As, on the one hand, a Greek will not consent to look for sovereign authority beyond the limits of his own city, so, on the other hand, he must have a city to look to: scattered villages will not satisfy in his mind the exigencies of social order, security, and dignity. Though the coalescence of smaller towns into a larger is repugnant to his feelings, that of villages into a town appears to him a manifest advance in the scale of civilization. Such, at least, is the governing sentiment of Greece throughout the historical period; for there was always a certain portion of the Hellenic aggregate—the rudest and least advanced among them—who dwelt in unfortified villages, and upon whom the citizen of Athens, Corinth, or Thebes, looked down as inferiors. Such village residence was the character of the Epirots[412] universally, and prevailed throughout Hellas itself, in those very early and even ante-Homeric times upon which Thucydidês looked back as deplorably barbarous;—times of universal poverty and insecurity,—absence of pacific intercourse,—petty warfare and plunder, compelling every man to pass his life armed,—endless migration without any local attachments. Many of the considerable cities of Greece are mentioned as aggregations of preëxisting villages, some of them in times comparatively recent. Tegea and Mantineia in Arcadia, represent, in this way, the confluence of eight villages, and five villages respectively; Dymê in Achaia was brought together out of eight villages, and Elis in the same manner, at a period even later than the Persian invasion;[413] the like seems to have happened with Megara and Tanagra. A large proportion of the Arcadians continued their village life down to the time of the battle of Leuktra, and it suited the purposes of Sparta to keep them thus disunited; a policy which we shall see hereafter illustrated by the dismemberment of Mantineia (into its primitive component villages), which Agesilaus carried into effect, but which was reversed as soon as the power of Sparta was no longer paramount,—as well as by the foundation of Megalopolis out of a large number of petty Arcadian towns and villages, one of the capital measures of Epameinondas.[414] As this measure was an elevation of Arcadian importance, so the reverse proceeding—the breaking up of a city into its elementary villages—was not only a sentence of privation and suffering, but also a complete extinction of Grecian rank and dignity. [412] Skylax, Peripl. c. 28-33; Thucyd. ii. 80. See Dio Chrysostom, Or. xlvii. p. 225, vol. ii. ed. Reisk,—μᾶλλον ἠροῦντο διοικεσῖσθαι κατὰ κώμας, τοῖς βαρβάροις ὁμοίους, ἢ σχῆμα πόλεως καὶ ὄνομα ἔχειν. [413] Strabo, viii. pp. 337, 342, 386; Pausan. viii. 45, 1; Plutarch, Quæst. Græc. c. 17-37. [414] Pausan. viii. 27, 2-5; Diod. xv. 72: compare Arist. Polit. ii. 1, 5.