Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/65

II together under the new order of things; and they remain, as we shall see, as a powerful conservative influence, holding back the State from a too rapid development as a new organism, and, as it were, keeping it continually in mind of the rock from which it had been hewn.

We have been following three lines of reasoning, and have arrived at the results of three kinds of evidence, — the nature of village communities in general; the existence of village communities in Greece and Italy, both in the earliest times and after the State arose; and the apparent remains of such communities, surviving in the State itself long after it had reached maturity; and the conclusion is irresistible that the State itself was formed out of material the original units of which were communities of this kind. The rest of this chapter must be occupied with some attempt to answer the other question proposed at the outset, how the State came to be built up out of this material. How could these little groups, so sharply separated from each other in all the interests of human life, come to be united into one corporation, owning, as we saw that a State must, one government, one law, one worship, capable of united action, and susceptible to the impulses of a common patriotic feeling? The problem was a more difficult one than