Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/59

Rh these agriculture has in most cases become the -absorbing occupation.^ But Thucydides has told more than this. Speaking of the prevalence of
 * acy in those early times, and the comparative

spect in which it was held, as an adventurous and nourable trade, he says that the pirates' victims ed in communities which were unfortified, and nsisted of one or more villages. And this is me out by Aristotle, who, reasoning as usual not fancy but on facts, describes the village as a lion of families, and the city as a union of villages ; us placing the village midway between family and For the second fact, that village life was preval- t in the less forward parts of Greece in historical nes, we have abundant and explicit evidence, mcydides describes it as existing in ^tolia in his m day ; the skilful Athenian general Demosthenes mded his hopes of conquering ^tolia on the iakness and disunion of a people still living Kara )fia<; arecx^lo-Tovf;.^ The same is implied of the lolian Locrians, a few chapters farther on ; and )m a later authority* we learn that the Acar- nians lived in villages, until at the end of the iirth century B.C. they began to develop something the nature of a town. In the Peloponnese the rcadians had not grown beyond this stage of social e when Epaminondas concentrated a number of ^ Maine, Village Communities, p. 175 ; Mackenzie Wallace, '^sia, vol. i. ch. viii. For these characteristics of the village ,ge of society see also below, ch. iii. p. 60. 2 Politics, i. 2 ; 1252 B. ' Thuc. iii. 94, 97 ; cf. 101.
 * y in the growth of society.^
 * Diodorus, 19, 67.