village communities like the Ætolians or Macedonians, or in very imperfect States like those of the Oriental nations, and themselves enjoying the ripe culture, the liberty, the leisure, and the comfort which the City-State had brought them, easily came to believe that there was something almost divine in the πόλις, enabling it to outstrip all other forms of association in the power of developing man's best instincts. With that mysterious power of the Greek to beautify and idealise everything he touched, Plato immortalised the πόλις by the very perfection of his ideal picture of it; and if all Greek history were lost, and the Republic alone remained, we should still be able to understand the depth of Greek conviction which connected political forms with the moral and intellectual perfectibility of human nature. But in Aristotle this idealisation was tempered both with the critical spirit and with a strict adherence to the essential facts of Greek life, and in seeking for the real distinction between the City-State and all earlier and less perfect associations, we cannot do better than follow in his footsteps.
There are only two or three points in Aristotle's theory of the State to which we need at present advert, but these are essentially axioms, which condition all his political thinking.
Let us place first his famous dictum, that while the end of all earlier forms of society is simply life, the end of the State is good life.[1] What a world of
- ↑ Politics, i. 2, 8 ; 1252 B; γινομένη μέν τοῦ ξῆν ἕνεκεν, οὖσα δὲ τοῦ εὖ ξῆν; that is, the πόλις is the earliest association of which the
