The Greek City and its Institutions

THE GREEK CITY AND ITS INSTITUTIONS

THEORIES

THE most striking feature of ancient Greece, the fundamental cause both of its greatness and its weakness, was its division into innumerable cities, each one of which formed a State. The ideas which a division of this sort implies were an inseparable part of the mental equipment of the Greeks, so much so that in the fourth century the most discerning minds considered the existence of the polis as a fact of nature. They could not conceive of any other organization for men worthy of the name. Aristotle himself took the effect for the cause, and defined not the Greek, but man, as a “political animal.” There were for him two kinds of human beings: those who were submerged in savage, formless hordes or in the vast tribes of some monstrously large monarchy, and those who were harmoniously associated in cities; the former were born for servitude in order that the latter might enjoy a nobler way of life.

In actual fact the geographical conditions of Greece were a powerful factor in its historical development. Sea and mountains split up the land into narrow valleys imprisoned by hills and having no easy outlet save on the coast, and thus a great number of cantons was formed, each the natural home for a small society. Physical partitioning gave rise to, or at least facilitated, political partitioning—to every division a distinct nationality. Imagine an isolated valley with pasturage bordering on streams, with wooded slopes, fields, vineyards and olive groves sufficient to maintain some tens of thousands of inhabitants, seldom more than a hundred thousand, and, in addition, high ground for refuge in case of attack, and a port for communication with the outside world, and one then has some idea of what an autonomous and sovereign State meant to the Greeks.

One cannot, however, attribute the creation of the city- state solely to inevitable circumstance, to the all-powerful influence of the land on its inhabitants. Proof of this lies in the fact that Aristotle gave no thought to it when he spoke of man as a “political” being. In Asia Minor and in Italy, moreover, geographical conditions were very different from those existing in Greece itself: there the mountains were lower and less wild, the plains more extensive, communication easier; and yet there the Greeks faithfully reproduced the type of constitution which they had devised for the needs of a smaller and more divided country. One must, therefore, admit that in the formation of the city historical circumstances were combined with the influence of physical environment.

Aristotle in ancient times and Fustel de Coulanges in our own day considered only the former.

According to the author of the Politics,1 the Greeks passed through three stages. The first community, which persists in all times simply because it is natural, was based on the association of husband and wife, master and slave; it embraced all who ate at the same table and breathed the smoke from the same altar: the family, the oilcia. Out of the family grew the village, the kome; its inhabitants, children and grandchildren of the family, obeyed a king who exercised in the larger group all the powers which fell to the eldest in the primitive household. Finally, from the association of many villages, the complete State was created, the perfect community, the polis. First founded that men might live, it continued that they might live happily, but only so long as it remained self-sufficing could it exist and endure. The city-state, therefore, was a work of nature just as were the earlier associations which found their fulfilment in it. Thus man, who can begin to develop only in the family, can come to full maturity only in the polis; he is by nature, therefore, a “political animal.”

By a narrow use of the comparative method the author of the Cité antique has, in modern times, arrived at conclusions different from these in certain respects, but similar on the whole. He looks for the explanation of institutions in primitive beliefs, in the worship of the dead and of the sacred fire—in short, in domestic religion. This was the formative principle of the family in its wider sense—of the Greek genos as of the Roman gens. The obligation to honour the common ancestor brought with it the obligation to assure the continuance of the family; it gave their essential character to the laws which governed marriage, the right of property and the right of succession; it conferred absolute authority on the father of the family, on the eldest of the direct descendants of the divine ancestor; it was the foundation of all morality. Exigencies of an economic and military nature compelled the families successively to group themselves into phratries, the phratries into tribes and, finally, the tribes into a city. Religion had to keep abreast with the development of human society, but the gods outside the home differed from the family gods only in the wider allegiance they commanded. Now there was a public hearth and the city had a religion which permeated all its institutions. The king was first and foremost a high priest, and the magistracies which succeeded the monarchy were, in essence, priesthoods: political power sprang from a sacred function. What was law but a command from on high ? What was patriotism but municipal piety ? What was exile but ex- communication ? Divine power created the omnipotence of the State, and claims for individual liberty could be regarded as nothing less than revolt against the gods. In cities so constituted the heads of the gene formed a privileged class; they were in a position to resist the kings, they lorded it over the men of the lower classes who gathered round them as clients, and, in particular, over the plebeian mob, the descendants of aliens. Such an exclusive power inevitably gave rise to a series of revolutions. The first deprived the kings of political authority, and restricted them to religious ascendancy. But the leaders of the aristocracy were still veritable monarchs, each in his own genos, and so there was a second revolution which changed the constitution of the family, suppressed the law of primogeniture and destroyed the client-system. A third brought the plebs within the city, modified the principles of private law and made the common interest the first consideration in government. For a moment, however, it seemed as if privilege of fortune were to step into the place of privilege of birth, and a fourth revolution was called for to establish the laws of democratic government. The city had now exhausted its capacity for development; and in the struggles between rich and poor it was to meet its end. The criticism of the philosophers began to point out that this regime was too circumscribed ; the Roman conquest deprived the municipal system of all political character; and finally, with Christianity, came the triumph of a universal conception which transformed for ever the conditions of all government.

The impressiveness of the structure which Fustel de Coulanges has built up, his breadth of thought combined with precision of detail and lucidity of style, impel admiration; but nevertheless, we cannot to-day accept all his conclusions unreservedly. I shall not attempt any criticism of his half-hearted use of the comparative method, partly because no use is made of it in this work, but still more because, when the Cité antique was published, no one since the time of Montesquieu had employed it with such masterly skill. It is in other matters that the fascination which his masterpiece exercises is to be guarded against. It is obvious that the author, as he passes from the family to the phratry, the tribe and the city, merely carries over to the larger groups the beliefs and customs observed in the primitive group; they remain identical though in a wider sphere. With imperturbable logic he proceeds by strict comparison to place the family in the centre of a series of concentric circles. But human societies do not evolve in this way: they are not geometrical figures, but living organisms which can only endure and preserve their identity so long as they suffer profound change. In reality, the Greek city, while retaining the institution of the family, grew at its expense. It was compelled to appeal to individual forces which the original group repressed. For a long time the city had to fight against the genos, and each of its victories was gained by the suppression of some form of patriarchal servitude. The great mistake which Fustel de Coulanges made is, therefore, clear. Conforming to the theory which dominated the liberal school of the nineteenth century, he established an absolute antinomy between the omnipotence of the city and individual liberty, whereas, on the contrary, state power and individualism progressed side by side, each supporting the other.

We shall not, therefore, see two opposing forces—the family and the city,—but three—the family, the city and the individual, each in its turn predominant. The history of Greek institutions thus falls into three periods: in the first, the city is composed of families which jealously guard their ancient right and subordinate all their members to the common good; in the second, the city subordinates the families to itself by calling to its aid emancipated individuals; in the third, individualism run riot destroys the city and necessitates the formation of larger States.

FACTS

We have seen how, from Aristotle to Fustel de Coulanges, the origin of the city-state has been conceived of in a purely logical manner. Unfortunately, the problem is not so simple. History does not follow a rectilinear line. Truth is always complex when it is concerned with men who live, toil and struggle, and are subject to the common needs of humanity. And if the event one is attempting to explain took place in times which have left no direct documents, when migration was mingling races and civilizations throughout all the lands of the Ægean, one must expect to find contamination of ideas and customs, a deceptive irregularity in the curve of evolution, and spasmodic progress followed by startling retrogression.

The first Greeks to arrive in Greece, the Achæans (some of whom later became known as Ionians and Æolians), were semi-nomadic shepherds from the Balkan peninsula. Since they had spent their lives wandering with their flocks over the plains and through the mountain forests, they had never formed a State. The unit of organization was the patriarchal clan, to which the name of patria, or more often genos, was given, and whose members were all descendants of the same ancestor and worshippers of the same god. The clans combined in greater or smaller numbers to form wider associations, brotherhoods in the broadest sense or phratries, warrior bands known as phratores or phrateres, etai or hetairoi. When the phratries went out on great expeditions they formed themselves into a small number, always the same, of tribes or phylai; each tribe had its own god and its own war cry, each recruited its own fighting force, the phylopis, and obeyed its own king, the phylobasileus ; but all recognized the authority of a supreme king, the basileus in chief.

At this time the genos alone had a solid and durable organization. A picture of it can be constructed from the data supplied by various sources—from traditions handed down in very ancient songs and in the relatively recent Homeric poems; from the legendary tales repeated from generation to generation until writing gave them a permanent form; from survivals enshrined in religious ceremonies; from archaeological details and from the innumerable analogies which a comparative study of human societies affords.

When the genos became established on Greek soil all in whose veins ran the blood of the common ancestor continued to gather round the common hearth. They lived under the same roof, they had imbibed the same milk (ομογάλακτες), breathed the same altar smoke (ομάκαπνοι), shared bread from the same oven (ομοσίιτυοή. All the clansmen were brothers (κασίνητοι)—to attempt to define more precisely the bonds of kinship is impossible. For long men remembered the great households embracing many hundreds of kinsmen: Homer tells of the fifty brothers and twelve sisters living under Priam’s roof together with their wives and husbands, not to speak of the children.2

Thus constituted, the clan enjoyed complete independence, recognizing no limits to its sovereignty. It knew no obligations save those imposed by its own religion, no virtues save those which contributed to its honour and prosperity. Bonds of the closest nature united all the elements of the clan— men, beasts and chattels: a relation expressed by the Greek pliilotes, a word which must be translated, for lack of an exact equivalent, by “ friendship,” though it represented a tie rather juridical than sentimental. Philotes alone aroused and determined aidos, consciousness of duty. Duty, always a reciprocal obligation, did not exist, therefore, save between kinsmen.³

This world in miniature could only preserve the independence which was its pride, the solidarity which was its strength, if it was self-sufficing: in Greek parlance, autonomy was dependent upon autarlceia. The clan possessed, therefore, together with the house consecrated by the hearth-stone, all the surrounding land consecrated by the tomb of the ancestor, all the fields, pasturage, vines and olives required to feed so many mouths. The demesne, with its livestock and slaves, belonged in common to the whole group; and, being collective, property was consequently inalienable and indivisible. There were no rules of succession—it passed in an unbroken chain from the dead to the living.4 And to earn his title to a share, each, whether young or old, man or woman, had to work for all.⁵

The chief of the genos was clearly marked out: he was king who, by male succession, traced his origin most directly to the divine ancestor, and in whose veins, therefore, flowed the purest blood. He was the priest of the god whose incarnation he was; he presided over all the ceremonies which gathered the clansmen together round the common hearth, and offered the sacrifices and libations which assured their prosperity. Not only did he possess absolute power over his wife, whom he could expose, sell or kill without having to justify his action, but, in addition, he exercised unrestricted authority over all the members of his group. To secure domestic peace he proclaimed, interpreted and executed the divine will. With the sceptre he received knowledge of the themisiesy infallible decrees which a super-human wisdom revealed to him through dreams and oracles, or suggested to his inner conscience. Handed down from father to son since the beginning of time, increasing from generation to generation, the themistes formed a sacred and mysterious code of family justice (themis). Those who had exposed themselves to divine wrath by acting in a manner hostile to the clan were entirely at the mercy of the chief, the dispenser of justice· He could put them to the ordeal or the judgment of God to expiate their offence or establish their innocence; he could place them under the ban of the genos by the terrible punishment of atimia. In his hands were the weapons of punishment and intimidation, and to him, therefore, fell the duty of providing for the protection of society.

Yet in spite of their nature, there was regular intercourse between the gene. For long neighbouring families were in a state of almost perpetual warfare. Raids on enemy territory took place; the chief gloried in the number of women and beasts he carried off; blood flowed and called for avenging blood, and so interminable reprisals followed. Even when they were united in phratries and tribes the clans did not abandon the vendetta; they were only compelled to subordinate it to those common rules which constituted then a higher law than themis, namely, dike. The members of the injured genos were always entitled to avenge themselves on the members of the attacking genos. But it was admitted that the murderer freed his kinsmen from all responsibility by exile: this kind of compounding by flight tranquillized passions and helped to restore order. A way was found of extending to members of different or even hostile clans the sentiments and obligations which up to that time had existed only between members of the same clan. Reconciliation could be achieved by the application to adversaries of aidos, by aidesis. By means of adoption or marriage the murderer would sometimes take the place of the dead man in the group he had depleted; most often he would make atonement by paying blood-money (poine). A treaty of “friendship” (philotes) followed, when with solemn ceremonies the families recently enemies offered a sacrifice to their gods, sat at the same table and mingled their blood in a loving-cup.6 Thus, above family law custom gradually created an inter-family law, whence, by degrees, public law was to spring.

The rule which subordinated the clans to the common interest was not devoid of sanction. To override the decrees of custom was to expose oneself to divine anger (óç θβών).⁷. But supernatural notions of this sort are always capable of a natural explanation. This fear of the gods was, at bottom, fear of a social force which day by day took to itself new strength. Men feared the demos. This name was applied to the whole mass of clans assembled under one rule, whether it was conceived in terms of the country or its inhabitants. Public opinion (demon phatis or phemis) exercised an influence which no clan could escape. It exerted by means of nemesis a pressure powerful enough to prevent crime or to compel the criminal to expiate his offence.⁸ True it had no official voice; it was represented neither by a person nor by an accredited body; yet one cannot say that it was simply a moral force, for in extreme cases, when passions were at fever-pitch, indignation would burst tempestuously forth and sweep all obstacles before it. In theory the family remained sovereign; in fact it often had to yield to that nameless collective will which was able to place so formidable a weapon in the hands of the king.

The Aehæans appear to have reached this stage of civilization when they settled in the midst of the peoples established on the shores of the Ægean. They were only an armed minority which had for the most part to adapt its ideas and institutions to the customs of the majority which it governed. The Pre-Hellenes, who had been a settled people since the earliest times, seem also to have known the system of the gentile clan: the ruins of spacious dwellings unearthed at Vasiliki, Chamaizi and Tiryns, as well as the enormous bee-hive tombs (tholoi) in the Messara, afford a retrospective commentary on those passages in the epics where Priam is shown with the sixty-two families over which he ruled, Nestor and Æolus with the households of their six sons and of their daughters, Alcinous with his six children, two of whom were married.9 But in the most progressive regions of the Ægean world this stage had long been passed; the enormous families had been broken up, and cities and monarchical government established. Crete, in particular, had magnificent palaces whence its lordly rulers governed a vast and wealthy people, and unfortified towns with roads flanked by rows of small houses. In the Cyclades are to be seen fortifications such as those of Chalandriani on Syra and of Haghios Andreas on Siphnos, which could only have been constructed at the command of powerful chiefs for the protection of large populations. On the mainland, along the great road which leads from Thessaly to the extremities of the Peloponnese, were scattered agricultural centres. Many of them were prosperous ; Orchomenus began to enrich itself by reclaiming land from Lake Copais, a task involving considerable labour, and surrounded itself with a whole escort of new villages. As a general rule hamlets and villages were situated near a hill which served for refuge in time of war, and to which the chief summoned the elders to make decisions concerning the common welfare. These heights were usually fortified; some were surrounded with simple wooden palisades which now have disappeared, others with walls of stone.

The Achæan conquerors took possession of the richest plains and the strongest positions. Within the walls rose the palaces of the kings. When there was sufficient space the houses of the chief officers and dignitaries were attached to them. At Athens, close by the “stronghold” where the Erectheum lay, was a small group of more modest dwellings. At Mycenæ, towards the middle of the fifteenth century, the fortifications were even extended so as completely to encircle the royal headquarters. At the foot of these hills were huddled the huts in which the peasants and serfs lived, along with the artisans and merchants who supplied their needs— sometimes so large a settlement that the villages formed almost a separate town. When he was in a favourable position and controlled access to his territory, the chief levied forced tolls from travellers, and where roads met population increased greatly.

It was the high town which was at first called the polis (ττλóç or íττολίβθρον), while the lower town was the asty (αστν). In many of the Homeric poems the two words still retain their distinct meaning.10 The asty was the inhabited part to which the roads led, and the surface of which was only hired.¹¹ To the polis was appropriated the term “lofty”; it was the acropolis, and there were words innumerable to describe its characteristics—its escarpments, its massiveness, its towers, its great gates;¹² moreover, since it contained the temple of the god of the city and the king’s palace, it alone was sacred, rich, magnificent, treasure-filled.¹³ When Hecuba wished to bring to the goddess Athene her offering and her supplications, she assembled the Trojans in the asty and climbed with them to the polis¹⁴ This distinction continued for long in a great part of Greece: in 426, the Hyeans, a people of western Locris, successfully resisted the Spartans so long as they remained masters of a paltry fortress called the Polis;¹⁵ official documents gave the Acropolis at Athens this name even at the beginning of the fourth century, and the Achæan fortress at Ialysus as late as the third century.¹⁶

But in the latest books of the Iliad, and in practically the whole of the Odyssey, no distinction is made between the polis and the asty. As the lower town became larger through the development of agriculture and commerce, it acquired an importance which counter-balanced that of the upper city. It was Mycenæ of “the spacious ways” which filled the coffers of Mycenæ “abounding in gold”, and the lord of the heights was forced to consider with growing interest and solicitude the activities of the plains : it is more than symbolic that the kings of the first dynasty were entombed in graves on the fortified hill, while those of the second wereburied in beehive tombs outside the walls. The people and property of the upper and lower towns were beginning to mingle. When the lords of Tiryns were extending their stronghold by building lower than the Oberburg the walls of the Mittelburg, then lower still those of the Niederburg, gradually they brought within the polis the territory of the ancient asty. Similarly, in the epics it was no longer the upper town of Ilium which was encircled with towers, but the lower town, the asty17 It was natural that the two words should become synonymous ; in many cases the same identification is seen. Both words were used indiscriminately to denote Ilium, Ithaca, Cnossus, Lacedæmon, Scheria.¹⁸ It seems, however, that the main agglomeration, as opposed to the surrounding country, was more particularly called the asty, the name which the country people had always given to the place where the market was held.¹⁹ On the other hand, the upper town had not merely absorbed the lower town of “ the spacious ways,”²⁰ for the general name polis was extended also to all the rural communities which lived under its protection. It was an easy step to extend it to the whole country which recognized the authority of the same chief.²¹ The word which in the beginning had denoted an acropolis ended by denoting a city.

This development did not involve the breaking up of the existing social system. The “polis” became a really “political” institution without destroying the clans, the phratries or the tribes; indeed, it was only possible for it to become so by incorporating these groups. They occupied a relatively large area to which the name of demos was given —a name which had naturally been transferred to the body of people inhabiting it.22 The city gave the demos the unity which it lacked; but it dealt with the organized society of clans, not with individuals. The king could only give orders and ensure their execution with the consent and through the mediation of the tribal chiefs, who, in their turn, could do nothing without the family chiefs. At most, one may surmise that public opinion (demon phatis) worked by indirect methods to undermine the solidarity of the family for the benefit of a larger unit.

These developments might have led Greece even as early as 1000 B.C. to the conception of the city which, in fact, only triumphed some centuries later. But at this point Greece was inundated with semi-barbarian Greeks who had not felt the influence of the Ægean civilization. At the end of the twelfth century there came in successive waves all the peoples of the north-west, some of whom at a later day were to be known as Dorians. Confusion reigned. The old monarchies crumbled and fell, and the glory of Mycenæ vanished for ever. No doubt certain obscure cantons of Greece proper, for example the part of Attica sheltered by Mount Parnes and Arcadia protected by the sharp rise of its plateaus, escaped the storm and could even offer shelter to fugitive bands ; but these were small rural districts, divided into innumerable villages, none of which was sufficiently strong to dominate the others. Elsewhere the invaders seized the land and reduced the vanquished to servitude; and the oldest customs of the race once more held sway. The progress of many centuries was lost. The system of clans and tribes regained the mastery, with strongly-marked military characteristics, and the movement which was gradually bringing it into subordination to the State, to the city, was cut short. Everything had to be started afresh.

The polis became once more the fortified place or camp whence the conqueror kept watch over his serfs who toiled upon the land. In Lacedaemon it bore the name of Sparta and was a combination of four villages. In Argos it comprised the two citadels of Larissa and the Aspis, with a lower town where the three Dorian tribes looked suspiciously upon a neighbouring non-Dorian tribe. In Crete it consisted of all the heights which rose above the fertile valleys.

There was, however, a vast region in which the Achæans, later to be distinguished as Æolians and Ionians, could transplant the relatively progressive institutions with which they had become familiar. Since early days they had known Asia Minor; at first they had occupied Pamphylia, Cyprus, Rhodes, Lesbos and the Troad; since then they had settled in certain places, preferably islands, from which they could easily explore the interior, either to pillage or to trade. Now they came in larger and smaller bands with no thought of returning to their native lands. They established themselves all along the coast in the midst of a dense population. Since they had to defend themselves against tribes which in some cases were for all practical purposes States, they were compelled to live together in strong strategic positions, in towns naturally or artificially fortified. On the banks of the Hermos grew up the New Fort, Neon Teichos; the port of Colophon received the name South Fort, Notion Teichos; the land of Teos was studded with fortresses to the number of twenty-seven, which served as places of refuge for the farmers, and which eventually became the centres of adminis- tration (pyrgoi or castles). Topography confirms the information furnished by place-names. Erythræ was originally situated on a hill ; the old town of Miletus had its origin in a citadel built a hundred yards or so from the sea.23 “The great men defend the towns,” as the Homeric expression is (άριστοι . . . ττλεopa ρύονται),²⁴ and even the peasants had their houses there if they were free and of Greek birth; the flat country was left for the natives, for those whom the people of Miletus and Priene called the Gergithes. They thus constituted an aristocracy of Hellenic eity-dwellers, as opposed to an alien rural proletariat; and within this aristocracy there were again very clearly defined class-distinc- tions. Whence the early demand for institutions more complex than elsewhere.

Another factor, the extraordinary mixture of immigrant bands, made this necessity still more urgent. From Crete to Thessaly every country had furnished its contingent. More than once waves of hybrid invaders had swept over the towns of the East. A place in the social structure had to be made for these heterogeneous elements. The Dorians had indeed brought with them the three-tribe system, just as the companions of the Neleidæ were divided into four Ionian tribes; but what was to be done with groups which did not belong naturally to any of these tribes ?

Let us see exactly what the position was. The tribes always kept their gentile character. The great families, the patrai, maintained a strong organization and gave their name to the locality in which their domain lay : beneath the royal families, the Neleidæ, Androclidæ, Penthilidæ, Basilidæ, there were still to be seen at Miletus the Thclidæ, the Skiridæ, the Hecætadæ; at Chios, the Demotionidæ, the Thraikidæ; at Camirus, the Hippotadæ, the Græadæ, the Thoiadæ; at Cos, the villages of the Antimachidæ and the Archiadæ ; at Calymna, that of the Scaliodæ; at Rhodes, that of the Boulidæ, etc.25 Around the most important families others were grouped, in such a way as to form phratries. The phratry often bore the name of the controlling patra, so that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish them: it must have been so for long with the Clytidæ at Chios, where they built a chapel to enshrine the common objects of worship, preserved until then in their own homes. The god of the phratries might be either a Zeus Patrios as with the Clytidæ, or a Zeus Phratrios as with the Euryanactidæ of Cos.²⁶ The social importance of these cults is attested by the fact that wherever there were Ionians, at Miletus, Priene and Samos, as well as at Delos and Athens, a great feast of the patriai and the phratries, the Apaturia, was celebrated. Their political importance is sufficiently demonstrated by the passages in Homer in which he seems unable to conceive of the formation of an army, and, as a consequence, of a people, without the division into phratries. The whole system of clan organization, dating back to the very origins of the cities, is remarkably illustrated, many centuries later, by a veritable family tree traced on an inscription from Camirus; at the top is written as a general heading the name of the Althaimenidæ, descendants of the heroic founder; underneath are ranged the phratries, each containing a certain number of patrai, named as such.²⁷

What, then, was the position of those Greeks who inhabited the same territory as the members of the family groups without being of their number ? That they might not remain isolated, individuals or small families formed artificial groups analogous to the patrai and the phratries, though very different in origin. They were called thiasoi. It is a Pre- Hellenic word preserved among the descendants of the oldest Achæans, and diffused in the Greek world by Attic settlers who lived in scattered groups there before the period of the great migrations. These associations kept faintly alive many very ancient beliefs, many elements of civilization which one day were to burst into full life again : it will never be known what part they played in the diffusion of the Dionysian and Orphic cults, and in the rebirth of industry and art, but their influence must have been great. At all events they succeeded in attaching themselves to the phratries. That this happened in Attica is certain;28 and the same may be said of Asia Minor. It explains the fact that in the third century a phratry of Chios still contained, besides the patrai bearing the family name (Demogenidæ, etc.), small communities called by the name of their chief (people of Telargus, etc.).²⁹ And, still more striking, side by side with the gentile tribes were secondary tribes in which individuals and families of racial minorities were grouped. At first their rights were doubtless small, but sooner or later they succeeded in attaining an equal footing with the other tribes. In this way two tribes, possibly pre-Ionian, the Boreis, and the Oinopæ, attached themselves to the four Ionian tribes at Miletus. And this same town affords the most striking example we know of a non-gentile association forcing its way into the political organism. There was there a religious fraternity of molpoi which dated back in all probability to Myeenæan days. In historic times it had at its head a president (aisymnetes) and five assistants (7rpoaeraipoi) representing, that is to say, each of the six tribes. One can see how the necessity of making a hybrid population live peacefully together gave extension to the idea of community in the centuries which followed the great migrations.

It was in Asia Minor, as we have just seen, that this stimulus towards progress was felt the earliest and the most powerfully: in a country which had for a considerable time served as a centre of colonization for the Hellenic race the Greeks, so various in their origin, could free themselves more easily than elsewhere from traditions in many respects obsolete. There also another factor contributed early to the same result. In Asia Minor economic conditions were not the same as in Greece proper. An exclusive system of landed property is essentially fitted for the maintenance of patriarchal customs and institutions. In the Greek settlements of Asia there had existed from the beginning resources other than the exploitation of rich land. All along the coast were excellent ports, well supplied with fresh water, near fine and extensive islands and situated often on isthmuses which made defence easy and favoured commerce, or at the mouths of rivers which penetrated far into the interior of the peninsula.30 There were thus splendid facilities for communication with all the countries of the old civilization, with those of the Ægean as with those of the East. Shipping and commerce were not slow to take advantage of all these opportunities. The eity-system developed; thriving markets gave birth to large towns. At Miletus, for example, the old town crept down from the Acropolis and stretched in the direction of the Lion Gate. Thus fluid capital competed with landed wealth and created a new class side by side with the landed and family aristocracy. Here was another reason for modification of the unduly narrow conceptions of former times·

The change which one can dimly discern taking place on the coast of Asia was effected in a similar fashion in Greece, though more slowly and usually still more obscurely. Everywhere were villages bearing ancestral names: for example, Akaidai and Keondai at Histiaia in Euboea. Everywhere were phratries grouping a number of families around an illustrious genos : for example, at Delphi the Labyadæ formed round a sacerdotal genos dedicated formerly to the Cretan cult of the Double Axe. Sometimes even the three Dorian tribes admitted a non-Dorian tribe to their ranks : for instance, the Hyrnatians of Argos. It is of Attica, naturally, that we have the fullest information. Clans of Eupatridæ were numerous. Many of them took their name from a sacred office, as for example the Eumolpidæ, and the Kerykes of Eleusis, the Gephyreans of Aphidna, the Bouzygæ, the Aletridæ, the Heudanemoi, the Phreorykhoi, the Aigeiro- tomoi. Many of them were sufficiently powerful to be able to dominate a whole demos and impose their name upon it, as the Scambonidæ, the Philaidæ, the Paionidæ, the Boutadæ, etc. According to ancient custom the phratries celebrated the Apaturia in honour of Zeus Phratrios and Athena Phratria and the tribes were four in number. But Attica is unique in that one can follow there the progressive fusion of all small communities into one community larger than the majority of Greek cities. In this rural country each group had at first its “prytaneum and its arehons.”31 After the struggles of which legend has preserved the memory, religious and political associations of various types were created. The most famous was a group of towns which worshipped Athena—the Athenai who took for chiefs the Erechtheidæ and for nucleus an acropolis destined to be the Acropolis par excellence. But there were many others: the Amphic- tyony of the Epacria and that of the Mesogæa; in one place a Tricomia, in another a Tetrâcomia or a Tetrapolis. This last example proves that even places so insignificant as Marathon, Tricorythus, Œnœ and Probalinthus were poleis, like the seven villages Homer speaks of on the outskirts of Pylus,³² or like the hundred small towns which were inhabited by the people whom the Spartans made Perioikoi.³³ It proves also that these “cities” formed a “city” four times as large before being absorbed by synœcism into a “city” which united in one single demos the demoi of the whole of Attica, and which took for its capital the Acropolis of the Erechtheidæ.

III

Elements and Characteristics of the City

Though the origin of the city is shrouded in darkness, through which the historian must grope his way lighted only by the feeble glimmer of stray facts, and guided only by precarious conjecture, at least when once it is in existence he can see a little more clearly its constituent elements.

Self-defence was its first necessity. Even in its earliest days the city had possessed a hill to which the countryfolk could fly when threatened by an enemy force or pirate bands. Almost always it had one acropolis or even more. Moreover, the development of the lower town usually made necessary the construction of more extensive walls; in the epics we see the asty surrounded with walls flanked with towers and pierced by gates. One realizes what Aristotle meant when he asserted that the defensive system of the acropolis was favourable to monarchy and oligarchy, whilst democracy preferred fortresses in the plains.34 Undoubtedly there were open cities very early in the historic period. When the Dorians of Laconia descended from the heights where they had first settled, they established a camp on the banks of the Eurotas, and, trusting in their native courage, built no ramparts around the four villages which composed Sparta.³⁵ Many places in Asia Minor had no walls to protect them against the Lydian armies, and were compelled hurriedly to make good the deficiency in the face of the Persian menace.³⁶ Camirus was not fortified at the end of the fifth century, nor Elis at the beginning of the fourth.³⁷ When a town had extended itself, however, especially if it were rich and aspired to political importance, it surrounded itself with strong walls. Miletus in Ionia, Assus in Æolis and Cnidus in Doris were fortified towns.³⁸ The Pisistratidæ had built round the Acropolis and its Pelargicon with Pelasgic walls a wall of a circumference considerable for those days.³⁹ It was not without cause that Thucydides in his rapid survey of the remote past of Greece made the age of fortified towns succeed that of open villages.⁴⁰

The need for mutual defence, of which the acropolis and the ramparts are evidence, was expressed, as was every social function in antiquity, in a religious form. Every city had its deity, as had every family. Just as the kinsmen gathered before the altar of the family hearth, so the citizens celebrated the religion of the city before the “common hearth” (κοινή eέr ία). There were offered the sacrifices which were to call down upon the people the protection of the gods: there were held the official banquets where the flesh of the victims was divided among the leading men of the city, high magistrates or members of the council, and citizens or strangers worthy of such an honour. For a long time the public hearth had for its home the palace of the king, the high- priest of the city: the banquets at which Alcinous, surrounded by the elders, magnificently entertained Ulysses, differed in no way from those where later ambassadors were received as public guests (τα ξένια).41

When monarchy fell the common hearth, deified under the name of the goddess Hestia,⁴² was inseparable from the building where dwelt the chief or the chiefs of the city, the prytanis or the committee of prytaneis : it became the centre of the Prytaneum and Hestia was its guardian.⁴³ According to the ruins of Olympia one must imagine at the entrance a small sanctuary, in the middle of which was placed an altar with a well filled with glowing embers, and, further within, banqueting halls and a kitchen supplied with all the necessary utensils.⁴⁴ There could be no city without a prytaneum: “ the prytaneum is the symbol of the city,” penetrale urbis, Livy called it.⁴⁵ At the time when Attica was divided into a great number of little cities, each had its own;⁴⁶ when it became one city it had a single prytaneum, the dwelling from which the archon had expelled the king, but to which the king returned with the tribal kings to deliver judgments of marked archaic character.⁴⁷ Whenever a colony was founded the emigrants took from the hearth of the mother city the embers which were to be cherished in the new prytaneum.⁴⁸ The place made holy by the undying fire might bear another name; for the name was of no account. At Cnidus where the supreme magistrate, the agent of the people, was the damiourgos, the public banquets were held in the damiourgeum. Among the Achæans of Phthiotis the prytaneum was called the “ house of the people,” leitom the word recalls the leitourgiai, or liturgies, those public services, originally largely ritual, which burdened the richest citizens, the most characteristic being the hestiasis, the provision and preparation of a sacred feast.⁴⁹

Not far from the prytaneum arose the Bouleuterion, where the Council sat. Whatever the political system of the city the Council was an institution with which it could not dispense. When the great men, who formerly had surrounded the king as gerontes or boulephoroi, became heads of the government, it was not enough that they were represented in the prytaneum by the prytaneis, they needed also a special meeting-place for their deliberations. And in the same way, wherever democracy took the place of aristocracy, the people, who could not be in permanent session, needed a limited body of men to prepare decrees, to keep in touch with the magistrates, to receive foreign ambassadors, to send representatives to the ‘ Commons.’ Whether the Council was called the Boule, as was most frequently the case, or as in certain cities, the Gerousia, whether its deputies in the prytaneum bore the commonly accepted name of prytaneis or the name aisymnates peculiar to the Megarians, there is no example of a city which had none. The Bouleuterion, as distinct from the prytaneum, dates far back. That of Olympia, rebuilt many times, followed the apsidal plan which goes back to prehistoric days;50 perhaps it was towards a building of this type that Alcinous was turning his steps when Nausicaa met him at the threshold of his door as he was departing to the Council of the Phæaeians.⁵¹ In Attica every small town had its Boule before the syncecism; the synœcism caused all to disappear, save that of Athens. When Thales suggested to the Ionians that they should unite he supplied them with a scheme: allow every city the right of administering its affairs as a deme, and establish in a federal capital a single Bouleuterion. The scheme failed, but the idea was sound. More than a century later it was put into practice at Rhodes. The three cities of Lindus, Camirus and Ialysus had been founded early at the expense of the demes of the island; when, in 408-7, they decided to form a single state they themselves were reduced to the position of demes, and, though they preserved the right of issuing decrees in what were henceforth municipal assemblies, they had only one common Boule.⁵²

According to the constitutional regime of the city the mass of the citizens either exercised no political rights at all, or, on the contrary, possessed them all; but whatever the constitution it was always essential that they should be able to meet together. For that gathering, which was called the agora, a public meeting-place was required, and it bore the same name. It was before everything else the marketplace. “For of necessity in almost every city,” wrote Aristotle, “there must be both buyers and sellers to supply each other’s mutual wants; and this is what is most productive of the comforts of life; for the sake of which men seemed to have joined together in one community.”53 The place set apart for commerce ought, therefore, according to Aristotle, to be “easily accessible for goods coming over the sea or from the interior of the country,” and the facilities which it offered for supplies generally attracted the prytaneum into its neighbourhood :⁵⁴ the excavations at Priene, for example, confirm this assertion. But the market-place was not only the scene of commercial transactions; for there with merchants and customers mingled gossips and loungers. At all hours it was the rendez-vous where men strolled around, learnt the latest news or talked politics; and there public opinion was formed. The agora, then, was expressly designed to serve for full assemblies of the people, for those which were convened by the king or the leaders of the aristocracy to discuss decisions made by the government, as well as for those which deliberated as sovereign assemblies. Even in that military city, the camp, an agora was needed : there was one during the Trojan war, where the Achæan chiefs, like the Roman prætors, delivered their proclamations to the warriors and administered justice.⁵⁵

In the hundreds of cities of which Greece was composed there were naturally many variations of this institution, as of all others. The agora in the topographical sense might be duplicated. In the oligarchical cities of Thessaly the market-place was abandoned to buying and selling, was “sullied with trade,” while the place of Liberty, situated at the foot of the hill where the prytaneum stood, was reserved for gymnastics for the privileged citizens.56 In democratic cities, especially in those which had grown much, the ancient agora was often too small and obstructed to accommodate the increasing numbers of the popular assemblies : the Athenians of the fifth century went to deliberate on the hill of the Pnyx which was fitted for the purpose, and no longer assembled in the agora except in extraordinary cases. Nor did the assembly retain the name of agora except in cities of the second rank, for example in Delphi, Naupactus, Gortyna and Cos,⁵⁷ and especially in subdivisions of the city, in the tribes and demes, or again in religious associations, the phratries, the thiasoi and the orgeones.⁵⁸ Ecclesia was the usual term for the assembly of the people, save with the Dorians who employed more often that of the IIalia (the tribunal of the Heliæa of the Athenians), and with the Spartans who used the name Apella.⁵⁹ But these differences did not prevent the Greeks from regarding the agora as an essential condition of city life. For Homer the Cyclopes were savages because they had not a “deliberative assembly” (ayopal βονΧηφόροή.) For Herodotus the thing which most clearly distinguished the Greeks from the Persians was the fact that the one had the institution of the agora whilst the others had not in their feudal villages even market-places.⁶⁰

The capital, whose pre-eminence was attested by the Acropolis, the Prytaneum, the Bouleuterion and the Agora, possessed surrounding territory, varying in extent according to its requirements. Most often the harbour was to be found there; for the Acropolis, which fixed for all time the site of the city, was generally some distance from the coast, in a position chosen by people who lived in fear of piracy.61 It was by means of the port that the city, whose territory was usually encircled by mountains, communicated with the outside world and added to its own resources the riches which it lacked. In all cases a larger or smaller number of hamlets, villages, and small towns called Jcomai, demes, or sometimes even, as in Laconia, poleis⁶² were in dependence on the principal agglomeration, the asty. In small cities there were fewer scattered villages, since the free peasantry frequently continued to live in the town, while going out to work in the fields from morning till evening. In the large cities, on the other hand, they were numerous, and some even acquired a certain importance. There were more than a hundred poleis inhabited by the perioilcoi of Laconia, and even more demes in Attica. These constituent elements of the city always enjoyed a large independence in administrative matters; but they had no political powers save as fractions of the greater community. Nowhere, perhaps, was the dependence of the part on the whole more remarkable than in certain cantons which, retaining a purely rural economy, contained only the komai, and not a single town. Elis, for example, had no capital before 471; but for long the supreme magistrate and the petty kings of each locality were subject to the hellanodikai and the demiourgoi who represented the central power.

But the most striking feature of the Greek city was the division of its citizens into tribes and phratries. I shall not emphasize these groups here, because I have already shown at some length that the formation of the city cannot be explained without them. I shall confine myself to pointing out that the gentile and aristocratic character which they owed to their origin was in some degree modified by the progress of democratic government. The phratries had often to admit within the ranks of the gene thiasoi composed for the most part of men of humble birth. The ancient tribes had often to tolerate side by side with them tribes of different nationality, before even the new ideas had made the conception of territorial tribes prevail.

The city thus constituted was a small State. Let us try to get a more detailed conception of it.63 Sparta and Athens were exceptional on account of the extent of their territory. Sparta, when it had aggrandized Laconia at the expense of Messenia, was the first power in Greece, since it commanded a country of 3,360 square miles, two-fifths of the Peloponnesus⁶⁴ (a little more than the department of the Marne, much less than that of the Gironde); one must also note that the land reserved for the citizens, the πολιτική χώρα, comprised only a third of that surface, the rest belonging to a hundred poleis of perioilcoi. Athens, the city which holds so great a place in the history of civilization, at the time of its greatest extent, that is, including the island of Salamis and the district of Oropus, possessed only 1,060 square miles (less than the department of the Rhone). One must pass to the West, to the conquering colonies, to find figures comparable to these: after annexing Gera, Acræ, Casmena and Camarina, the territory of Syracuse covered 1,880 square miles, surpassing that of Acragas, which measured 1,720. Everywhere else the surface of the Greek cities was hardly equivalent to that of French arrondissements or even cantons; often it happened that they were considerably smaller. In the Peloponnesus Argos, mistress of Cleonæ, ruled in all 560 square miles; Corinth 352; Sicyon 1”; Phlius 72. In the fifth century the Boeotian League extended over 1,032 square miles, of which Thebes accounted for about 400 and the rest was divided among a dozen cities, each averaging about 52 square miles. The 656 square miles of Phocis were divided among twenty- two principalities. In Asia Minor, where there was no lack of land, the Ionian cities possessed from 80 to 600 square miles; the Æolian cities only about 40. As for the islands, the smaller and most of the medium-sized ones each formed a single city; such were, for example, Delos (2| square miles, with Rhenea), Thera (32J square miles), Ægina (34), Melos (60), Naxos (176), Samos (188), Chios (331). But Ceos, which had an area of only 70 square miles, was, until the fourth century, divided into four cities, each of which coined its own money. As for the larger islands, those of 400 square miles or more, one alone achieved political unity—Rhodes, whose three cities, covering 584 square miles, disappeared only toward the end of the fifth century. Lesbos, with its 696 square miles, contained five cities even in the time of Herodotus, who states that earlier there were still more.⁶⁵ Euboea, with an area of 1,508 square miles, was at the same epoch divided into eight parts. The 3,”0 square miles of Crete were divided in Homeric days among ninety cities; more than fifty of them still existed in historic times.

To imagine that density of population compensated for scantiness of territory would be to allow oneself to be misled by fallacious inferences and false interpretations of the facts. It is true that the steady flow of emigration which scattered Greeks on all the shores of the Mediterranean is a phenomenon which gives rise to reflection. Plato saw the cause in the “niggardliness of the soil” and the impossibility of nourishing an over numerous population;66 and, just at the time of the great colonizations, the author of the Cyprian Songs explained the fatal law which decimates mankind by war in a way which certain theorists of modern times would not have been disposed to quarrel with: “ Myriads of men wandered in the vast bosom of the earth; Zeus took pity, and of his great wisdom resolved to lighten the burden of the suckling earth; he sent forth among them the harsh strife of war that the dead might make room for the living.”⁶⁷ But in reality the excess of population in Greek cities was relative : it proceeded from a permanent cause, the large extent of barren land, and from historic causes, the monopoly of property by the aristocracy and testamentary divisions. Moreover, with this people which had “poverty for its foster sister”⁶⁸ colonization was not the sole factor which prevented the growth of the population to large proportions. Always and everywhere the Greeks dreaded large families. To prevent such misfortune, recourse was had to birth control. Hesiod even in his day was appealing for the “one-child family ” (μουνοψνής ττraiç).⁶⁹ They indulged in all the practices of an unbridled Malthusianism—abortions, infanticide, exposure of the newly born, homosexuality : all were authorized by custom, tolerated by law and fully approved by the philosophers.⁷⁰ For these reasons the Greek city was as small in the number of its inhabitants as it was in the extent of its territory.

According to Hippodamus of Miletus, that sociological architect who built both on the soil and in his dreams cities of faultless symmetry, the ideal city ought to have ten thousand inhabitants.71 Plato wished the number of citizens to be sufficiently great for the city to be able to defend itself against its neighbours or to assist them in case of need, but sufficiently small to enable them to know each other and to choose their magistrates with knowledge : he fixed this necessary and sufficient number according to a Pythagorean method at l x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x7 = 5,040.⁷² Aristotle examined the question at great length. He saw in the number of citizens, and the extent of territory, the first materials which the statesman and the legislator required for their labours; it was necessary that they should have the essential qualities, and that they should be of just proportions in order that the city might fulfil the task assigned to it. Nor ought one to confuse the great city with the populous city. Slaves and strangers, whether domiciled or not, were merely worthless refuse; only the citizens counted. Experience proved that it was difficult, and perhaps impossible, to organize efficiently an over-populous State; for how could good laws be applied and order be maintained there ? There was a determinate size for the city as for all other things. If the city failed to conform to that standard, either from deficiency or excess, it could not achieve its proper end. A society of a hundred thousand members was no more a city than one of ten members.⁷³

The theorists only reduced to a system the facts which were before them. Very few cities exceeded the number approved by Hippodamus. One can calculate that the Athens of Pericles numbered about 40,000 citizens. Three cities had 20,000 or a little more in the fifth century: Syracuse, Acragas and Argos. It is true that in the following century Syracuse reached the figure of 50,000 or 60,000 by the necessary assimilation of conquered peoples, by the colonization of the interior, but she was then by far the greatest city in Greece.74 Cities inhabited by 10,000 citizens, those which realized the ideal of the great town, the ττ πόλ μυρίανΒρος, were not numerous. One can place in that category in Asia Minor the Miletus of Hippodamus, smaller at this time than in the sixth century, Ephesus, and Halicarnassus; in Greece proper, Thebes, Corinth and its ancient colony Corcyra, and the towns of recent growth, Rhodes, Megâlapolis and Messena; in Chalcidice, Olynthus; on the Bosphorus, Byzantium after the incorporation of Chalcedon; in Libya, Cyrene; in greater Greece, Tarentum and Croton; in Sicily, Gela. The proof that the population of these towns was in accordance with the Greek ideal of the fifth century no less than with that of Hippodamus, lies in the fact that the Athenians, when they founded Ennea Hodoi, and similarly Hiero, when Catana was superseded by Ætna, sent out the ideal number of ten thousand colonists.⁷⁵ Investigation shows that of the hundreds and hundreds of Greek cities, barely twenty attained or surpassed that ideal figure.

To pass on. The towns where the body of citizens varied between 10,000 and 5,000 and which were reckoned of importance⁷⁶—such as Mitylene, Chios and Samos, Eretria and Chalcis, Megara, Sicyon, Phlius and Elis—were not considerable in number. Well-known towns such as Man- tinea and Tegea did not touch this level; Ægina, for long so rich and important as a result of its commerce, had only 2,000 to 2,500 citizens to its 44 square miles. In the beginning, according to tradition, the Spartans formed a body of from 9,000 to 10,000 men; there were still 8,000 at the time of the Persian wars ; but the defects of an obsolete constitution led rapidly to a dearth of men, oXiyavOρωττία; they numbered only 2,000 in 371 at the battle of Leuctra, while in 242 King Agis could muster only 700. Undoubtedly the oligarchical principle, which rigorously restricted the dignity of citizen to a minority, played a large part; nor when calculating the population of democratic cities must one forget the mass of aliens and slaves who were excluded from the agora; nevertheless, from a quantitative point of view the Greek city was a small affair.

But it was superlatively rich in moral qualities, and it was to exercise a decisive influence on the civilization of the future. The Hellenic world was a network of virile, active communities. Aristotle described 158 of them,77 but there were ten times more. Everywhere, some few miles apart, were hills serving as frontiers. A small tract of land shadowed by a mountain, watered by a stream and indented with bays— such was a State. One had only to climb to the acropolis which was the réduit to survey the whole of it. The town, the fields, the woods, the creeks—that was the fatherland, the country founded by their ancestors, the country which each generation must leave more beautiful and more prosperous. Some eminent men realized that the Greek people as a whole differed from other peoples in its language, its poetry, its art, its worship of sublime deities; but for long even these were content and did not aspire to Hellenic unity, because, in their opinion, the superiority of the Greeks lay simply in their conception of the polis. The barbarian world was composed of unwieldy monarchies, lifeless masses; the Greek world alone answered to the definition of man who is, in all the fullness of its meaning, a political being.

The autonomous city had, as its essential complement, liberty. Collective liberty, if that expression may be used; for though individual liberty might exist as well it was not indispensable. Concerning this Herodotus gives us a piece of information as strange as it is illuminating: for when he wishes to oppose Hellenic freedom to Persian servitude he makes two Spartans speak, two of those Greeks whose whole existence was bound by the most minute regulations. The scene is enacted at Susa. Sperthias and Boulis come to offer their lives to the king of kings in order to appease his wrath for the two heralds of Darius put to death at Sparta. A satrap asks them why they refuse to be the friends of a king who knows how to honour the brave, and their reply is: “Hydarnes, the counsel you give us is not good; it comes from a man who has tried one kind of life and has experience of no other: you know what servitude is but you have never tasted liberty; you do not know whether it is sweet or not. If you had experienced it you would urge us to fight for it, not from afar with javelins, but with axes at close quarters.”78

That passion for independence made of the city, however small, a sovereign State. Take two neighbouring cities ; everything divides them. The sacred bounds which mark the limits of their territory trace almost insurmountable barriers between religions and laws, calendars, money- systems, weights and measures, interests and affections. What was the patria in the great centuries of ancient Greece ? The word speaks for itself. It denoted everything which united men who had a common ancestor, a common father. The patria was at first the genos, as it always was in Asia Minor; by a gradual extension, as in Elis for example, it became the wider group generally called the phratry, and it finished by being everywhere the community in which all smaller societies were absorbed, the city. The patriotism of the Greeks seems to us to-day nothing more than municipal loyalty; but it was a feeling the more intense and profound as it was directed towards a smaller object. When the ephebos had taken the public oath his thoughts, his very blood, were consecrated to the city. Not to an abstraction did he dedicate body and soul, but to a reality which he saw day by day before his eyes. What was the sacred earth of the fatherland ?—it was the home of the family, the sepulchre of the ancestors, the fields whose every owner was known, the mountain where wood was cut, where the flocks were driven, where honey was gathered, the temples where one took part in the sacrifices, the acropolis to which one walked in procession; it was all that one loved, all that one was proud of, and which each generation wished to leave more glorious than it found it. A town, a single town, and often small, and yet it was for this that Hector courted death, for this that the Spartan considered it the crown of “virtue” to “fall in the first ranks,” for this that the heroes of Salamis hurled themselves aboard the enemy ships with triumphal songs, and Socrates drank the hemlock in his reverence for the law.

As soon as he left the limits of the microcosm which was the city the Greek was in a strange country, often in an enemy country. Terrible consequences followed from this conception. The hatreds of genos towards genos, deme towards deme, had at great effort been allayed under the authority of public power, though traces always remained. In Attica, for instance, members of the family of Pallene were not allowed to marry those of Hagnus, and party strife was for long identified with family vendettas. Topography sometimes sufficed to maintain within a city strange enmities : Aristotle mentions the hostility which existed even in his time between the island of Clazomenæ and the district of Chytron.79 With still more reason were there rivalries, unending and bloody, between neighbouring cities. The history of ancient Greece is a tissue of sordid and cruel wars, in which all the passions of which patriotism is capable were unloosed for the conquest of a few paltry fields.

Many attempts were made to break down these insuperable barriers, to introduce the cities into wider units. But they demanded the renunciation of a portion of sovereignty and hence they were always confronted with invincible opposition.

The Amphictyonie Councils of Calaureia, Delphi and the Panionium could easily, it seems, have transformed themselves from religious associations into political confederations ; they did not succeed, but remained hotbeds of intrigue where the representative cities fought for supremacy. The federal system, however, demanded no sacrifice save a mutual understanding on questions of foreign policy. If ever it arose from urgent necessity it was in Asia Minor in the seventh and sixth centuries when the danger of Lydian or Persian domination threatened all the cities. Far from submitting to it Greeks fought Greeks under the eyes of the barbarians, Chios against Erythræ, Samos against Priene and Miletus; and the armies of Darius were preparing to secure the reign of peace by servitude when a project of union which humoured all susceptibilities nevertheless broke down pathetically before general indifference.⁸⁰ It was in vain that the Boeotian Confederacy left to each city its own institutions and the right of coining money; continual conflict raged between Thebes, who intended to be mistress, and the other towns which were unwilling to obey. In Arcadia, where pastoral life scattered the people more than elsewhere,⁸¹ two attempts were made to counteract the centrifugal force, in the seventh century under Aristocrates, king of Orchomenus, and in the fourth century under Lycomedes of Mantinea; both times the attempt failed.

As for the system of hegemony which Athens and Sparta sought to impose, it naturally encountered a vigorous opposition. It could not even depend upon political sympathies, upon the. solidarity of parties from town to town. During the Peloponnesian war the democrats and oligarchs of Athens were each in their turn striving to uphold their own system; nothing was effective: when a subject city revolted all the factions worked together. Cleon spoke truth when he said that he knew of only one means to maintain the empire— terror; only one effective government—tyranny;82 and Alcibiades showed true discernment in thinking that every city, rather than be enslaved under the government it preferred, would choose to be free under any.⁸³

This narrow and jealous particularism exposed the whole race to dangers which it could not always avert. The danger of barbarian conquest, which Asiatic Greece could not combat, almost engulfed European Greece. She escaped, but not before safety had been long endangered by the petty conflicts of local egoisms. But when finally the cities, worn out by indecisive and aimless struggles, felt the need of healing unity, there was not one capable of winning a unanimous vote, and the intervention of Macedon and Rome became necessary.

Autonomy was, at all events, rich in benefits. Each city had its own character, its own personality, its own life. By its institutions and its law, by its religion and its festivals, by its monuments and its heroes, by all its methods of interpreting and applying the economic and political, moral and intellectual principles of a common civilization, each city helped to give to that civilization an infinite variety of expression. A fruitful spirit of emulation gave rise to numerous experiments, encouraged originality in imitation and, in order to realize all the latent forces of communities so small, called upon all the energies of the individual.