Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/58

34 government by a council and a headman; community of land; and common worship. It is obvious that a stage of social life which could realise these characteristics must be considerably advanced; we seem already to see the possibility of a further advance into a higher level of association. But what evidence have we, in the next place, that the Greek and Latin races had attained to this stage before the City-State arose among them?

There can be no doubt that the Greeks believed themselves to have lived in villages before they advanced to city life; and it is equally certain that in the less highly civilised parts of Greece, village life predominated even in historical times.

For the first of these facts we have the evidence both of Thucydides and Aristotle, representing the highest point, in two successive centuries, at which Greek political thought had arrived. At the outset of his history, Thucydides gives us a picture of life in Greece as he believed it to have been "in early times" (Thucydides, i. 2, 5 and 6); it is no doubt a fancy picture, but contains some elements of truth, and is at least a record of what the inquiring Greek thought. He conceived of the Greeks as living without union or unifying influences, without enterprise in commerce or agriculture, without any object in life beyond that of obtaining the means of subsistence. Had he told us nothing more, we might fairly have guessed that this was a description of the life of men living in some kind of village communities; for it accords precisely with what we read of those which are still in existence, save that