The second great consequence of the Graeco-Roman city-system was linked
in many ways with this absence of the representative principle. In
Greece the formation of political aggregates higher and more extensive
than the city was, until a late date, rendered impossible. The good and
bad sides of this peculiar phase of civilization have been often enough
commented on by historians. On the one hand the democratic assembly of
such an imperial city as Athens furnished a school of political training
superior to anything else that the world has ever seen. It was something
like what the New England town-meeting would be if it were continually
required to adjust complicated questions of international polity, if it
were carried on in the very centre or point of confluence of all
contemporary streams of culture, and if it were in the habit every few
days of listening to statesmen and orators like Hamilton or Webster,
jurists like Marshall, generals like Sherman, poets like Lowell,
historians like Parkman. Nothing in all history has approached the
high-wrought intensity and brilliancy of the political life of Athens.

On the other hand, the smallness of the independent city, as a political
aggregate, made it of little or no use in diminishing the liability to
perpetual warfare which is the curse of all primitive communities. In a
group of independent cities, such as made up the Hellenic world, the
tendency to warfare is almost as strong, and the occasions for warfare
are almost as frequent, as in a congeries of mutually hostile tribes of
barbarians. There is something almost lurid in the sharpness of contrast
with which the wonderful height of humanity attained by Hellas is set
off against the fierce barbarism which characterized the relations of
its cities to one another. It may be laid down as a general rule that in
an early state of society, where the political aggregations are small,
warfare is universal and cruel. From the intensity of the jealousies and
rivalries between adjacent self-governing groups of men, nothing short