ania or amongst the least modern backwoods of the
Slav-speaking east. To take only the leading instance, Greek tribal
society dissolved within historic times under the double attack of
individualism, industrial and commercial, at the one end, and of the
federalism of the city state, at the other. For Aristotle the
village-community was the 'colony' ([Greek: apoikia]) or direct
offspring of the patriarchal household, but he nowhere admits the
city-state to be the 'colony' of the village-community. On the contrary,
at the risk of upsetting his own theory of the state as a natural
outgrowth of man's political nature, he lays stress on 'the man who
first introduced them to each other' as the 'author of the greatest
advantages'. And it was precisely this process of 'introducing them to
one another', so that the members of hitherto autonomous clans became
friends instead of enemies, and were thenceforth citizens all, in one
and the same city-state, that terminated that period of migrations and
political chaos which separates the Minoan from the Hellenic Age in
Greek lands. Rome's mission among the tribal societies of Italy is
essentially the same; and it is the lack of any such missionary of
political enlightenment beyond the frontier of the Roman State in its
imperial fullness, that makes early mediaeval problems, which were
essentially the same, so slow to be solved.

We are now hard upon the borderland of history, and we take leave of a
peninsular Europe--for the grassland stands still outside, as a distinct
geographic entity--in which the diverse races, and languages, and
religious schemes, and material cultures, are almost wholly propagated
under the forms of societies of one homogeneous type, autonomous,
indeed, like the states in the loosest of federations, and involved
annually, somewhere or other, in intertribal feuds and war; but
sufficiently acquainted with each other's customs to know that they were
based on the same large needs, not merely of 'living' somehow but of
'living well', and to respect this common heritage of intertribal
customs, so far that in their uttermost dealings with admitted aliens
they were wont to 'make war like gentlemen'. To Homer's audience it was
sure proof that Odysseus was really 'at the back of nowhere', when the
Cyclops was unable to behave when a stranger came to his cave: he was 'a
monster, of knowledge not according to the rules'.[12] It was a
criticism of despair, like that of M. L