ANCIENT barbarism developed naturally 32 into Ancient Civilisation, which, as the name implies, took the form of city life. This development was furthered by the fact that, when the tribes began to settle, those dwellings throve most which were naturally protected by the lie of the land, so that the anxiety for the safeguarding of the wealth of the community was not constantly pressing. And these best protected and consequently most thriving places became the nuclei of the great cities of antiquity, such as Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Jerusalem, Corinth, Athens, Rome, etc. Babylon, by the way, if the 33 accepted measurements of its walls are anywhere near correctness, seems to have been rather a walled-round district than what we should now call a city, and may therefore be considered a very direct development from the stockaded home-field of the tribal group.
As the tribe or people settled, there as a tendency towards a further development of the cultus of the ancestor, which gradually fixed his imagined deeds and tomb in a certain locality. The sanctity of this place made it the centre of the life of the community, and the members of the groups, which were now increasing in numbers, flocked to it for common worship and intercourse, as well as for protection. This greater centralisation tended to obscure the lesser centres (the clan, tribe, etc.), and at last left them rudimentary, mere local names, sometimes with religious rites attached to them21
The arts of building which began with 34 the settlement of the tribe, and which were used in completing the raising of the burg and the walling of the common homestead, now received further impetus from being used for the great temple of the eponomous ancestor (that is, the original father of the tribe, real or supposed) of the whole community, in which each clan (of the þeoð) had its own shrine or chapel dedicated to its own special ancestor.
By the time this was accomplished the city was the one unit of life and centre of worship, and of the group-organisations, the lands of the community surrounding it being the property of those clans, and exploited by them for their livelihood, while their social and religious home was in the city itself.
But in the city social was being fast transformed into political life by the destruction of the independence of the ancient groups, and the dying out of real personal relations between their members; for this was accompanied by the change in the ownership of land 35 which now made the citizen a representative and possessor of a portion of the city territory; whereas heretofore the land was an affix to the social group, the individual member of which enjoyed its advantages simply as a member of that corporation.22 In short, in the earlier times the land belonged to the group; now the individual belonged to the land.
Accompanying this change there took place a development of the market, which before this centralisation was infrequent and spasmodic, depending on periods of truce between warring tribes, but which now became a regular and settled institution under the protection of the burg and its citizens, and was thus one of the chief elements in the growth of the importance and power of the cities. And the communication between different districts and countries which this settled and protected market set on foot, also tended to the federation of the cities, 36 which was one of the leading ideas of the ancient historical period.
Slavery of the chattel kind now grew rapidly, with the result that the usufruct of the land became much more valuable, as raw material was worked up by the constant labour of slaves into marketable wares. This growing wealth created a narrow aristocracy, the members of which were the freemen of the old clans. These were imbedded in a population composed to a great degree of slaves as aforesaid, but also of men who, though not in a servile condition, did not share in the privileges of the original kinship and founders of the city. These were the fragments of broken-up clans of the neighbouring country, or emancipated slaves who had drifted towards the paramount city. The great historical instance of this is the story of the Roman plebs, which, it must be remembered, is not an accident peculiar to Roman society, but was going on at various periods throughout the whole of inchoate ancient civilisation, and also in the Teutonic countries of Early Medieval Europe.
We believe that this, or something 37 like it, was the origin and condition of all the great cities of antiquity, alike of the great oriental empires, Egypt included, and of the Greek and Italian communities. As for the empires of the East they were originally only federations of great cities, just as the cities themselves originated in federations of clans and tribes. The semi-godlike position of the king in these empires was doubtless a recurrence of the worship of the tribal ancestor, now transferred to the embodied symbol of the collective ancestor-worship of the federation. As the progressive races issue from the prehistoric times, we find them segregated into four great sections, or civilisations, the first and most important dwelling in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates; the next in importance in the valley of the Nile; the third on the Yang-tsze-kiang; and the fourth on the Ganges.
At a later period, when the energies of the progressive races required fresh developments, the shores of the eastern portion of the Mediterranean were 38 peopled by the most adventurous and most progressive of those races, to whom we will now turn as affording the most typical instances of the development of city life, and as those of whom we have the most definite information.
With the period of the Homeric poems this civilisation of the classical peoples emerges from its prehistoric beginnings. In the literature of this period there are few indications on the surface of the barbaric group-society, although search reveals at least some of these, amongst which may be mentioned the account in the Iliad of the household of Priam, which seems to have been a complete and recognised Gens. Again, the end of the Odyssey, which appears from the modern literary point of view such a purposeless anti-climax, was once a history that the rhapsodist could not possibly evade, of the bloodfeud after the suitors, the slaying of whom, according to modern ideas of ancient manners, was a perfectly justifiable homicide. But in an earlier society it was not crime that had to be punished, but a tribal injury, which had to be atoned 39 for either by blood or the price of blood. Whatever the merits of the quarrel might have been, the ethics of kinship would compel the Gentes, to whom the slain men belonged, to follow up the feud to appeasement, which even in the present state of the text takes place in the Odyssey.
The remains of so-called cities, as at Mycenæ and Tyryns, turn out on investigation to have been the dwelling of the chieftain of the clan, or the burg, that is to say, the germ of the city of civilisation. The two typical forms of this city which went through a long development, very obscure at certain stages, are Lacedæmon and Athens. The former retained in its constitution a great part of the communal organisation, and even habits of the group-society, out of which it had grown. This is shown on one hand by the common dinner of the freemen, and the general tendency of the Lycurgan legislation, some of the instances of which have been so curiously misunderstood by later exponents, who saw in them mere artificial and arbitrary regulations having the conscious end of sustaining the warlike spirit of the citizens, 40 instead of being, as they were, survivals crystallised from the early stage of development. An obvious example is the well-known story of the boy who had stolen the fox, which is given as an illustration of the Lycurgan law which legalised theft if done with formal secrecy, a law which was felt as so directly opposed to the more modern institution of private property that it needed a euhemeristic explanation, which of course has no foundation in fact.
In Athens the change was much more radical, the idea which wielded it much more thoroughly new: it involved the complete transformation of the personal relationship of the free men into a political society.
But in the revolution which bears the names of Solon and Kleisthenes, the group-society had, first of all, become thoroughly corrupted; since the old Gentes had grown to be close corporations amidst a disorganised society of free men who did not share in their privileges, and who were economically oppressed by the outrageous and bald system of usury practised by the privileged. In Sparta, 41 as above said, the old gentile Community retained a great amount of vitality, even amidst the new political order.
It may be remembered, by the way, that the earlier stages of a new social development always show the characteristic evils of the incoming system, not perhaps in their really worst, but, at least, in their most direct and obvious form. For instance, in all early civilised Communities (recently emerged from group-organisations) usury and litigation are rampant, as, amongst other instances, the elaborate account of the life of the time given in the Icelandic sagas shows us. Again, the earlier days of the great capitalistic industries give us examples, worse on the surface, of the cynical brutality which is an essential of Capitalism, than any that are current to-day, although the present evils reach both deeper and wider than they did in its beginnings, and for that very reason are more irremediable under the system.23
As the change took place at Athens, 42 then, the old Gentes were entirely broken up, except for certain ceremonial and religious purposes, and the free citizens were placed on the lands on certain localities of the territory without any topographical relation to their former position in the kinship clans. Except for the purposes of a few ritual usages, property in severalty took the place of corporate ownership, and the society of the ancient historical city was thus rendered complete as to its essentials: the federations of the cities so formed, such as the Doric and Ionian confederacies, had no tendency to consolidate into empires as in the East, but remained true federations, the units of which were still sovereign cities, and which developed no overlord destined to grow gradually into the despotic head of a quasi-bureaucratic system.24
The development of the native Italian cities, as distinguished from Greek colonies in Italy, was not in any essential respect different from that of 43 Athens, which may be regarded as the general type of the ancient classical city apart from the Dorian developments, which always retained some show of the ancient survivals.
In Rome, the most historically important of the native Italian cities, the very same resolution took place that we have described as to Athens. The first instalment of it was embodied in the legislation ascribed to “Servius Tullius,” which created the Centuries, political bodies based on the possession of property. These were thrust into the kinship groups, the Curiæ and tribes, and gradually assimilated the latter to their conditions. The bodies so formed became the free men or burgesses of early historical Rome. The plebs, which originally constituted the unprivileged free men, was, thus taken into the political system and attained a measure of privilege, the struggle for the increase of which forms the staple of Roman history for the next three centuries; these plebeian citizens at first were in the main the craftsmen of the city; slave-labour at that period apparently not 44 touching that side of production much. But from the first the idea of conquest was always dominant in the Roman community, so that this organisation of free men was the political side of a system mainly directed towards the upholding of an effective army. This was, of course, conspicuous in early days owing to the necessities of the case; but in later times the army organisation was the engine by which the plutocratic classes impressed their power on the State. The Equestrian order, as the name implies, was originally the cavalry of the Roman army, composed of the richer citizens, since their equipment was more expensive; but in later times, when the bureaucracy was being formed, it became little more than a formal title of honour, indicating the possession of riches.
The Gracchan legislation points to the rise of this plutocracy, and its struggles with the older nobility, the patrician order, which by this time had diminished to a very small part of the population. It became finally dominant in the last days of the republic, and after having produced the chaotic period, during which 45 Roman history is a record of the struggles of great individualities amongst the rich, was reduced to order by the early empire. The latter was a definite and stable bureaucratic system, which was at least so much of an improvement as to make life tolerable for most people. All rights indeed, both political and social, had disappeared, except the rights of property as interpreted by the law courts; but the lower ranks of society, including the slaves, were decidedly bettered by the change; while the well-to-do were 1n a state of material ease unrivalled in the world’s history.
The institutions of marriage and slavery played a great part in the above-mentioned development of society. The group-marriage of the early kinship Communities, on the change in the holding of property becoming marked, grew to be superseded by a quasi-monogamy, which was in force at least as early as the Homeric period, though it is clear from that literature that it was personally, apart from the rights of property and succession, a very loose tie, and was supplemented. by widespread recognised concubinage. 46 Throughout the whole of the classical period practically the same state of things obtained. But as the republic of Rome drew near to its fall, the monogamic institution was still further weakened, and became little more than a contract dissoluble by will; and advantage of this fact was commonly taken. In the end, in the later days of the Empire, marriage was looked upon as so irksome that it was little resorted to, its place being supplied by intercourse with the female slaves, with the result that the population began obviously to decrease owing to the nonrearing of children.
This subject leads naturally to the consideration of the Roman familia, which consisted of wife, children, and slaves, all under the absolute power of the head of the household, or paterfamilias ; attached to this family through their relations to the paterfamilias were the clients, who, though not directly under his absolute power, were practically bound to him by economic and social ties, since he was their guardian and their protector generally. The relation of this, amidst all differences, to 47 the kinship group is clear, as well as its demarcation from the polygamic patriarchal family of the East. It must be remembered that the power of life and death, in short of jurisdiction, of the paterfamilias over all the members of the family was real and not merely formal. It will be seen therefore that the monogamic family was the lowest unit in classical society, as the Gens was in the early group-society; and also 1t must be said that the working of the transformation of personal into political society is very clearly marked by the differences between the classical family and the barbaric Gens, Curia, or Clan.
The oligarchies which became the masters of this social state, owing to the ambition of their more able members, who found their support in the democracies, were self-destructive, and before long gave way to the absolutist power which was the core of them, and their place was taken in the Greek world by the so-called Tyrannies, and in the Roman world by the Empire.
21. The great Epos of Troy, in which the Holy City plays a central and predominating part, is a good illustration of the growth of the burg into the city, and it may be noted that the Holy City was the centre of the Hellenes of Asia, where civilisation was more advanced, whereas their ruder European brethren felt themselves the enemy of the new development, just as in England the incoming Teutonic þeoð fell on the Roman cities then existing, which, when conquered, they could make no use of, but merely destroyed.Back
22. It is worth while noting, as showing that there are yet left definite survivals of tribal life, that one of the incidents in the recent anti-Christian movement in China was a solemn proclamation from certain of the tribes calling on another tribe much infected by Christianity to purge itself of the offence by expelling the offending members if they proved to be obstinate.Back
23. As for instance the actual chattel-slavery of the workhouse children consigned to the manufacturers of the northern towns, and their torture to keep them awake during the monstrous duration of the hours of labour, that obtained before the passing of the Factory Act.Back
24. The Tyrannies cannot be considered as a development of city life but rather as sporadic disease of its corruption; and seldom covered more than a single city.Back