Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/43

 THE ARYAN MIGRATIONS 31 short, much sense of the rights of the governed or of the duties of the governors. But when we come to the Hellenes we find a different state of things altogether. As soon as we have any records of them they are already dwellers in well-built cities, in possession of many luxuries, endowed with what we may call a literature, and skilled in the Hellen i C work of the smith, the potter, the engraver, and the Character- architect. On the other hand, though we find a i8tiC8, Hellenic people in the sense that all Hellenes look upon each other as kinsmen of the same race, and upon all who do not belong to that race as an inferior folk whom they classify all together as barbarians, we do not find a Hellenic nation in the sense that any great mass of Hellenes recognise a single govern- ment common to them all. On the contrary, every city regards itself as a separate state, and the members of all other cities as aliens. The Hellenic world is broken up into a hundred states, which may combine together for the purpose of a war, and may for that purpose even temporarily recognise a single leader ; but they do not own any common government. Each state, however, is in the early stage governed in the same way as its neighbours. There is a king. There is a council of elders or chiefs. There is a general assembly of all the freemen who bear arms. When the migrations ceased, and all the Greeks had settled down, we soon find changes in this original system of govern- ment j but we can perceive with a fair degree of accuracy how the changes came about. And we are helped in forming our ideas about this by our knowledge of the way in which the government of other Aryan nations grew up at a time when there were civilised observers who studied their institutions, as travellers and explorers nowadays study and record the manners and customs of barbaric peoples. With the Greeks we have no record of a time before they were ruled over by kings and a council of chiefs who were also entitled to their position by hereditary right. Also Greek they always had the Assembly of Freemen who Government: were entitled to be consulted on matters of grave Kln £snip. importance. With our own Teutonic ancestors, however, we