Aside from the causes already assigned, the want of political union among the Greeks may be ascribed to a natural and mutual jealousy, which, in the language of Mr. Thirlwall, "stifled even the thought of a confederacy" that might have prevented internal wars and saved Greece from foreign dominion. This jealousy the institutions to which we have referred could not remove; and it was heightened by the great diversity of the forms of government that existed in the Grecian states. As another writer has well observed, "The independent sovereignty of each city was a fundamental notion in the Greek mind. The patriotism of a Greek was confined to his city, and rarely kindled into any general love for the welfare of Hellas. So complete was the political division between the Greek cities, that the citizen of one was an alien and a stranger in the territory of another. He was not merely debarred from all share in the government, but he could not acquire property in land or houses, nor contract a marriage with a native woman, nor sue in the courts except through the medium of a friendly citizen. The cities thus repelling each other, the sympathies and feelings of a Greek became more central in his own." In view of these conditions it is not surprising that Greece never enjoyed political unity; and just here was her great and suicidal weakness. The Romans reduced various races, in habitual war with one another and marked by variations of dialect and customs, into a single government, and kept them there; but the Greeks, though possessing a common inheritance, a common language, a common religion, and a common type of character, of manners, and of aspirations, allowed all these common interests, that might have created an indissoluble political union, to be subordinated to mutual jealousies--to an "exclusive patriotism" that rendered it difficult for them to unite even under circumstances of common and terrible danger. "It was this political disunion that always led them to turn their arms against one another, and eventually subjected them to the power of Macedon and of Rome." CHAPTER IV. SPARTA, AND THE LEGISLATION OF LYCURGUS. Spread on Eurotas' bank, Amid a circle of soft rising hills, The patient Sparta stood; the sober, hard, And man-subduing city; which no shape Of pain could conquer, nor of pleasure charm. Lycurgus there built, on the solid base Of equal life, so well a tempered state, That firm for ages, and unmoved, it stood The fort of Greece! --THOMSON.