By a rare good fortune we have from Thucydides himself an account of the nature and extent of the city of Athens in the time of the kingship. This account is not indeed as explicit in detail as we could wish, but in general outline it is clear and vivid. To the scholar the remembrance of this account comes as a ray of light in his darkness. If he cannot find his way in the mazes of archaeological controversy, it is at least his business to read Thucydides and his hope to understand him. The account of primitive Athens is incidental. Thucydides is telling how, during the Peloponnesian War, when the enemy was mustering on the Isthmus and attack on Attica seemed imminent, Perikles advised the Athenians to desert their country homes and take refuge in the city. The Athenians were convinced by his arguments. They sent their sheep and cattle to Euboea and the islands; they pulled down even the wood-work of their houses, and themselves, with their wives, their children, and all their moveable property, migrated to Athens. But, says Thucydides[2], this ‘flitting’ went hard with them; and why? Because ‘they had always, most of them, been used to a country life.’ This habit of ‘living in the fields,’ this country life was, Thucydides goes on to explain, no affair of yesterday; it had been so from the earliest times. All through the days of the kingship from Kekrops to Theseus the people had lived scattered about in small communities—‘village communities’ we expect to hear him say, for he is insisting on the habit of country life; but, though he knows the word ‘village’ (κώμη) and employs it in discussing Laconia elsewhere[3], he does not use it here. He says the inhabitants of Athens lived ‘in towns’ (κατὰ πόλεις), or, as it would be safer to translate it, ‘in burghs.’ It is necessary at the outset to understand clearly what the word _polis_ here means. We use the word ‘town’ in contradistinction to country, but from the account of Thucydides it is clear that people could live in a _polis_ and yet lead a country life. Our word _city_ is still less appropriate; ‘city’ to us means a very large town, a place where people live crowded together. A _polis_, as Thucydides here uses the word, was a community of people living on and immediately about a fortified hill or citadel—a citadel-community. The life lived in such a community was essentially a country life. A _polis_ was a citadel, only that our word ‘citadel’ is over-weighted with military association. Athens then, in the days of Kekrops and the other kings down to Theseus, was one among many other citadel-communities or burghs. Like the other scattered burghs, like Aphidna, like Thoricus, like Eleusis, it had its own local government, its own council-house, its own magistrates. So independent were these citadel-communities that, Thucydides tells us, on one occasion Eleusis under Eumolpos actually made war on Athens under Erechtheus.