Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/51

union appeared, it was based, not on influences directly political, but on games and art: the contests at Olympia, the poems of Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, were the only bonds that held Hellas together. Resolutely, on the other hand, the Italian surrendered his own personal will for the sake of freedom, and learned to obey his father that he might know how to obey the state. In such subjection as this individual development might be marred, and the germs of fairest promise in man might be arrested in the bud; the Italian gained instead a feeling of fatherland and of patriotism such as the Greek never knew, and alone among all the civilized nations of antiquity, succeeded in working out national unity in connection with a constitution based on self-government—a national unity, which at last placed in his hands the supremacy, not only over the divided Hellenic stock, but over the whole known world.