Page:The municipalites of the Roman empire (IA municipalitesofr00reidrich).pdf/22

4 characteristics derived from an age when state and city were convertible terms.

Such was the view of the of the Roman empire which presented itself first and foremost, and above all, to those who were subject to it, down to its latest days. A rhetorician of the first Christian century, speaking of the Hellenised East, identified it with "the cities," using the phrase just as it is employed by Thucydides and Xenophon to represent the Hellas of their time. A scrap of manuscript was discovered not long ago, which appeared to be a fragment of a general account of the Roman state, just before it fell into ruin. The writer treated it as made up of the civic bodies which it comprised, numbering, according to his reconing, 5627. But it is unnecessary to insist further on this point. No one can read Strabo, for example, or the elder Pliny, without realising that the ancients habitually viewed the Roman empire as constituted by and summed up in a vast confederation of municipalities.

This conception was of course only developed by a process of evolution continued through many generations, in prehistoric and historic time. The process, as completed under Roman guidance, may often by paralleled from the experience of other states and empires. Twenty or more centuries before the fabled date of Rome's foundation, great city-states sprang into existence by the Tigris and Euphrates, warred with each other, and ended by becoming component parts of a great empire. And the towns within the states of medieval Europe, above all the cities of the Hanseatic league, frequently held a status which resembled not a little that of towns within the great imperial Roman polity. But parallels to the story of Italian cities in the Middle Ages, of Florence, of Genoa, of Milan, of Venice, are easier to find in the records of Greece than in those of Rome. The municipal system of the Roman empire was only in part a natural growth; in great measure it owed its origin to the deliberate policy of dominant states and rulers. The wandering adventurers who sowed the Hellenic settlements