he aggregation of clans into tribes
and confederations of tribes resulted directly, as we have seen, in the
City. There burghership, with its political and social rights and
duties, had its theoretical basis in descent from a common ancestor, or
from a small group of closely-related common ancestors. The group of
fellow-citizens was associated through its related groups of ancestral
household-deities, and through religious rites performed in common to
which it would have been sacrilege to have admitted a stranger. Thus the
Ancient City was a religious as well as a political body, and in either
character it was complete in itself and it was sovereign. Thus in
ancient Greece and Italy the primitive clan-assembly or township-meeting
did not grow by aggregation into the assembly of the shire, but it
developed into the _comitia_ or _ecclesia_ of the city. The chief
magistrate was not the _ealdorman_ of early English history, but the
_rex_ or _basileus_ who combined in himself the functions of king,
general, and priest. Thus, too, there was a severance, politically,
between city and country such as the Teutonic world has never known. The
rural districts surrounding a city might be subject to it, but could
neither share its franchise nor claim a co-ordinate franchise with it.
Athens, indeed, at an early period, went so far as to incorporate with
itself Eleusis and Marathon and the other rural towns of Attika. In this
one respect Athens transgressed the bounds of ancient civic
organization, and no doubt it gained greatly in power thereby. But
generally in the Hellenic world the rural population in the
neighbourhood of a great city were mere [Greek: _perioikoi_], or
"dwellers in the vicinity"; the inhabitants of the city who had moved
thither from some other city, both they and their descendants, were mere
[Greek: metoikoi], or "dwellers in the place"; and neither the one class
nor the other could acquire the rights and privileges of citizenship. A
revolution, indeed, went on at Athens, from the time of Solon to the
time of Kleisthenes, which essentially modified the old tribal divisions
and admitted to the franchise all such families resident from time
immemorial as did not belong to the tribes of eupatrids by whom the city
was founded. But this change once accomplished, the civic exclusiveness
of Athens remained very much what it was before. The popular assembly
was enlarged, and public harmony was secured; but Athenian burghers