Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/276

 260 HISTORY OF GREECE. importance, so the reverse proceeding the breaking up of t, city into its elementary villages was not only a sentence of privation and suffering, but also a complete extinction of Grecian rank and dignity. The Ozolian Lokrians, the ^Etolians, and the Akarnanians maintained their separate village residence down to a still later period, preserving along with it their primitive rudeness and disorderly pugnacity. 1 Their villages were unfortified, and defended only by comparative inaccessibility ; in case of need, they fled for safety with their cattle into the woods and mountains. Amidst such inauspicious circumstances, there was no room for that expansion of the social and political feelings to which pro- tected intramural residence and increased numbers gave birth ; there was no consecrated acropolis or agora, no ornamented tem- ples and porticos, exhibiting the continued offerings of successive generations, 2 no theatre for music or recitation, no gymnasium for athletic exercises, none of those fixed arrangements, for transacting public business with regularity and decorum, which the Greek citizen, with his powerful sentiment of locality, deemed essential to a dignified existence. The village was nothing more than a fraction and a subordinate, appertaining as a limb to the organized body called the city. But the city and the state growing up round Olynthus (Xen. Ilcllen. v. 2, 11-2). The wise and admirable conduct of Olynthus, and the reluctance of the neighboring cities to merge themselves in this union, are forcibly set forth ; also, the interest of Sparta in keeping all the Greek towns disunited. Compare the descrip- tion of the treatment of Capua by the Romans (Livy, xxvi. 16). 1 Thucyd. i. 5 ; iii. 94. Xenoph. Hellen. iv. 6, 5. 2 Pausanias, x. 4, 1 : his remarks on the Phokian TroAtf Panopeus indicate what he included in the idea of a ?r6Atf : eiye ovo/nuaat TIC ir63.iv /cat rou- TOV$, olf ye OVK upheld, ov yvftvaotov kariv ov fisaTpov, OVK uyopav e%ovotv, oi>% i>6up Karspxonevov If Kprivrjv u.'KA.u. ev areyai<; Koi^atf Kara raf /ca/>.t>/?af ftuhiffra ruf iv rolf opeciv, evravtia oiKovcriv enl xapdSpq,. ofiuf 6e Spot ye rijq %upaf elaiv avrolc elf roi)f 6fiopov<;, Kal ef rbv aiikkoyov avvetipovf /cat avroi TTffinovai rbv QUKIKOV. The fiiKpa Troliicfiara of the Pelasgians on the peninsula of Mount Athua (Thucyd. iv. 109) seem to have been something between villages and cities. When the Phokians, after the Sacred War, were deprived of their cities and forced into villages by the Amphiktyons, the order was that no village should contain more than fifty houses, and that no village should be within the din tance of a furlong of any other (Diodor. xvi. 60).