Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/78

 62 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

trial, they tend to break down and even to abolish entirely econ- omic frontiers, and indirectly to do away with the whole military structure. If the ancient city advanced its frontiers by war, it developed equally within by peace. The essential forms of the state remained the same, but the increase of the social mass of the territory and of population was paralleled by an increasing differentiation in the interior, with a corresponding co-ordination of all parts of the society.

In Greece the Amphyctionic confederations succeeded at last in controlling and organizing certain relations between the states, and in imposing limitations even upon war. These confedera- tions were concluded and commemorated by a sacrifice and a common meal. These international feasts, analogous to those of the clan, and equally to those which had continued to be the cus- tom in each city, although in different degrees according to the greater or less force of the ancient communal traditions, were in reality at this moment the equivalent of the commercial and other treaties which led to the foundation of later political federa- tions by basing them upon a durable economic understanding. In Greece, at Rome, and everywhere else the extension of exter- nal frontiers, or the abolition of them by reciprocal intersocial penetration, corresponded continually to a reduction and to a leveling of the different classes in the city. These classes dis- solved gradually through the weakening of economic, religious, moral, and legal conditions; in a word, through more and more complete participation of all in the same religious and 'legal rights. In these cases the struggle was always between the democracy and the oligarchy, as well between the groups of the same society as between different states. At Rome the treaty between the plebs and the patricians was concluded at a certain moment in the same forms as the treaties between two different states : " foedere icto cum plebe," says Tacitus. 4 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 5 tells us that the fctiales acted as intermediaries, and he gives extracts from the treaty called lex sacrata.

All the internal development of Roman civilization progressed pari passu with the extension of its frontiers. How different in

IV, 6. vi, 89.