Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/275

 VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 259 Hellenic aggregate the rudest and least advanced among them who dwelt in unfortified villages, and upon whom the citizen of Athens, Corinth, or Thebes, looked down as inferiors. Such village residence was the character of the Epirots 1 universally, and prevailed throughout Hellas itself, in those very early and even ante-Homeric times upon which Thucydides looked back as deplorably barbarous; times of universal poverty and inse- curity, absence of pacific intercourse, petty warfare and plunder, compelling every man to pass his life armed, endless migration without any local attachments. Many of the consid- erable cities of Greece are mentioned as aggregations of pre- existing villages, some of them in times comparatively recent. Tegea and Mantineia in Arcadia, represent, in this way, the confluence of eight villages, and five villages respectively ; Dyme in Achaia was brought together out of eight villages, and Elis in the same manner, at a period even later than the Persian inva- cion ;'- the like seems to have happened with Megara and Tan- agra. A large proportion of the Arcadians continued their village life down to the time of the battle of Leuktra, and it suited the purpose? of Sparta to keep them thus disunited ; a policy which we shall see hereafter illustrated by the dismember- ment of Mantineia (into its primitive component villages), which Agesiluus carried into effect, but which was reversed as soon as the power of Sparta was no longer paramount, as well as by the foundation of Megalopolis out of a large number of petty Arcadian toAvns and villages, one of the capital measures ot Epameinondas. 3 As this measure was an elevation of Arcadian 1 Skylax, Peripl. c. 28-33 ; Thucyd. ii. 80. See Dio Chrysostom, Or. xlvii. p. 225, vol. ii. ed. Reisk, fj.iM.ov fypovvro dioiKcetcrdai Kara K6/j.af, TOI( papffupoie upoiovf, r) axi/na Trofoejc Kal ovofia t%eiv. s Strabo, viii. pp. 337, 342, 386 ; Pausan. via. 45, 1 ; Plutarch, Qusest. Grace, c. 17-37. 3 Pausan. viii. 27, 2-5 ; Diod. xv. 72: compare Arist. Polit ii. 1, 5. The description of the dio'iKiaic of Mantineia is in Xenophon, Hellen. v. 2, 6-8: it is a flagrant example of his philo-Laconian bias. We see by the case of the Phokians after the Sacred War, (Diodor. xvi. 60; Pausan. x. 3, 2,) how heavy a punishment this dio'iKiaif was. Compare, also, the instructive speech of the Akanthian envoy Kleigenes, at Sparta, when he invoked the Lacedaemonian interference for the purpose of crushing the incipient feder- ation, or junction of towns into a common political aggregate, which ^as