Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/29

I from each other at a glance, yet forming one great stream.

But what is of the greatest moment for our purpose at present is that these two peoples developed the same kind of polity. They carried it out with different aims and with very different results; but the form of political union in which they lived was essentially one and the same, and passed through the same stages of growth. Living as they did in adjacent peninsulas, in the same latitude and in much the same climate, within easy reach of the sea, and in fertile valleys or plains surrounded by mountainous tracts, it was natural that they should develop socially and politically on much the same lines. Like conditions produce like growths, modified only by the inherent differences of stock, and by the forwarding or retarding influences which may be brought to bear on them as they grow. The Greek and Latin States experienced very different fortunes, and their differing characteristics caused them to float in different directions, some going straight onward in a natural order of progress, some being swept into backwaters, and retarded for many generations; but their State was in all cases of the same species, and this species was almost peculiar to themselves among the peoples of antiquity.

This unique form of State was what the Greeks called the ; a word which, like the Latin urbs, may probably have originally meant no more than a fortified position on a hill, to which the inhabitants of the surrounding country could fly for