Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/17

 INTRODUCTION. 11 The cause which producss them must be powerful, and must be found in man himself. If the laws of human association are no longer the same as in an- tiquity, it is because there has been a chnnge in man. There is, in fact, a part of our being which is modified from fige to age; this is our intelligence. It is alvvaya in movement; almost always jDrogrcssing ; and on this account, our institutions and our laws are subject to change. Man has not, in our day, the way of thinking that he had twenty-five centuries ago; and this is why he is no longer governed as he was governed then. The history of Greece and Rome is a witness and an example of the intimate relation which always exists between men's idens and their social state. Examine the institutions of the ancients without thinking of their religious notions, and you find them obscure, whimsical, and inexplicable. Why were there patri* cians and plebeians, patrons and clients, eupatrids and thetes; and whence came the native and inefiaceable differences which Ave find between these classes ? What was the meaning of those Lacedasmonian institutions which appear to us so contrary to nature? How are we to explain those unjust caprices of ancient private law; at Corinth and at Thebes, the sale of land pro- hibited ; at Athens and at Rome, an inequality in the succession between brother and sister? What did the jurists understand hy a ffJiatioji, nnd by gens? Why those revolutions in the laws, tliosc political I'cvolu- tions ? What was that singular patriotism which some- times effaced every natural sentiment? What did they understand by that liberty of which they were always talking? How did it happen that institutions 60 very different from anytliing of which we have an idea to-day, could become established and reign for so