Then a city was like one man. Now one man is like a city in civil war

“Then a city was like one man. Now one man is like a city in civil war” is an aphorism about artistic and cultural unity: it contrasts an older world in which collective work could possess coherence with a modern world in which even an individual may be divided against himself. The image of the city turns a claim about tradition into a compact comparison between social cohesion and inner conflict.

Meaning and Structure

The expression is built from a balanced reversal. In its first sentence, a city is imagined as a single person; in its second, that relation is turned around, and one person becomes a city at war with itself. The repeated structure makes the change in historical outlook feel sharp, while “civil war” gives the modern condition a specifically internal form: division is no longer only among members of a community but within the individual.

The line is not offered as a literal account of cities or people. Its force comes from the contrast between kinds of unity. The ancient city stands for collective coherence; the modern individual, despite being a single person, contains competing parts. The metaphor therefore unsettles the assumption that an individual work must have a single individual author in order to be unified.

Context of Traditional Creation

The expression appears in an argument about the authorship and gradual formation of old artistic works. The Book of Job, like Westminster Abbey, may have grown over time; the passage argues that such development need not make the result incoherent or spurious. It compares this communal understanding of creation with the Iliad and its disputed authorship, suggesting that a tribal epic could be treated as a shared work in much the same way as a tribal temple.

The line crystallizes the passage’s claim that “there was more unity in those times in a hundred men than there is unity now in one man.” In this account, continuity could be carried by tradition across generations: a poem might be left for a son to finish as his father would have finished it, just as a field might be left to be reaped. The city-and-person comparison gives memorable form to that contrast between inherited communal practice and modern insistence on individual authorship.

Critical Force

The aphorism does not settle whether the Iliad was written by one person or many. Instead, it shifts attention from the number of authors to the kind of unity a work can possess. The passage compares the unity of traditional creations to that of Canterbury Cathedral: a work may have coherence without having been produced in a single act by a single maker.

In this setting, “civil war” is the pointed opposite of the inherited continuity that the argument attributes to older collective culture. The phrase makes modern individualism look less like a guarantee of wholeness than a source of division, and it supports the broader contention that a work’s unity may arise from a shared tradition rather than from an isolated author.