Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/66

42 we can well realise, and the process was doubtless a much longer one than historians have represented it. We can only see a bare outline of the truth; in no single case of real antiquity can the details be recovered.

Let us first consider what motives or circumstances may have suggested such a union of these small groups into larger ones.

I have said that before a wandering people settles down on a particular territory, it already contains a number of cells held together by the tie of kinship. After the settlement, this tie continues to act as a bond; but from that time onwards a new binding principle begins to make itself felt, and by slow degrees takes the place of kinship. This new tie is the influence of the land on which the community is settled. Kinship is a bond which must sooner or later be relaxed and fail; it can only be kept up by ingenious fictions, and in most existing village communities it has long ago disappeared. But when once a permanent settlement has been made on a tract of land, the land becomes a home; it is taken to the heart of the people who live on it and by it, and they hold together for love of it, long after the idea of actual kinship has grown weak or utterly vanished. History teems with examples of this change. We can see it in many of our own English villages, which once were the hams or tuns of invading Teutonic kinsfolk, and now, though still bearing their kin name, have entirely lost the binding power of kinship, yet exercise over their inhabitants a certain unifying