hierarchy of civil
officials, the men of this race invented a peculiar institution, the
City, each city giving rise to others like itself, and from colony
to colony reproducing itself indefinitely. A single Greek city, for
instance, Miletos, produced three hundred other cities, colonizing with
them the entire coast of the Black Sea. Each city was substantially
self-ruling; and the idea of a coalescence of several cities into a
nation was one which the Greek mind rarely conceived, and never was able
to put into operation.

In these cities, labour was for the most part carried on by slaves.
In Athens there were four or five for each citizen, and in places like
Korinth and Aigina the slave population is said to have numbered four
or five hundred thousand. Besides, the Greek citizen had little need of
personal service. He lived out of doors, and, like most Southern people,
was comparatively abstemious in his habits. His dinners were slight, his
clothing was simple, his house was scantily furnished, being intended
chiefly for a den to sleep in.

Serving neither king nor priest, the citizen was free and sovereign in
his own city. He elected his own magistrates, and might himself serve
as city-ruler, as juror, or as judge. Representation was unknown.
Legislation was carried on by all the citizens assembled in mass.
Therefore politics and war were the sole or chief employments of the
citizen. War, indeed, came in for no slight share of his attention. For
society was not so well protected as in these modern days. Most of these
Greek cities, scattered over the coasts of the Aigeian, the Black
Sea, and the Mediterranean, were surrounded by tribes of barbarians,
Scythians, Gauls Spaniards, and Africans. The citizen must therefore
keep on his guard, like the Englishman of to-day in New Zealand, or
like the inhabitant of a Massachusetts town in the seventeenth century.
Otherwise Gauls Samnites, or Bithynians, as savage as North American
Indians, would be sure to encamp upon the blackened ruins of his town.
Moreover, the Greek cities had their quarrels with each other, and their
laws of war were very barbarous. A conquered city was liable to be razed
to the ground, its male inhabitants put to the sword, its women sold as
slaves. Under such circumstances, according to Taine's happy expression,
a citizen must be a politician and warrior, on pain of death. And not
only fear, but ambition also tended to make him so. For each city strove