'wisdom', her high civilization, her
leadership of all that was most Hellenic in Hellas. The 'Beloved City'
of Pericles had become a tyrant, her nature poisoned by war, her
government a by-word in Greece for brutality. And Greece as a whole
felt the tragedy of it. It is curious how this defeat of Athens by
Sparta seems to have been felt abroad as a defeat for Greece itself and
for the hopes of the Greek city state. The fall of Athens mattered more
than the victory of Lysander. Neither Sparta nor any other city ever
attempted to take her place. And no writer after the year 400 speaks of
any other city as Pericles used to speak of fifth-century Athens, not
even Polybius 250 years later, when he stands amazed before the solidity
and the 'fortune' of Rome.

The city state, the Polis, had concentrated upon itself almost all the
loyalty and the aspirations of the Greek mind. It gave security to life.
It gave meaning to religion. And in the fall of Athens it had failed. In
the third century, when things begin to recover, we find on the one hand
the great military monarchies of Alexander's successors, and on the
other, a number of federations of tribes, which were generally strongest
in the backward regions where the city state had been least developed.
+To koinon ton Aitolon+ or +ton Achaion+ had become more important than
Athens or Corinth, and Sparta was only strong by means of a
League.[80:1] By that time the Polis was recognized as a comparatively
weak social organism, capable of very high culture but not quite able,
as the Covenant of the League of Nations expresses it, 'to hold its own
under the strenuous conditions of modern life'. Besides, it was not now
ruled by the best citizens. The best had turned away from politics.

This great discouragement did not take place at a blow. Among the
practical statesmen probably most did not form any theory about the
cause of the failure but went on, as practical statesmen must, doing as
best they could from difficulty to difficulty. But many saw that the
fatal danger to Greece was disunion, as many see it in Europe now. When
Macedon proved indisputably stronger than Athens Isocrates urged Philip
to accept the leadership of Greece against the barbarian and against
barbarism. He might thus both unite the Greek cities and also evangelize
the world. Lysias, the democratic and anti-Spartan orator, had been
groping for a similar solution as early as 384 B. C., and was prepared
to make