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 258 HISTORY OF GREECE. not a relation subsisting between members of a common political aggregate. Within a few miles from his own city-walls, an Athenian found himself in the territory of another city, wherein he was nothing more than an alien, where he could not acquire property in house or land, nor contract a legal marriage with any native woman, nor sue for legal protection against injury, except through the mediation of some friendly citizen. The right of intermarriage, and of acquiring landed property, was occasionally granted by a city to some individual non-freeman, as matter of special favor, and sometimes (though very rarely) reciprocated generally between two separate cities. 1 But the obligations between one city and another, or between the citizen of the one and the citizen of the other, are all matters of special covenant, agreed to by the sovereign authority in each. Such coexistence of entire political severance with so much fellowship in other ways, is perplexing in modern ideas, and modern language is not well furnished with expressions to describe Greek political phenomena. We may say that an Athenian citizen was an alien when he arrived as a visitor in Corinth, but we can hardly say that he was a foreigner ; and though the relations between Cor- inth and Athens were in principle international, yet that word would be obviously unsuitable to the numerous, petty autonomies of Hellas, besides that we require it for describing the relations of Hellenes generally with Persians or Carthaginians. We are compelled to use a word such as interpolitical, to describe the transactions between separate Greek cities, so numerous in the course of this history. As, on the one hand, a Greek will not consent to look for sove- reign authority beyond the limits of his own city, so, on the other hand, he must have a city to look to : scattered villages will not satisfy in his mind the exigencies of social order, security, and dignity. Though the coalescence of smaller towns into a larger is repugnant to his feelings, that of villages into a tov/n appears to him a manifest advance in the scale of civilization. Such, at least, is the governing sentiment of Greece throughout the his- torical period ; for there was always a certain portion of the 1 Aristot. Polit. iii. 6, 12. It is unnecessary to refer to the mary inscrip- tions which confer upon some individual non-freeman the right of nd