The description of the διοίκισις of Mantineia is in Xenophon,
Hellen. v. 2, 6-8: it is a flagrant example of his philo-Laconian
bias. We see by the case of the Phokians after the Sacred War,
(Diodor. xvi. 60; Pausan. x. 3, 2,) how heavy a punishment
this διοίκισις was. Compare, also, the instructive speech of
the Akanthian envoy Kleigenês, at Sparta, when he invoked
the Lacedæmonian interference for the purpose of crushing
the incipient federation, or junction of towns into a common
political aggregate, which was growing up round Olynthus (Xen.
Hellen. v. 2, 11-2). The wise and admirable conduct of Olynthus,
and the reluctance of the neighboring cities to merge themselves
in this union, are forcibly set forth; also, the interest of
Sparta in keeping all the Greek towns disunited. Compare the
description of the treatment of Capua by the Romans (Livy, xxvi.
16).
The Ozolian Lokrians, the Ætolians, and the Akarnanians maintained
their separate village residence down to a still later period,
preserving along with it their primitive rudeness and disorderly
pugnacity.[415] Their villages were unfortified, and defended only
by comparative inaccessibility; in case of need, they fled for
safety with their cattle into the woods and mountains. Amidst such
inauspicious circumstances, there was no room for that expansion
of the social and political feelings to which protected intramural
residence and increased numbers gave birth; there was no consecrated
acropolis or agora,—no ornamented temples and porticos, exhibiting
the continued offerings of successive generations,[416]—no theatre
for music or recitation, no gymnasium for athletic exercises,—none
of those fixed arrangements, for transacting public business with
regularity and decorum, which the Greek citizen, with his powerful
sentiment of locality, deemed essential to a dignified existence.
The village was nothing more than a fraction and a subordinate,
appertaining as a limb to the organized body called the city. But
the city and the state are in his mind, and in his language, one
and the same. While no organization less than the city can satisfy
the exigencies[417] of an intelligent freeman, the city is itself a
perfect and self-sufficient whole, admitting no incorporation into
any higher political unity. It deserves notice that Sparta, even
in the days of her greatest power, was not (properly speaking) a
city, but a mere agglutination of five adjacent villages, retaining
unchanged its old-fashioned trim: for the extreme defensibility of
its frontier and the military prowess of its inhabitants, supplied
the absence of walls, while the discipline imposed upon the Spartan,
exceeded in rigor and minuteness anything known in Greece. And thus
Sparta, though less than a city in respect to external appearance,
was more than a city in respect to perfection of drilling and fixity
of political routine. The contrast between the humble appearance
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