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But the incorporation of one town with another, though effected with brilliant results in the early history of Attika, involved such a disturbance of all the associations which in the Greek mind clustered about the conception of a city that it was quite impracticable on any large or general scale.
Let us note first that Athens was a large city surrounded by pleasant village-suburbs, the demes of Attika, very much as Boston is closely girdled by rural places like Brookline, Jamaica Plain, and the rest, village after village rather thickly covering a circuit of from ten to twenty miles' radius.
It may be that there will ultimately exist, over the civilized world, conditions as favourable to the complete fruition of life as those which formerly existed within the narrow circuit of Attika; save that the part once played by enslaved human brain and muscle will finally be played by the enslaved forces of insentient nature.
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.
Next above the hundred, in order of composition, comes the group known in ancient Italy as thepagus, in Attika perhaps as the deme, in Germany and at first in England as the gau or ga, at a later date in England as the shire. Whatever its name, this group answers to the tribe regarded as settled upon a certain determinate territory.
For Rhodes see Strabo 654 = XIV. ii. 9: E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iv. pp. 60, 199 rejects the tale. For plans of the Piraeus see Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen im Alterthum, ii. 134, and Curtius and Kaupert, Karten von Attika , plan IIa by Milchhöfer. Ges. der Wissenschaften, 1878, xxx.
The differences in degree of civilization between such states as Massachusetts and North Carolina were considerable, but in comparison with such differences as those between Attika and Lusitania they might well be called slight. The attacks of savages on the frontier were cruel and annoying, but never since the time of King Philip had they seemed to threaten the existence of the white man.
The secret of Rome's wonderful strength lay in the fact that she incorporated the vanquished peoples into her own body politic. In the early time there was a fusion of tribes going on in Latium, which, if it had gone no further, would have been similar to the early fusion of Ionic tribes in Attika or of Iranian tribes in Media.
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