Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/60

36 villages into his new Great City (Megalopolis), destined to overawe Sparta. And lastly, Sparta itself was a city made up of villages, and so were Elis, Mantinea, Tegea, and many others; in the case of Sparta, owing to the distance from the sea, and the military strength of the situation, the constituent villages were never even fortified by an enclosing ring-wall.

Turning to Italy, we find village settlements there also, and we have little doubt that they formed, in some cases at least, among which that of Rome must be reckoned, the constituent elements of towns. The Latin words for this kind of community are vicus and pagus; and though we do not know precisely what their original meaning was, the words were always used to denote a smaller social unit than a civitas or state. The word pagus fell out of use in Italy, but was used by Cæsar for the subdivisions of Gallic civitates, i.e. the Celtic sept; vicus continued to be used for a hamlet in the country, together with other words (fora, conciliabula) which probably denote growths of a later time.

There is yet another set of facts to be mentioned, which will go some way towards strengthening our argument that the City-State was formed out of an association of village communities. It is as well, however, to point out that we shall here be using a method to which we are frequently driven in ancient history for want of a better — the method, as we may call it, of survivals, by which we argue back from the nature of institutions in later times, of which we know something, to their probable originals or early