CHAPTER I.
THE CITY COMMONWEALTH GROUP.
§ 45. It has been said with truth that the "brief blossom-time" of the Periclean age has so far dazzled modern critics that they have come to identify the short-lived spirit of that age with the spirit of the Greek race in general. The error cannot, however, with fairness be laid at the door of the modern critic alone. The Athenian spirit in its full life and vigour could not brook the thought of a time when it was not, threw a kind of glamour over the past history of Hellas, and universalised its own ideas at the expense alike of contemporary states of Greek society less developed than its own, and of the early life of chief and clan. Thus, to select a literary example, the dramatic spectacles and forensic pleading of Athens underlie the general canons of Aristotle's poetic and rhetorical criticism, and supply the living particulars which his philosophy expands into ideal forms. Athens herself is, in fact, the type of a city commonwealth, her literature the ideal of such a city's literature. The custom of speaking of "Greek" literature or the Greek "nation"—the latter an abuse of language to be peculiarly condemned—obscures the real nature of that social and political development which has given us the masterpieces of Athenian thought and art. Inheriting the
