Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/61

 THE GENESIS OF THE CITY-STATE 37 itory, of which we know nothing directly. Foi imple, if we can discover survivals of the life of lage communities in the completed City-State of er times, we may argue back from what we know these to the features of the original village life fore the city arose. From this method we cannot pect more than an approximation to the truth, d it needs skilful handling ; but the same may be d, with even greater force, of reasoning based ly on the statements of ancient authors. It would be indeed strange, on the supposition which we have already obtained some proof — it cities were formed in most cases out of village / tlements — if those settlements did not continue exist in some form after the city was full-grown ; it as the constituent parts of the caterpillar con- ue in other forms in the chrysalis and even in J fully developed insect. And, in fact, the early
 * y-State, wherever we have anything like a full

owledge of it, invariably appears as subdivided smaller groups, which look as if they had some torical relation to the original settlements out of dch the city was formed. These are the yevrj Athens, the gentes of Kome ; all of them being, e the village community, groups consisting of a •tain number of families. We have strong a iori reasons for believing these to be the lineal scendants of the original village communities, just our English parishes of to-day are directly de- luded from the " hams " and " tuns " (ix. village itlements) of our immigrant forefathers. We ve also reason to believe that Aristotle thought '