CHAPTER XXIV

THE GROWTH OF THE GREEK CITY-STATE

I.

THE EARLIEST ORDER

 

THROUGHOUT the whole Greek world surveyed in the preceding chapters, the salient feature is the city-state. Where this characteristic institution arose, intense and continuous political and social life matured the genius of the race. To Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries, life not in cities was half way to barbarism, and the republican city-state seemed to belong to the order of nature. Aristotle, defending the city-state as ‘natural,’ argued that man, being a ‘political animal,’ naturally formed unions, each including its predecessor—the household, the village, the city. But so many Greeks failed for so long to discover this invincible necessity of their nature and omitted to complete the Aristotelian progression, that it seems truer to say that a variety of causes, economic, geographical, military and social, brought them to dwell in cities, and that it was life in the polis that made of the Greek a political animal. To discover and evaluate these causes involves a somewhat hazardous process of reconstruction, for the growth of the city-state was, in the main, completed before the full light of history, and when it occurs later, as in the formation of the Arcadian Megalopolis, it is not permissible to assume that the conditions were the same as in earlier times. In the absence of record we must rely, as best we can, on the evidence of excavations, of names and language, and of the institutions of the city-states in their historical form, while some help may be gained from the analogy of primitive peoples like the Germans and of other city communities such as arose in Phoenicia and Italy.

In the period which preceded the Trojan wars, the mainland of Greece was occupied or dominated by people to whom may be applied, for convenience, the name Achaean. These were not originally dwellers in cities; they are not called after the names of cities; their names are those of peoples and of tribes. The bond which unites them is the bond of tribal membership, and the stage from which they begin to develop is that of the Tribal State. They acknowledge the rule of kings or leaders and each head of a household is the ruler of his family. Between the pater­familias and the head of the tribe lies one intermediate institution, the brotherhood—the phratry. This is in origin a voluntary association of comrades in war, but, as the tribes settle down, the association, from being at first fortuitous, becomes local and at the same time hereditary. The ‘clan’, the genos, which is the reflection of aristocracy, is as yet in the future. Each of the three associations of family, phratry and tribe was strengthened by the religious bond of cult. The tribe felt itself united in the worship of its god and, even in much later times when it had become only a convenient piece of mechanism in the city-state, the tribe stood before the gods, united in worship. The phratry might look up to Zeus Phratrios, and Zeus of the Hearth guarded the religious centre of the household. These three simple loyalties suffice; the tribe needs no capital city, the place where the king worships the god of the tribe is enough of a meeting-place in moments of emergency or at times of festival.

It may be assumed that the tribesmen did not live in isolated homesteads but, as by instinct, in villages which were not, in any formal sense, political units. Of the early sites excavated in Thessaly two, Sesklo and Dimini, were little towns with stone walls, the remainder were not fortified except possibly with stockades which have long since perished. In the rest of Greece, except in Phocis, the settlements lie near strongholds, which from being places of safety were to become seats of government. Wealth and labour were needed to build stone fortifications, and petty villages had no defence except flight. The security of their most valued possessions, their flocks and herds, demanded some permanent place of refuge from raids by land and sea, by kinsmen or aliens. These ancient asyla continued in use far into historical times, where conditions remained like those of the tribal state. When Philip V of Macedon led a foray into Elis in 218 BC, he captured many head of cattle in such a refuge. This phenomenon, the result of recurrent needs, is not peculiar to the Greeks or to antiquity. Refugia existed on the west coast of Scotland and in the territory of the Saxon tribes in Germany down to the time of Charlemagne, and it is reasonable to suppose that like causes among peoples at a like stage of culture produced like results.

This common place of refuge was a natural place for the king to live, not at first within it, as the space was needed for flocks and fugitives, but near by. So at Goulas in Boeotia there has been found a fortress with walls three-quarters of a mile round, and against the north wall a palace. At Tiryns, besides the upper fortress-palace, there was a lower citadel which was left uninhabited. Many of these refuges trusted to their position alone, others were no doubt roughly fortified with palisades, so that no traces of their use remain. With the stage when the ruler lives by the place of refuge we reach the beginnings of a local centre for the tribal state. But in parts of Greece where Minoan culture sophisticated the Achaeans and the example of the East was known, what may have been a refuge with a king’s dwelling by it became a fortified citadel-palace as at Mycenae or at Tiryns. Such a stronghold is what was first called a polis. At its foot clustered the houses of the king’s dependants, the ministers of his government or his pomp, and peasants or serfs who tilled the lands that stretched around it. At Mycenae in the times of the great Tholos Dynasty there were houses within the citadel for the officers of the king, and the size of the cemeteries below suggests a considerable population at the foot of the fortress hill.

This collection of dwellings below the citadel is what the Greeks called Asty (acmi). In the Homeric poems conventional epithets still mark a distinction between Asty and Polis. The Asty is simply ‘big’ or ‘famous’, and once a passage which may well be later than the rest ‘wide-spaced’. The epithets of splendour and strength and wealth—well-built, towering, well-walled, high-gated, towered, holy, rich, full of gold, full of bronze—are reserved for the Polis. In the sixth book of the Iliad Hecuba collects the old women in the Asty and thence goes up to the ‘high city’. Here and there, as is natural, the archaism fails and the words are used interchangeably, and in one passage comes in the word acropolis meaning, it would seem, a citadel. But the old meaning of polis died hard. In 426 BC the Peloponnesian commander Eurylochus could not force the Hyaei, a branch of the western Locrians, to give him hostages until he had reduced a village which bore the name Polis. At Athens until the fourth century the word was officially used for the Acropolis, asty for the city in which men lived. At Ialysus in Rhodes the old citadel was called polis as late as the third century.

We may then assume that in parts of Greece, as early as the Heroic Age, there was the word polls and the conjunction of palace-citadel and open settlement. But such a combination— ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’—was far from being the city-state, the intensely alive and all-absorbing centre of political and civic life. The king counted for too much, the common people for too little. But the idea of a fixed political centre had come and come to stay.

Such was the legacy of the first stage, the time of the splendour and power of Mycenae, which ended with what has been well called the Viking Age of Greece. The overseas expeditions of the Achaean princes culminated in the great adventure of the Trojan war. And then the plundering bands became bands of refugees as successive shocks of invasion broke up the Mycenaean order. Dorians and the north-western peoples who came with them and after them destroyed the old monarchies, burned Mycenae and the other centres of Mycenaean power and civilization and proceeded to settle down. They seized on the good land, assigned demesnes (temene) to their kings and their gods, and divided the rest of the soil democratically into lots (kleroip Attica remained secure from the invasion and there the development from Mycenaean times was continuous, while Arcadia afforded a refuge for pre-Dorians of the Peloponnese. But elsewhere in Greece, from Thessaly southwards, the old order disappeared, and the process of political growth from the tribal state began anew.

 

II.

THE GROWTH OF THE NEW GREEK CITIES

 

For a time, in most of Greece, political development towards a city-state was arrested. But if the invaders were not city-states themselves, they were the cause of city-states in others. For the successive shocks of their coming drove the pre-Dorians overseas, no longer to plunder and return in triumph, but to find new homes. The Aeolians and Ionians, to anticipate a conscious differentiation, go out in bands to settle where they have not the moral support of contiguous kinsmen. These settiers are linked together not by the easy relationship of the tribe but by the fact of a common adventure. They have to face the opposition of the peoples of the hinterland where they find their new homes, and their settlements are strung along the coast of Asia Minor or dotted in the islands, not, at first, in deserted places but where there were already inhabited sites. At least the Greek traditions of settlement in Asia Minor at this stage are uniform in describing it as the occupation of known existing places. And excavations show that in the islands of the Cyclades the inhabitants had lived for centuries in little walled towns. The newcomers cannot spread out, but must concentrate generally within or within reach of walls. One settlement is called the New Fort (Neon teichos), the harbour town of Colophon is called the South Fort (Notion teichos) as the early settlements of the East India Company are called Fort St George and the like. Possibly the colonists remembered the places of refuge and now they are always refugees. Erythrae for example spread from a fortified hill, and Strabo describes how, about 700 BC, Miletus consisted of an Acropolis and the original settlement half a mile away. The open villages in which the non-Greek peoples of Asia Minor were accustomed to live were left to the natives who were dependent, often serfs.

Besides the pressure of danger from men there was the need to exploit natural advantages or to evade problems of navigation. A good or conveniently-placed harbour, a good water-supply, a position on an isthmus which may spare traders a long or dangerous sea-voyage, the outlet of some good trade route all led to a clustering market1. Freed from retarding traditions these new communities had realized the idea of the city-state before the era of secondary colonization in the eighth and seventh centuries. How quickly these new conditions had their effect may be seen in Crete when Dorian invaders passed on to occupy it. The same stock, which, settled in Greece, was comparatively slow to develop cities, found in Crete an island already dotted with towns. The Minoan glory was departed; there were no centralized Minoan princedoms, but the Dorians like the earlier invaders of Crete quickly became divided into separate city-states until Crete possessed over forty cities and was credited with a hundred. The Dorian cities here clung firmly to their unity of birth as Dorians but politically they were fissiparous.

In Greece proper the process was slower, the causes more complex. By the year 600 there were city-states in Thessaly, Boeotia, Phocis, Locris, Euboea, the Argolid, possibly in Achaea, besides Corinth and her western neighbours and the city-state par excellence Athens. Sparta, which in so many respects stands outside the political development of Greece, is hardly a city-state, but rather a tribal state compacted by pride and danger. As late as the fifth century Thucydides could write of Lacedaemon ‘for it was no union in a city but a life in villages in the old Greek manner.’ In Arcadia it is doubtful if Tegea and Heraea were city-states before the sixth century, Mantinea before the fifth, and it was not till then that the Eleans made a city called Elis. The western Locrians and Acarnanians were in transition to the city-state at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Throughout the north-west, apart from colonies founded as cities, the Greek­speaking people are village-dwellers. The ‘ancient life in villages’ was the life of perhaps half the Greeks of the mainland in the early Classical period.

This is not to say that these remained untouched by political development. Where the people lived in villages there arose what may be called ‘canton-units,’ as the tribes split up into sub-tribes each master in its own glen. This led to varying degrees of independence. Separate action by the several communes is far from unusual. The sanction of a pact made by ‘the Eleans’ is directed against ‘any freeman or magistrate or commune’ who may deface it. Where the complex influences which produced the city-state were not active, these parts of Greece remained almost devoid of political life, rallying to make or repel raids, otherwise quiescent, while elsewhere the tiny city republics pursued high policy and produced literature and art and thought for the whole race.

The ‘conquest’ communities in the Peloponnese show a variation from the Eleans of the north-west who remain in villages or districts called damoi to the Dorians of the north-east who are split up into cantons each dominated by a single city-state. Between these lies the Spartan state which is concentrated into a kind of standing camp in Hollow Lacedaemon. The primary cause of concentration, whether in city or in camp, was the fact that these Dorian conquerors took the best land and planted in each area a strong point no doubt fortified by the inherited skill of the people whose forefathers had laboured on the citadels of Mycenaean kings and barons. Round these strong points stretched the land cultivated by serfs for whom the conquerors found contemptuous names, ‘dusty foot,’ ‘sheepskin-wearers,’ ‘club-bearers.’ In some communities at least, the hill country was left to non­Dorians who lived in political dependence and slowly acquired political privilege, possibly because they were needed for war. Thus a distinction between town and country was sharply established. It may be too that in these parts of Greece where the Mycenaean power was most centralized the conquerors had taken example from the strongholds which they had destroyed. That they did not occupy the chief sites may be due to the fact that places like Mycenae were not near enough to the plain; perhaps, also, the newcomers felt a parvenu’s uneasiness before the memory of the splendour which they had ruined.

Next to Argos, which controlled the largest plain of the north­eastern Peloponnese, the most important city was Corinth. The rise of Corinth was, most likely, due to trade; Mycenae had controlled a network of roads which now became less safe and ran through little states which might levy tolls on travellers. So it was wiser to take to the paths of the sea, and trade now ran up the Saronic gulf and gave to Corinth the double advantage of lying on routes north and south, as well as east and west. Corinthian commerce may well have been served by the jealousy which led Argos to destroy the port of Nauplia, though Epidaurus must have inherited some of the trade which Nauplia had lost. The states on the Saronic gulf, despite their concentric Amphictyony, must have been politically educated by their trade with the more advanced cities of Asia Minor.

To like economic causes may be attributed the rise of the two chief cities in Euboea, Chaicis and Eretria, aided by the fact that their prosperity depended in part on metal-working which concentrated the population. In Thessaly there had been some fortified towns, and cities like Crannon and Larissa became the centres of aristocratic dynasties. But the wide plain of Thessaly, which put the serfs at the mercy of their mounted conquerors, prevented the need and probably the desire for such a concentration as Sparta. Nor did new political ideas easily penetrate into Thessaly, which was shielded by mountains and a rock-bound coast from the invasion of political progress. In Central Greece we may attribute more importance to the existence of Mycenaean-poleis. In Locris, Phocis and Boeotia there was no sharp division into conquerors and conquered, and such cities and communities as arose seem to have owed their existence to the occupation of earlier sites rather than to the causes which were most powerful in the Peloponnese. Locris came to be dominated by the one Locrian community which succeeded in developing a true political state, the city of Opus. Boeotia, even after the fertile plain was dimin­ished by the disastrous extension of the Copaic Lake was an area which seemed to invite union under a single great city. But the rising power of Thebes in the south was faced by the tenacious resistance of the declining state of Orchomenus in the north, and for centuries the Boeotians refused to pass beyond federation to a closer unity.

The fortune of Attica was otherwise. Here the development from Mycenaean times was continuous, the population was in the main homogeneous. Athens itself was singled out for greatness both as an old Mycenaean polis and as lying at the base of a fan of roads near the best harbour of the Saronic gulf with a fertile plain behind it. The view that Attica was a political unity continuously from Mycenaean times is made unlikely by evidence of the fortification of separate communities, of a primitive wall which protected the plain of Athens from the plain of Eleusis, and of traditions which speak of political individualism within Attica itself. But the natural divisions of Attica are not so marked as to make separatism permanent, or to counteract the centripetal influence of Athens reinforced perhaps by a precocious political instinct. The unification of Attica did not however take the form of the concentration in Athens itself of the bulk of the population, though no doubt the nobles would come to have their town houses at the place of central government. The union of Attica was rather the extension of an idea than the concentration of a people, and is more strictly described by the Greek word sympoliteia, the sharing of citizenship.

Here and there village communities by a deliberate act abandoned their villages and set up house together. This process is synoikismos in the narrower sense. It is seen at work in the plain of eastern Arcadia which was occupied by two groups of rural communities each possessing its place of refuge, called in the northern group Polis, in the southern group ‘the fort’. The southern group, probably through fear of Spartan aggression, joined together and made the city-state of Tegea, and, later on, the northern made the city-state of Mantinea. The reason for the synoikismos of Mantinea may have been fear of the military power of her southern neighbour reinforced by the desire to control the water-supply of the northern plain. In the same way the Heraeans were impelled by the growing aggressiveness of the Eleans to form the city-state of Heraea. The mere proximity of city-states no doubt inspired village communities to imitation, and the impulse to the formation of city-states in north­west Greece seems to have proceeded from the presence of a fringe of Corinthian city-state colonies.

Besides the attractions of trade and the fears of conquerors, social causes helped to advance and to mould the growing polis. The development of justice is the shadow of the development of the city-state. On the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad is depicted in a famous scene the lawsuit in the market-place, where justice is not administered by the king, but by a group of elders. In fact justice had ceased to be the divine prerogative of the sceptred king. It was no longer a revelation or interpretation of the will of Heaven to which the king alone had access. It was something more mundane—arbitration. When two peasants could not agree they appealed, not to Heaven, but to the judgment of a Solomon, and the Solomon might be some old noble whose shrewdness could detect the surest way of justice just as well as some warlike king. But not all judges were just and not all suitors were satisfied: Hesiod’s ‘gift-devouring’ kings, who give crooked judgments, are the nobles of Boeotia.

With the economic elevation of the nobles and the economic depression of the commons, which marked the eighth and seventh centuries, justice became more the exhibition of power than the guarantee of fair dealing. Thereupon arose the demand for the formulation of justice in a code of laws, and the second half of the seventh century and the beginning of the sixth was the age of lawgivers. This is not only so in states where we know the name of some great lawgiver. At Chios about the year 600 are found institutions which presuppose a code of laws, though there is no record of any great Chian lawgiver. The administration of justice now becomes much more a state matter, and it is concentrated where the government of the state resides. The desire for stabilization, reflected in the agreements between states limiting the practice of reprisals, helps to promote the city-state. It may, indeed, be said that the sovereign idea of the city-state is the idea of law, something permanent which transcends the will of the people or the governors at any given moment. Even under tyrants the law persists, and the earlier tyrants are usurpers of executive government, but respecters of civil law. The lawlessness which Greek theorists attributed to all tyrants is a reflection rather of the later military tyranny than of the earlier usurpations.

A second cause which promoted the growth of city-states was a change of military methods. Warfare had been the fighting of chiefs in which the common people counted for little, till the seventh century when the aristocratic cavalry had been supplanted by the citizen phalanx of hoplites. The Euboeans at the time of the Lelantine war fight in this way, and later, in the closing decades of the seventh century, the Spartans become virtuosi in the new art of war and develop the tactical flexibility which was to make them invincible for so long. The old kind of fighting was well enough managed where the country was inhabited in villages. The noblemen came from their castles and constituted the real fighting force. But first chariots and then cavalry went out of fashion and the knights became mounted infantry. The new method of fighting, the fighting of the middle classes, spearmen acting together, made for unity if only because of the importance of practising together. Uniformity in arms and uniformity in tactics assisted the movement towards the centralized city-state.

 

III.

THE CHARACTER OF THE CITY-STATE

 

Thus in Greece proper there grew up many cities and, in the days before the growth of democracy, indeed in the days before tyranny, the city-state had already become a conscious social unity. That this was so is suggested by the character of Greek codes of law, which seek to regulate so much in the private life of the citizens. For the Greek codes not only mark the supplanting of self-help by the authority of the state, and the triumph of state interests over the instinctive rights of family and clan units, but also impose on citizens all manner of rules of conduct. The laws were meticulous in prescribing for the citizens, regulating, for example, expense at funerals and the dress of women; not because an obvious interest of the state was endangered, but because the state was the people and crystallized public sentiment.

A result of this social consciousness was to prevent the state from remaining inclusive. When once a state reached a certain size, its tendency was to become, like a club, unwilling to admit new members, until birth in the city-state became as exclusive as birth in the tribe had been, or more exclusive. In the heroic age strangers moved about freely, and later the mixture of peoples in overseas settlements destroyed the sense of tribal exclusiveness. In some Peloponnesian cities, besides the three purely Dorian tribes, we find non-Dorians grouped in a tribe of their own. But presently arose a movement towards exclusiveness, except where enlightened lawgivers, such as Solon, realized its economic disadvantages. Equally within the state the idea of caste was strengthened by the defining of political privilege where before there had been only superior influence.

Such civic exclusiveness was not inconsistent with practices of hospitality to non-citizens, especially to the helpless who might invoke the powerful aid of Zeus Xenios the patron god of strangers. In the Milesian colonies on the Black Sea the ship­wrecked alien was received by the state and dismissed, like Odysseus, with gifts to help him on his way. Social exclusiveness admitted temporary exceptions. In Crete at the public meals two tables were set for foreigners who were served before the magistrates themselves. At the very time when the Athenian democracy had hedged its citizenship about by barriers of birth, Sophocles and Euripides glorified the ancient hospitality of Athens which sheltered against powerful neighbours the suppliant who sought her protection. But city-states as a rule refused to non-citizens the rights to hold land, to marry into the citizen body or to join such religious unions as sanctified membership of the state.

This last restriction follows naturally upon the conception of the city as a social unity. For perhaps the most vivid social sense of the Greeks was religion. ‘Greek religion permeated every action or relation of the individual towards other members of society.’ In the tribal state the common cults of tribe, phratry or family had bound men together. And a like bond came to link together the members of the city-state. It was not for nothing that Athens was the city of Athena and Apollonia the city of Apollo. While one tendency in Greek religion was Pan-Hellenic, another was towards the separate highly self-conscious city-state. The older Amphictyonies, with their religious centre at a shrine, are an anticipation of the narrower union under the protection of the chief god or goddess of a city. All Greeks might meet at Olympia or at Delphi, but, besides that bond, there was the closer feeling for Athena at Athens, and Hera at Argos. The Greeks conceived of their gods politically. Olympus itself was no anarchy but a society, and Zeus is the king of gods. And the city as well as the tribe and phratry might be under his care. There is not only Zeus Phratrios but Zeus Polieus, and in the market at Athens stood Zeus Agoraios the god of the meeting-place. A city might gather at some notable cult-centre and, once the city began to form-, its growth was under the care of the god or hero of the place. The colonies often set up the worship of their oecist (the leader of their first settlement) so as to have a cult which was peculiarly theirs.

This social and religious sense of union had a reaction which goes far to explain why there were so many city-states in Greece proper and the islands. States took on a kind of personality, and the more highly developed and the more self-conscious they became, the less they were willing to make even the partial sacrifice of this personality implied in federalism. It is significant that in later times federalism was mainly the achievement of the intellec­tually more backward communities, like the Achaeans and Aetolians. Each city-state claimed from its neighbours the full recognition of its freedom and autonomy, its right to manage its own affairs as it would. And this claim was not only fiercely held but in point of fact readily admitted. For the city-state, while intolerant of any division of authority within its borders, was tolerant of its neighbour’s independence. The will to defend exceeded the will to attack. In fact the instinct of territorial expansion, the imperialism which dominated the Empires of the East, was singularly weak among the Greek city-states. The Greeks lacked the sense of the political significance of territorial extent. The more conscious they became of the social unity of their state and religion the less they desired expansion, for ex­pansion meant relaxing the intensity of their common life. They were prepared to dominate their neighbours but not to absorb them, still less to surrender their individuality in a larger union.

The demands of a system, the need for land, turned Lacedaemon into a territorial state but, outside Sparta, Attica is the only part of Greece where any considerable territory was guided constantly by a single will. Compared with the thousand square miles of Attica, the territory controlled by any other Greek city-state was very small. The Boeotian cities apart from Thebes govern on an average about 70 square miles, Sicyon 140, Phlius 70, Corinth 350, the eight cities of Euboea on an average 180, even islands with a single city like Chios little more than 300, and this island is the greatest. In Ceos, which is less than half the size of the county of Rutland, there were, in the sixth century, four independent cities and three independent currencies. The stage on which the drama of Greek high politics was played was small indeed. Servius Sulpicius writes to Cicero ‘As I returned from Asia and sailed from Aegina to Megara, I began to view the lands which lay around me. Behind me I could see Aegina, before me Megara, on my right the Piraeus, on my left, Corinth.’ By this limitation of the area which each controlled, the Greek cities escaped many of the problems which perplex the territorial state, and political life, concentrated within these bounds, quickly matured and quickly exhausted the political capacity of the race.

 

IV.

ARISTOCRACY

 

The period which witnessed the growth of the city-state witnessed too the decline of kingship. The Homeric poems were written for nobles; the Heroic age was seen across an interspace of adventure in which the nobles had played the leading part, and what is presented to us is a dissolving view of monarchy. The archaism of the Epic is not everywhere complete, and in the Sixth Book of the Odyssey the curtain seems to be lifted and to disclose the new settlement where the king has at his side a formal established aristocratic government. Nausithous had led his people harried by the Cyclopes

 

And moved and settled them in Scheria’s isle

Aloof from all oppressors; round their town

He raised a wall and built their homes, and reared

Shrines to their gods and meted out the fields.

 

And there side by side with the material splendour of the old order is found the social structure of the new. There is a council of twelve nobles to advise the King Alcinous, Nausithous’ son. There is the public place of assembly where the Phaeacians gather, but not to vote; they gather to see the stranger Odysseus.

In Ithaca we have monarchy without the king; the royal birth of Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, is a claim to rule but a claim which may be set aside. Laertes the father of Odysseus has long become a country gentleman powerless and hardly respected. When Odysseus himself returns he must prove his kingship by deeds, not merely proclaim it. But in Scheria is order; it is the foreshadowing of the aristocratic state, and the king, as at Ephesus or Erythrae, belongs to the line of the oecist or creator of the settlement. The nobles are not the king’s deputies any more than are the nobles who judge the suit in the scene on the Shield of Achilles. The king was not the fountain of honour, nor were the cause of monarchy and that of aristocracy necessarily one. The king was no more than an eminent noble among nobles equally well born, nor did the early kings detect the secret of empire and base their power on the goodwill of the commons. That secret was reserved for some of the tyrants after the power of the commons had shown itself. The ancient Greek monarchy had no depth of earth, and the nobles sprang up and choked it. The aristocracy, while it pulled down the king, did not raise up the commons but took into its strong hands the government of the city-state and devoted to the task the ordering genius of its race.

Thus the constitutional frame in which the city-state was built was aristocracy. With settled life personal leadership had given place to the steady influence of a class. Overseas this class was sometimes the original settlers who kept political power in their own hands. In Greece proper long-established wealth or pride of birth, displayed in the keeping of horses or the membership of aristocratic clans, had shown itself too in the service of the state. As the king had dwindled, so the old assembly of freemen disappeared or counted for little. The state was the possession of those who had the freedom to serve it. The chief organ of government was the Council, which was either an inner ring of nobles or the whole body of privileged citizens. This body which had succeeded to monarchy is imposing in its unity. Those whose ambition made them unwilling to fit into the ordered scheme of city life might go out and make new cities.

The nobles did not live in parochial leisure but learned to be colleagues in the Council chamber. The magistrates were usually subordinate to them, for membership of the Council was generally for life and its steady influence controlled the state, while within its ranks was gathered experience in an age which lived by inherited wisdom. There are few outstanding figures in early Greek history. This is not only because of the lack of record. It was because the city-state, so long as no new forces rose to disturb it, could dispense with great men who did not fit its ordered scheme of things. The state was greater than its rulers. Kingship either became a magistracy among others or remained, in the shadow of this imposing aristocracy, an embarrassed phantom haunting the altars of the gods, reduced, in the phrase of Aristotle, ‘to the conduct of the traditional sacrifices.’ At Miletus, in a copy of an inscription first set up not later than in the sixth century, appears the clause ‘At these sacrifices the King is present but receives no more than the other Singers of the Guild’.

The essence of the Greek state is that it is the state of a class; ‘the constitution is the governing class,’ and the state is within a ring-fence. That is the legacy of aristocracy. Oligarchy extended membership of the class to wealth as well as to good birth, democracy to race, but even the extremest democracy excluded aliens and women and was jealous of granting citizenship. Where the defence of the city was, above all, the work of the hoplites, political privilege could hardly be denied to those who were the state in arms. Thus beside the Council there might arise, in larger states, an assembly of the hoplite class, and the franchise might be wide enough to give stability and the possibility of political development. But in many states, as new economic stresses broke down the easy order of more primitive times, the governing class was tempted to use its political and legal power to exploit the rest of the community. And where this happened Nemesis followed, and aristocracy yielded or was broken. Tyrants arose, sometimes suspicious of concentrated urban life, and the shocks of revolution from time to time shifted the balance of political power, but the city-state outlasted change. Its main lines had been drawn too firmly and clearly to be erased, and the history of Greece in the classical period will show how new needs and new ideas were adapted and limited within the frame in which Greek political life had been set in the age of aristocracies.