Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/89

III were performed either by or under the authority of a single man; and in this case we can be sure that tradition was right. Both Thucydides and Aristotle accepted it; at conservative Sparta the king himself survived throughout her history; and at Athens and Rome kingship left traces behind it when it had vanished, which the "method of survivals" has co-ordinated with a definite result.

We can best study kingship by comparing three different forms of it, which seem roughly to represent three successive stages in its history. We can see it in the Homeric poems, where on the whole it appears as an undefined and therefore early form; next in the earliest constitution of Rome, which represents a later stage, and shows it defined with tolerable exactness by custom and tradition; and lastly, as a survival at Sparta, retaining its old characteristics of form, but much modified in actual practice.

I. We no sooner touch the Homeric poems than we are met by the question, Was the City-State already in existence when they took their present shape? In any case, are we justified in using Homer as evidence for the earliest form of State government? On the whole we are so justified, in spite of the fact that the first of these questions must be answered in the negative. It has already been pointed out (see p. 47) that recent archæological discovery seems to indicate a clear line of distinction between the civilisation of the age