The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene, Vol. 1

EARLY GREEK HISTORY

The city was, in many cases, in a chronic state of giving birth to new cities, either from overpopulation or from that ever-lurking enemy in its heart: Stasis (civil strife/factionalism). At a given moment, it would throw out a colony—that is to say, a new city bound to the parent city by filial ties and claiming its protection. Others might be extinguished or deserted from natural causes, sometimes only temporarily. “Let us leave the city,” says the Spartan Archidamus in Isocrates’ monograph, “send our parents, wives, and children to our kindred cities; they will be glad to receive them out of gratitude to us for past benefits and ties of blood. We will abandon our city, and occupying the best strategic positions, will fight the enemy by land as well as by sea.”Isocrates, Archidamus, 73, 74. So in Roman history, civitas means an aggregation of cives (citizens), i.e., a populus (people). The Spanish derivative pueblo means a town. Notice that the city means the group of men to him, not the walls and buildings. It can even be dispersed for a while if the fortunes of war call for such a course. Its cohesion is moral, not material. Thus, our star map will be in a state of continual flux and change like the river of Heraclitus. One could not travel through the same Hellas twice.

There may be some of us who remember reading Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome for the first time in our boyhood and who have not forgotten the thrill we felt at the verses recounting the envoy of “The Thirty Cities” to Rome. There was some image evoked in the phrase “The Thirty Cities” which seemed to call up in our budding imaginations a world that was far removed from ours in its organic structure, and a decentralization of forces that is difficult to grasp today. Rome steadily advanced in the path of centralization, but Hellas was disunited to the end. Furthermore, the strife was not only of cities against one another, or one group against another, but each city itself was the theater of an internal strife that was always latent—one that frequently caused its form of government to change from monarchy to oligarchy, from oligarchy to plutocracy, from there to democracy, and finally perhaps to tyranny. The history of many of the cities, as we read in Aristotle’s Politics, ran continuously in some such vicious circle.