They were wise enough, moreover, to perceive that not only were city institutions indispensable for an up-to-date polity--whence the Ætolians on forming their league in 322-314 B.C. abandoned their three ancient tribes and their multitudinous villages and organized in their stead a score or two of cities[129]--but also that their federal system must recognize and accept the preexistent city-states as its units. This, as we have seen,[130] had not been done in Boeotia or in the Hellenic league organized by Philip II, in each of which the federal synod, being constructed on the idea of representation according to population, made districts and not cities the units; so that the smaller cities felt themselves discriminated against and tended to rebel against being clubbed together. How far equality of cities prevailed among the Achæans it is impossible to say with certainty: we are simply informed that the voting there was by cities. But we are, I think, permitted to infer that the principle followed was "one city one vote." For it is unlikely that the old Achæan cities, on admitting Sicyon, Corinth, Megalopolis, and Argos, deliberately exposed themselves to the fate of the little lake cities in Boeotia by giving these large "foreign" cities voting power proportionate to their populations. This conclusion holds, I believe, both for the Achæan representative assembly, or synod, which was made up, seemingly, of successive fractions of the citizens of the constituent cities,[131] and for the Achæan primary assembly, or _syncletus_, which was open to all citizens over thirty years of age. It holds, too, it seems, for the two Ætolian assemblies, the ordinary and the extraordinary, which were both primary,[132] but not for the Ætolian council which was constituted of delegates apportioned to the constituent cities according to their size. The Achæan and the Ætolian leagues represent in this respect a reaction from the earlier leagues. Their hope was to change the stress of the cities, which came into play, from a centrifugal into a centripetal force by basing their federations squarely on the city-states.