there was no parallel in Boeotia, was the hegemon. Subordination to a synod was offensive enough to city-states which regarded complete independence as alone ideal. It was intolerable to them to submit to a synod which its hegemon, Philip of Macedon, controlled,--one which could never have any one but the contemporary king of Macedon as its hegemon. The hegemony of Macedon was sugar-coated, but it was none the less an hegemony, and, as such, illegal and unacceptable.[10] A notable start in the direction of uniting city-states legally in a larger whole had been made by Athens during the epoch of her empire. She had then founded many colonies (_cleruchies_), which, though organized as separate cities, retained for their residents citizenship in Athens. Why not grant citizenship (_polity_) to the inhabitants of other cities as well? There were some, and among them the comedian Aristophanes,[11] who canvassed this idea. "Let us assume," he says, "that our city is a heap of wool, and that each of our allied cities is a fleck of wool. Let us take all the wool and spin it into yarn, and weave the yarn into a great blanket with which to protect our lord Demos against the cold." But for this drastic measure the times were not ripe. It was altogether repugnant to the pride of the Athenians to share with everybody advantages which they had sacrificed so much to acquire; and there was little in the advantages thus diluted to compensate other cities for the at least partial loss of identity which they were bound to sustain on acquiring Athenian citizenship. In the one instance in which this course was taken, the Samians, to whom Athens gave her full civic rights in the supreme agony of the Peloponnesian War, had both earned them and come to appreciate them by sacrificing their own territory rather than desert their ally. Another less heroic expedient for bringing about a permanent _entente_ between cities was the grant of _isopolity_, or reciprocity of citizenship. In certain cases this was the concession of the passive rights of citizenship (_civitas sine suffragio_) to all citizens of a particular city who should take up residence in, or even merely visit, the territory of the grantor. Thus circumscribed, however, it amounted simply to an exchange of commercial privileges, and proved barren of political consequences in that each city reserved to itself complete control of its own policy, thus rendering impossible any advance in state building. It remained for the Romans to render this institution fruitful to an astonishing degree by making the legal exercise of Roman citizenship independent of migration to Rome.