far the genius of the Italian republics was diverted from literature to painting and sculpture by the presence of literary models which it must have seemed alike hopeless to surpass by creation and to equal by imitation.
§ 46. Athens, then, is the type of the city commonwealth as an organism internally united, free to pursue its own development, unshackled by inheritances from the past, uncurbed by relations with any larger social union, political or religious. But it may be questioned whether the city commonwealth is a phase of social life found with sufficient frequency to admit of its being taken as a stage of social evolution. It may be said that Athens, Rome, Florence, not only represent, as we have admitted, very different types of the city commonwealth, but that these are isolated cases possessing no widely found characteristics which would justify us in setting them apart as specimens of a defined social organism.
When we look at the East in general and the civilisation of India in particular, we must candidly admit that there are large districts of the world's surface in which city life has exerted no influence compared with the municipal systems of Greece and Rome and the nations which have risen among their ruins. If Rome passed at a single stride from a city commonwealth to a world-empire without waiting to grow into a nation, the social evolution of the East seems to have passed from the village community to world-empire without experiencing the stage of isolated city commonwealths. But the vast influence of municipal life and thought on Western progress abundantly demonstrates the claim of the city commonwealth to be regarded as a leading stage in social development. Objectors, accordingly, will probably shift their ground to the difficulty of defining the nature of the city commonwealth. But a little examination will
