CHAPTER VI
THE REALISATION OF DEMOCRACY: ATHENS
I said at the end of the last chapter that Athens alone, of all the City-States of antiquity, solved for a time the problem of freely developing the talent, of the individual, while maintaining fully that identification of the individual with the State which was the very essence of Greek social life. This proposition I wish to prove and explain in the present chapter. By keeping steadily to it, we shall obtain, I believe, the best idea of such "good life" as it was possible for the City-State to realise; and we shall learn to identify that "good life" with the form and spirit of Democracy, the last phase taken by this kind of social union in the course of its natural development, before decay set in. I say the form and spirit of Democracy; for though Democracy is often treated as a form of government only,[1] we surely may not be content so to treat it, if we are really bent on understanding what the πόλις in its perfection could do for the education of mankind.
- ↑ E.g. by Sir H. Maine in Popular Government, ch. i.
