] And, lastly, it is seen in the ever-growing practice of filling military, legal, and administrative offices (particularly the more important of them) by lot — a kind of homage to Tyche, the goddess of the Moment.
This was the Classical world's manner of being politically "in form" and, correspondingly, of thinking and feeling. There are no exceptions. The Etruscans were as much under its domination as the Dorians and the Macedonians.[2] When Alexander and his successors dotted the Orient far and wide with their Hellenistic cities, they did so without conscious choice, for they could not imagine any other form of political organization. Antioch was to be Syria, and Alexandria Egypt. The latter, under the Ptolemies and later under the Cæsars, was, not indeed legally, but certainly in practice, a Polis on a vast scale — for the country outside, long reverted to townless fellahdom and managed by immemorial precedents, stood at its gates like an alien frontier.[3] The Roman Imperium was nothing but the last and greatest Classical city-state standing on foundations of a colossal synœcism. Under Marcus Aurelius the rhetor Aristides could say with perfect justification that it had "brought together this world in the name of one city: wheresoever a man may be born in it, it is at its centre that he dwells." Even the conquered populations of the Empire — the wandering desert-tribes, the upland-valley communities of the Alps — were constituted as civitates. Livy thinks invariably in the forms of the city-state, and for Tacitus provincial history simply does not exist. When, in 49, Pompey, withdrawing before Cæsar, gave up Rome as militarily unimportant and betook himself to the East to create there a firm base of operations, he
