Whereas modern life is very much a country life, and we see all our plains and hills studded with farmsteads and well kept houses, it was seldom so with ancient, as it is never so with modern, Greece. In old days the fear of pirates and plunderers, in later days the taste for talking and for politics, kept men from staying in the country, and brought them into the towns, where they found safety and society. The tyrants alone insisted upon country life. Thus we find in Homer that outlying farms belonging to the nobles were managed by trusty slaves, who grazed cattle, and stall-fed them for city use. In Hesiod’s time it was the poor farmer only who dwelt in the country; fashionable and idle people always came together in the towns. The very same facts meet us when we read the Greek novels of the latest age, such as the _Story of Daphnis and Chloe_. There the rich citizens of Mitylene only come out rarely, like many Irish landlords, to visit their tenants and their flocks. There are only two large instances of Greek gentry living from choice in the country. The first is that of the old Attic gentry, whom Thucydides and Aristophanes describe as living luxuriously on their estates, and coming seldom to Athens. The second is that of the gentry of Elis, who were often, Polybius says, complete strangers for generations to the town. This was so because Attica was protected by her forts and fleets from sudden attack in these early days, and because the Greeks by common consent respected the land of Elis as sacred on account of the Olympic games. Accordingly, Xenophon, who was a sportsman, settled in this country when he retired from his wars. But we must pay our chief attention to city life as the almost universal form of Greek society.