The Greek city had fallen through its intense individualism. Roman citizenship failed because it became universal. It lost the power to create a common character and to command a common allegiance. Something was needed which should be less narrow than the city-state, and less wide than a world-empire, before the modern conception of citizenship could be realized.
In the city politics of Mediaeval Italy we find revived in a new form the Greek idea of citizenship. There is the same intense activity within a limited area, the same intimate participation in civic duties and privileges, the same pride in the material and spiritual development of the city itself. But faction, the ruin of the cities of Greece, is rife in the Italian, and here it is animated by a bitterness if possible more personal and more intense. You have only to read the burning words of Dante to see to what depths the civic spirit might descend.