last resort everyone who belongs to it (which is a matter of moment in a status-dictatorship) finds his interests represented by those of one or the other noble party.
This steadiness of last, deepest, and ripest form, which springs from the historical feeling of Western mankind, was denied to the Classical. Tyrannis vanished. Strict oligarchy vanished. The Demos which the politics of the sixth century had created as the sum of all men belonging to the Polis burst into factions and spasmodic shocks of noble versus non-noble, and conflicts began within states, and between states, in which each party tried to exterminate the other lest it should itself be exterminated. When in 511 — that is, still in the age of the Tyrants — Sybaris was annihilated by the Pythagoreans, the event, the first of its kind, shocked the entire Classical world; even in distant Miletus mourning was worn. But now the elimination of a Polis or a party was so usual that a regular form and choice of methods — corresponding to the typical peace-treaties of Western Baroque — arose for the disposal of the vanquished — for example, the inhabitants might be massacred or sold into slavery, the houses razed or divided as spoil. The will to absolutism is there — after the Persian Wars it is universal, in Rome and Sparta no less than in Athens — but the willed narrowness of the Polis, the point-politic, and the willed brevity of office-holding and immediacy of schemes made it impossible ever to reach a firm decision as to who should be "the State."[1] The high craft of diplomacy, which in the West was practised by cabinets inspired by a tradition, was here handicapped by an amateurism founded not on any accidental inadequacy of persons — the men were available — but solely in the political form itself. The course of this form from the First to the Second Tyrannis is unmistakable and corresponds to the same evolution in all other Late periods; but the specifically Classical style of it appears in the disorder and subjection to incidentals which naturally and inevitably followed from a life that could not and would not dissociate itself from the moment.
The most important example of this is the evolution of Rome during the fifth century — a period over which hitherto historians have wrangled, precisely because they have tried to find in it a consistency that can no more have existed there than anywhere else in the Classical State. A further source of misunderstanding is that the conditions of that development have been regarded as something quite primitive, whereas in fact even the city of the Tarquins must have already been in a very advanced state, and primitive Rome lay much further back. The relations of the fifth century are on a small scale in comparison with those of Cæsar's age, but they were not antiquated. Because written tradition is defective (as it was everywhere save in Athens), the literary movement which followed the Punic Wars set itself to fill the blanks with poetry and in particular (as was to be expected in the Hellenistic age)
- ↑ R. von Pöhlmann, Griech. Gesch. (1914), pp. 223-45.
