3. _Greece._--The Homeric armies were tribal levies of foot, armed with spear, sword, bow, &c., and commanded by the chiefs in their war-chariots. In historic times all this is changed. Greece becomes a congeries of city-states, each with its own citizen-militia. Federal armies and permanent troops are rare, the former owing to the centrifugal tendency of Greek politics, the latter because the "tyrannies," which must have relied very largely on standing armies to maintain themselves, had ultimately given way to democratic institutions. But the citizen-militia of Athens or Sparta resembled rather a modern "nation in arms" than an auxiliary force. Service was compulsory in almost all states, and as the young men began their career as soldiers with a continuous training of two or three years, Hellenic armies, like those of modern Europe, consisted of men who had undergone a thorough initial training and were subsequently called up as required. Cavalry, as always in the broken country of the Peloponnesus, was not of great importance, and it is only when the theatre of Greek history is extended to the plains of Thessaly that the mounted men become numerous. In the 4th century the mainstay of Greek armies was the _hoplite_ ([Greek: hoplitaes]), the heavy-armed infantryman who fought in the _corps de bataille_; the light troops were men who could not provide the full equipment of the hoplite, rather than soldiers trained for certain special duties such as skirmishing. The fighting formation was that of the _phalanx_, a solid corps of hoplites armed with long spears. The armies were recruited for each war by calling up one or more classes of men in reserve according to age. It was the duty and privilege of the free citizen to bear arms; the slaves were rarely trusted with weapons. 4. _Sparta._--So much is common to the various states. In Sparta the idea of the nation in arms was more thoroughly carried out than in any other state in the history of civilization. In other states the individual citizen often lived the life of a soldier, here the nation lived the life of a regiment. Private homes resembled the "married quarters" of a modern army; the unmarried men lived entirely in barracks. Military exercises were only interrupted by actual service in the field, and the whole life of a man of military age was devoted to them. Under these circumstances, the Spartans maintained a practically unchallenged supremacy over the armies of other Greek states; sometimes their superiority was so great that, like the Spanish regulars in the early part of the Dutch War of Independence, they destroyed their enemies with insignificant loss to themselves. The surrender of a Spartan detachment, hopelessly cut off from all assistance, and the victory of a body of well-trained and handy light infantry over a closed battalion of Spartiates were events so unusual as seriously to affect the course of Greek history.