on Scythia, of Thucydides on Thrace, of Polybius and Caesar upon Gaul,
of Tacitus on Germany: each with the unspoken afterthought 'but thank
goodness that they cannot!'

But while it hindered larger growths of political structure, so long as
it remained intact, and furnished a strong social skeleton upon which to
frame manners and ideals which are among man's highest achievements,
patriarchal society had its own dangers, and has now so nearly succumbed
to them, that to see its institutions in working order we have to
penetrate into Albania or amongst the least modern backwoods of the
Slav-speaking east. To take only the leading instance, Greek tribal
society dissolved within historic times under the double attack of
individualism, industrial and commercial, at the one end, and of the
federalism of the city state, at the other. For Aristotle the
village-community was the 'colony' ([Greek: apoikia]) or direct
offspring of the patriarchal household, but he nowhere admits the
city-state to be the 'colony' of the village-community. On the contrary,
at the risk of upsetting his own theory of the state as a natural
outgrowth of man's political nature, he lays stress on 'the man who
first introduced them to each other' as the 'author of the greatest
advantages'. And it was precisely this process of 'introducing them to
one another', so that the members of hitherto autonomous clans became
friends instead of enemies, and were thenceforth citizens all, in one
and the same city-state, that terminated that period of migrations and
political chaos which separates the Minoan from the Hellenic Age in
Greek lands. Rome's mission among the tribal societies of Italy is
essentially the same; and it is the lack of any such missionary of
political enlightenment beyond the frontier of the Roman State in its
imperial fullness, that makes early mediaeval problems, which were
essentially the same, so slow to be solved.