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 burghership
still remained a privilege which could not be acquired by the native of
any other city. Similar revolutions, with a similarly limited purpose
and result, occurred at Sparta, Elis, and other Greek cities. At Rome,
by a like revolution, the plebeians of the Capitoline and Aventine
acquired parallel rights of citizenship with the patricians of the
original city on the Palatine; but this revolution, as we shall
presently see, had different results, leading ultimately to the
overthrow of the city-system throughout the ancient world.

The deep-seated difference between the Teutonic political system based
on the shire and the Græco-Roman system based on the city is now, I