What this fall of Papacy and Empire meant was the victory of State over Estate. At the root of the feudal system there had been the feeling that the purpose of existence was that a “life” should be led in the light of what it meant. History was exhaustively comprised in the destinies of noble blood. But now the feeling sprang up that there was _something else_ besides, something to which even nobility was subordinate, and which it shared with all other classes (whether of status or of vocation), something intangible, an idea. Events came to be viewed, no longer from a frankly private-law standpoint, but under a “public”-law aspect. The State might (and almost without exception did) remain aristocratic to its core; its outward appearance might be scarcely altered by the transition from the feudal group to the Class-State; the idea that those outside the Estates possessed rights as well as duties might be still unknown; _but_ the feeling had become different, and the consciousness that Life existed to be lived on the heights of history had given way to the other sentiment, that it contained a _task_. The difference becomes very distinct when we contrast the policy of Rainald van Dassel (d. 1167)--one of the greatest German statesmen of all periods--with that of the Emperor Charles IV (d. 1378), and consider in parallel therewith the transition in Classical feeling from the “Themis” of the knightly age to the “Dike” of the growing Polis.[656] Themis involves only a claim, Dike implies a task as well.

The State-idea in its sturdy youth is always--and self-evidently, with a naturalness rooted deep in animality itself--bound up with the conception of an individual ruler. The same holds good, with the same self-evidence, for every roused crowd in every decisive situation--as every riotous assembly and every moment of sudden danger demonstrates afresh.[657] Such crowds are units of feeling, but blind. They are “in form” for the onrush of events only when they are in the hands of the leader, who suddenly appears in their midst, is set at the head in a moment by that very unity of feeling, and finds an unconditional obedience. This process repeats itself in the formation of the great life-units that we call peoples and States, only more slowly and with surer meaning. In the high Cultures it is sometimes set aside or set back in favour of other modes of being “in form,” for the sake of a great symbol and artificially; but even then under the mask of these forms we practically always find _de facto_ an individual rulership, whether it be that of a King’s adviser or a party leader; and in every revolutionary upheaval the original state of things reappears.

With this cosmic fact is bound up one of the most intimately inward traits of all directional life, the _inherited will_, which presents itself with the force of a natural phenomenon in every strong race and compellingly urges even the momentary leader (often quite unconsciously) to uphold his rank for the duration of his personal existence or, beyond it, for that of his blood streaming on through children and grandchildren. The same deep and plantlike trait inspires every real following, which feels in the continuance of the blood of leadership both a surety for and a symbol of the continuance of its own. It is precisely in revolutions that this primitive instinct comes out, full and strong and regardless of all principles. Precisely because of it the France of 1800 saw not only Napoleon, but also his hereditary position, as the true fulfilment of the Revolution. Theorists who, like Marx and Rousseau, start from conceptual ideals instead of from blood-facts have never grasped this immense force that dwells in the historical world, and have in consequence labelled its manifested effects as damnable and reactionary. But they are there, and with a force so insistent that even the symbolism of the high Cultures can only override them temporarily and artificially, as is shown in the engrossing of elective officers by particular families in the Classical, and the nepotism of the Baroque popes in our own case. Behind the fact that leadership is very often freely resigned, and the saying that “merit should rule,” there is practically always the rivalry of magnates, who have no objection in principle to hereditary rulership, but prevent it in practice because each one of them secretly claims it for his own blood. This state of active, creative jealousy is the foundation on which the forms of Classical oligarchy are built up.

The combination of both elements produces the idea of Dynasty. This is so deeply rooted in the Cosmic and so closely interwoven into the factual web of historical life that the State-ideas of each and all the Cultures are _modifications of this one principle_, from the passionate affirmative of the Faustian to the resolute negative of the Classical Soul. The ripening of the State-idea of a Culture is associated with the city and even the adolescence of the city. Nations, historical peoples, are town-building peoples.[658] The _capital_ takes the place of the castle and the palace as the centre of high history, and in it the feeling of the exercise of power, Themis, transforms itself into that of government, Dike. Here feudal unity is inwardly overcome by national, even in the consciousness of the First Estate itself, and here the bare fact of rulership elevates itself into the symbol of _Sovereignty_.

And so, with the sinking of feudalism, Faustian history becomes dynastic history. From little centres where princely families have their seats (whence they “spring,” as the phrase goes, reminding us of plant and property), the shaping of nations proceeds--nations of strictly aristocratic constitution, but yet so that the State conditions the being of the Estate. The genealogical principle already ruling in the feudal nobility and the yeoman families, the expression of the feeling for expanse and the will-to-history, has become so powerful that the appearance of nations transcending the strong unities of language and landscape is dependent upon the destinies of ruling houses. Marriages and deaths sever or unite the blood of whole populations.[659] Where a Lotharingian and a Burgundian dynasty failed to take shape, there also nations already embryonic failed to develop. The doom that overhung the Hohenstaufen involved more than the imperial crown. For Germany and Italy it meant for centuries a deep unsatisfied longing for a united German-Italian nation, while the House of Habsburg, on the contrary, enabled, not a German, but an Austrian nation to develop.

In the Magian world, with its cavern-feeling, the dynastic principle was quite otherwise constituted. The Classical princeps, the legitimate successor of tyrants and tribunes, was the embodiment of the Demos. As Janus was the door and Vesta the hearth, so Cæsar was the people. He was the last creation of Orphic religiousness. The “Dominus et Deus,” on the contrary, was Magian, a Shah participating in the divine Fire (the _hvareno_ of the Mazdaist empire of the Sassanids, which becomes the aureole in Pagan and Christian Byzantium), which radiates about him and makes him _pius, felix, invictus_ (the last-named, from Commodus’s reign, his official title).[660] In Byzantium in the third century of our era the ruler-type underwent the same transition as was implied in the taking-down of Augustus’s civil-service state to build Diocletian’s feudalism. “The new creation begun by Aurelian and Probus and built up on the ruins by Diocletian and Constantine was about as alien to the Classical world and the principate as the empire of Charlemagne.”[661] The Magian ruler governed the visible portion of the general Consensus of the orthodox, which was Church, State, and Nation in one,[662] as Augustine described it in his _Civitas Dei_. The Western ruler is by the grace of God monarch in the _historical_ world; his people is subordinated to him because God has invested him with it. But in matters of faith he is himself a subordinate--to God’s Vicar on earth, or to his own conscience, as the case may be. That is the separation of State authority and Church authority, the great Faustian conflict between Time and Space. When, in 800, the Pope crowned the Emperor, he _chose_ a new ruler for himself in order that he himself might thrive. Whereas the Emperor in Byzantium was, according to Magian world-feeling, his spiritual as well as his secular superior, an Emperor in the Frank lands was his _servant_ in spiritual matters, besides being (perhaps) his arm in secular affairs. As an idea, the Papacy could arise only by separation from the Caliphate, for the Pope is _included_ in the Caliph.

For this very reason, however, the choice of the Magian ruler cannot be bound down to a genealogical succession-law. It issues from the consensus of the ruling blood-kindred, out of whom the Holy Ghost speaks and designates the Chosen One. When Theodosius died, in 550, a relative, the nun Pulcheria, formally gave her hand to the old senator Marcianus, thereby incorporating this statesman in the family and securing the throne to him and continuance to the “dynasty”;[663] and this act, like many similar occurrences in the Sassanid and Abbassid houses, was taken as the outcome of a hint from above.

In China, the Emperor-idea of the early Chóu period, which was strictly bound up with feudalism, soon became a dream, which, rapidly and with increasing distinctness, came to reflect a whole preceding world in the form of three dynasties of Emperors and myth-Emperors more ancient still.[664] But, for the dynasties of the system of states that thereupon grew up (in which the title King, _Wang_, came at last into perfectly general use) strict rules came into force for royal successions, legitimacy--a notion quite alien to the early time--became a power to conjure with,[665] and extinction of lines, adoptions and _mésalliances_ led, as in the Baroque of the West, to innumerable wars of succession.[666] Some principle of legitimacy, too, surely underlay the remarkable fact that the rulers of the Egyptian XIIth dynasty, with whom the late period of the Culture ended, had their sons crowned during their own lifetime.[667] The inward relationship between these three dynastic ideas is yet another proof that Being in these three Cultures was akin.

It requires a close insight into the political form-language of the Classical world to perceive that here also the course of things was exactly the same, and that it comprised not only the transition from feudal union to class-State, but even the dynastic principle as well. Classical being, indeed, said no to everything that might draw it into distances either of space or of time, and even in the fact-world of history ringed itself with creations that had something of the defensive in them. But all this narrowing and curtailing presupposes the thing against which it is striving to maintain itself. The Dionysiac squandering, and the Orphic negation, of the Classical body contained in the very _form_ of their protest the Apollinian ideal of perfect bodily being.

Individual rulership and the will to transmit to heirs were unmistakably taken for granted in the oldest kingship.[668] But they had become questionable even by 800, as the rôle of Telemachus in the older parts of the Odyssey indicates. The royal title was frequently borne by great vassals and the most conspicuous of the nobles. In Sparta and in Lycia there were two of them, and in the Phæacian city of the epic and in many actual cities there were more. Next comes the splitting-off of offices from dignities. Lastly, the kingship itself becomes an office which the nobility confers (though at first, perhaps, only upon members of the old royal family); thus in Sparta the Ephors, as representing the First Estate, were in no wise limited in their choice by rule; and in Corinth from about 750 the royal clan of the Bacchiadæ abolished hereditary succession, and on each occasion set up a _prytaneus_ with royal rank from within their own body. The great offices, which likewise were hereditary at first, came to be for one life only, then were limited to a term, and lastly became annual, and, further, were so arranged that there were more holders than offices, and the leadership was exercised by each in turn--the custom which, as is well known, led to the disaster of Cannæ. These annual offices, from the Etruscan annual dictature[669] to the Doric ephorate (which is found in Heraclea and Messene as well as Sparta) are firmly bound up with the essence of the Polis, and they reach their full structure about 650. Exactly at the corresponding date of the Western class-State (end of the fifteenth century), the hereditary power of dynasties was being secured by the Emperor Maximilian and his marriage-politics (against the claims of the Electors), by Ferdinand of Aragon, Henry VII of England, and Louis XI of France.[670]

But with the increasing emphasis upon the Classical here and now, the priesthood, which had the beginnings of an Estate in it, became _pari passu_ a mere aggregate of city officials. The capital, so to call it, of the Homeric kingship, instead of being the centre for the radiation of State influence in all directions into the distance, contracted its magic circle until State and city became identical. Thereby, of course, the nobility was fused with the patriciate, and if even in the Gothic the representation of the young cities (for example, the English Commons or the French States-General) was exclusively by patricians, how much more so in the powerful city-state of the Classical! Not indeed in idea, _but in fact_, it was a pure kingless aristocratic State. The strictly Apollinian “form” of the growing Polis is called _oligarchy_.

And thus, at the close of the early periods of both these Cultures, we see two principles parallel and contrasted, the Faustian-genealogical and the Apollinian-oligarchic; two kinds of constitutional law, of Dike. The one is supported by an unmeasured sense of expanse, reaches back deep into the past with form-tradition, thinks forward with the same intense will-to-endure into the remotest future; but in the present, too, works for political effectiveness over broad expanses by well-considered dynastic marriages and by the truly Faustian, dynamic, and contrapuntal politics that we call _diplomacy_. The other, wholly corporeal and statuesque, is self-limited by its policy of _autarkeia_ to the nearest and the most immediate present, and at every point stoutly denies that which Western being affirms.

Both the dynastic state and the city-state presuppose the city itself. But there is this difference, that a seat of government in the West, though it may be (and frequently is) far from being the greatest city of the land, is a force-centre in a field of political tensions such that every occurrence, in however remote a corner, vibrates generally throughout the whole--whereas in the Classical, life huddles closer and closer until it reaches the grotesque phenomenon of Synœcism--the very acme of the Euclidean will-to-form in the political world. It is impossible to imagine the State unless and until the nation sits physically concentrated in one heap, as one _body_; it must be _seen_, and even seen “at a glance.” And while the Faustian tendency is more and more to diminish the number of dynastic centres--so that even Maximilian I could see looming in the distance a dynastically secure universal monarchy of his house--the Classical world fell apart into innumerable petty points, which, almost as soon as they came into existence, started to do that which for Classical mankind was almost a necessity of thought and the purest expression of _autarkeia_--to destroy one another.[671]

Synœcism with its consequence, the creation of the Polis-type proper, was exclusively the work of _aristocracy_. It was they that established the Classical city-state, and for themselves alone; it was the drawing-together of country nobility and patriciate that brought it into form. The vocational classes were already on the spot, and the peasantry ceased to count from the class point of view. And by the concentration of noble power at one point the kingship of the feudal period was shattered.

With these glimpses into Greece to go upon, we may venture, though under all reserves of course, to outline the history of primitive Rome. The Roman synœcism--the assembling of widely scattered noble families--is identical with the “founding” of the city, an Etruscan undertaking of the beginning of the seventh century.[672] Facing the royal stronghold of the Capitol, there had long been two other settlements on the Palatine and the Quirinal. To the first of these belonged the ancient goddess Diva Rumina[673] and the Etruscan Ruma clan;[674] the god of the second was Quirinus Pater. From these comes the dual name of Romans and “Quirites,” and the dual priesthoods of the Salii and Luperci, which adhered to the two hills. Now, as the three blood-tribes named Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres are in all probability common to all Etruscan localities,[675] they must have existed in both of those which concern us here; and thus are explained, on the one hand, the number _six_ of centuries of equites, of military tribunes, of aristocratic Vestals, and, on the other, the number _two_ of the prætors (or consuls) who were, quite early, attached to the King as representatives of the nobles and gradually deprived him of all influence. Already by 600 the constitution of Rome must have been a strong oligarchy of “Patres” with a shadow-kingship[676] as figure-head. Thus both the older theory of an expulsion of the kings, and the newer of a slow disintegration of the royal power, can stand side by side after all, the former as referring to the fall of the Tarquinian Tyrannis, which (as everywhere else in the Classical world--Pisistratus in Athens, for example) had set itself up in opposition to the oligarchy about the middle of the sixth century; the latter as referring to the slow disintegration of the feudal power of the (may we say) Homeric kingship by the aristocratic city-state, _before_ the “foundation,” so-called--the crisis, probably, in which the prætors emerged, as the Archons and Ephors emerged elsewhere.

This Polis was no less strictly aristocratic than the Western class-State, with its nobility, clergy, and higher burgesses. The residue of the people belonging to it was merely its _object_, but--in the West the object of its political _care_, and in the Classical the object of its political _carelessness_. For here “_Carpe diem_” was the motto of the oligarchy as well as of others. It proclaims itself aloud in the poems of Theognis and the Song of Hybrias the Cretan. It made Classical finance till right into its latest phases--from the piracy practised by Polycrates upon his own people to the proscriptions of the Roman Triumvirs--into a more or less hand-to-mouth seizing of resources for the moment. In jurisprudence it emerges with unparalleled logic in the limitation of Roman edict-law to the term of office of the one-year prætor.[677] And, lastly, it is seen in the ever-growing practice of filling military, legal, and administrative offices (particularly the _more_ important of them) by lot--a kind of homage to Tyche, the goddess of the Moment.

This was the Classical world’s manner of being politically “in form” and, correspondingly, of thinking and feeling. There are no exceptions. The Etruscans were as much under its domination as the Dorians and the Macedonians.[678] When Alexander and his successors dotted the Orient far and wide with their Hellenistic cities, they did so without conscious choice, for they could not imagine any other form of political organization. Antioch was to be Syria, and Alexandria Egypt. The latter, under the Ptolemies and later under the Cæsars, was, not indeed legally, but certainly in practice, a Polis on a vast scale--for the country outside, long reverted to townless fellahdom and managed by immemorial precedents, stood at its gates like an alien frontier.[679] The Roman Imperium was nothing but the last and greatest Classical city-state standing on foundations of a colossal synœcism. Under Marcus Aurelius the rhetor Aristides could say with perfect justification that it had “brought together this world in the name of one city: wheresoever a man may be born in it, it is at its centre that he dwells.” Even the conquered populations of the Empire--the wandering desert-tribes, the upland-valley communities of the Alps--were constituted as _civitates_. Livy thinks invariably in the forms of the city-state, and for Tacitus provincial history simply does not exist. When, in 49, Pompey, withdrawing before Cæsar, gave up Rome as militarily unimportant and betook himself to the East to create there a firm base of operations, he was doomed. Giving up the city, he had, in the eyes of the ruling classes, given up the State. To them Rome was all.[680]

These city-states were in principle inextensible. Their number could increase, but not their ambit. The notion that the transformation of the Roman _clientela_ into a voting _plebs_, and the creation of the country tribes, meant a breach in the Polis-idea is incorrect. It was in Rome as in Attica--the whole life of the State remained as before limited to one point, which was the Agora, the Forum. However far away those to whom citizenship was granted might live--in Hannibal’s day it might be anywhere in Italy, and later anywhere in the world--the _exercise_ of his political right depended upon _personal presence_ in the Forum. Hence the majority of the citizens were, not legally, but practically without influence in political business.[681] What citizenship meant for them, therefore, was simply the duty of military service and the enjoyment of the city’s domestic law.[682] But even for the citizen coming to Rome, political power was limited by a second and _artificial_ synœcism which came into existence after, and as the result of, enfranchisement of the peasant, and can only be understood as an unconscious effort to maintain the idea of the Polis strictly unimpaired; the new citizens were inscribed, regardless of their numbers, in a very few tribes (eight, under the Lex Julia), and were always, therefore, in a minority in the Comitia relatively to the citizens of the older franchise.

And naturally so, for this _civitas_ was regarded through and through as one body, a σῶμα. That which did not belong to it was out of its law, _hostis_. The gods and the heroes stood above, the slave (not quite to be called human, according to Aristotle) below, this aggregate of persons.[683] But the individual was a ζῶον πολιτικόν in a sense that would be regarded by us, who think and live in our expanse-feeling, as an utter slavery; he existed _only_ by reason of his membership of an individual Polis. Owing to this Euclidean feeling, the nobility as a self-contained body was at first synonymous with the Polis--to such an extent, indeed, that even in the Twelve Tables marriage between patricians and plebeians was forbidden and the Spartan Ephors began their term of office, according to ancient custom, with a declaration of war against the Helots. The relation was reversed whenever in consequence of a revolution the non-noble became _the_ Demos--but its meaning remained. As in inward, so also in outward relationships, the _body_ politic was the foundation of all events throughout Classical history. The cities, hundreds of them, lay in wait for each other, each as self-gathered, politically and economically, as it was possible to make it, ready to bite, letting fly on the smallest excuse, and having as its war-aim, not the extension of its own state, but the extinction of the other side’s. Wars ended with the destruction of the enemy’s city and the killing or enslavement of his citizens, just as revolutions ended with the massacre or expulsion of the losers and the confiscation of their property by the victorious party. The natural interstate condition of the West is a close network of diplomatic relations, which may be broken through by wars; but the Classical law of nations assumes war as a normal condition, interrupted from time to time by peace treaties, and a declaration of war merely re-established the natural state of policy. Only so do the forty- and fifty-year peace treaties, _spondai_ (such as the famous one of Nicias in 421), become intelligible, as temporary guarantee-treaties.

These two State-forms, with the styles of policy appropriate to each, are assured by the close of the Early period. The State-idea has triumphed over the feudal union, but it is the Estates that carry that idea, and the nation has political existence only as their sum.