like his tribe to abandon it and wander elsewhere with his family and
herds. The land was too fully peopled for that. The dissatisfied could
only endure and grumble and rebel. One system of law after another was
tried and thrown aside. The class on whom in practice a rule bore most
hard, would refuse longer assent to it. There were uprisings, tumults,
bloody frays.

Sparta, at this time the most prominent of the Greek cities, evolved a
code which made her in some ways the wonder of ancient days. The state
was made all-powerful; it took entire possession of the citizen, with
the purpose of making him a fighter, a strong defender of himself and of
his country. His home life was almost obliterated, or, if you like, the
whole city was made one huge family. All men ate in common; youth was
severely restrained; its training was all for physical hardihood. Modern
socialism, communism, have seldom ventured further in theory than the
Spartans went in practice. The result seems to have been the production
of a race possessed of tremendous bodily power and courage, but of
stunted intellectual growth. The great individual minds of Greece, the
thinkers, the creators, did not come from Sparta.

In Athens a different _régime_ was meanwhile developing Hellenes of
another type. A realization of how superior the Greeks were to earlier
races, of what vast strides man was making in intelligence and social
organization, can in no way be better gained than by comparing the law
code of the Babylonian Hammurabi with that of Solon in Athens.[16] A
period of perhaps sixteen hundred years separates the two, but the
difference in their mental power is wider still.

[Footnote 16: See _Solon's Legislation_, page 203, and _Compilation of
the Earliest Code_, page 14.]