Substantially the same result was achieved by the Greeks through what they termed _sympolity_, or joint citizenship. This was possessed from of old by rudimentary nations, like the Achæans and the Ætolians,[12] among whom the towns and hamlets had never become independent and self-sufficient political units; so that the inhabitants were Achæans from Ægium, or Achæans from Cerynia, or Achæans from some other of the ten so-called cities of which the Achæan nation or league was constituted. In like fashion the Ætolian hamlets had a double citizenship. An essential part of this scheme, evidently, was that each city had an equal voice in the election of the officials of the league and in the settlement of all federal matters. And so satisfactory a safeguard of urban autonomy did this prove to be that in the last half of the third century B.C. city after city in the Peloponnesus outside the ancient limits of Achæa took the irrevocable step of acquiring Achæan citizenship in addition to its own; while in Central Greece the Ætolians by fair means or foul bestowed a dual citizenship upon all their neighbors. Athens and Sparta alone persisted in their isolation, the former on the strength of an international guarantee of autonomy, the latter in stubborn reliance upon its own powers. The other city-states entrusted to an international board, not for a definite or indefinite term of years, but for all future time, complete control of their foreign relations. Each city put permanently the international authority between itself and the outside world, thus escaping individual danger by the surrender of individual diplomacy.[13] In this way arose what by the general consent of historians and jurists is the most perfect state which antiquity produced. The antinomy between the city-state and the imperial spirit which had existed for centuries was reduced to a minimum by the nice balance of the federal system. There were defects in the Achæan and Ætolian leagues which their statesmen did not remove. "Equality," says Aristotle, "is just, but only between equals." The cities which had an equal voice in the international board, like the modern nations which cast a vote each at the Hague Congress, were unequal in population and in wealth. The Achæans and Ætolians came nearer than any ancient republicans to entrusting power to representatives; but, besides creating a large legislative council, constituted in successive years, in the one case, of different fractions of the citizens of each city, and in the other, of deputies apportioned to the constituent cities according to their size, they showed the ingrained distrust held by all Greeks for oligarchy by requiring the reference to a general assembly of all matters of high importance. How to satisfy the just claims of those whom distance or lack of leisure prevented from coming to the meeting-place, they did not discover.