to political unity without at the same time exchanging their polity
for despotism. The ideal world of beauty was all in all to the
Greeks, and compensated them to some extent for what they wanted
in reality. Wherever in Hellas a tendency towards national union
appeared, it was based not on elements 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. Amidst this
subjection individual development might be marred, and the germs
of fairest promise in man might be arrested in the bud; the Italian
gained in their stead 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 mastery not only over
the divided Hellenic stock, but over the whole known world.




Notes for Book I Chapter II



1. Some of the epitaphs may give us an idea of its sound;
as -theotoras artahiaihi bennarrihino- and -dasiihonas platorrihi
bollihi-.