The Classical nations, in accordance with the static-Euclidean soul of their Culture, were corporeal units of the smallest imaginable size. It was not Hellenes or Ionians that were nations, but in each city the Demos, a union of adult men, legally and _by the same token nationally_ defined between the type of the hero as upper limit and the slave as lower.[244] Synœcism, that mysterious process of early periods in which the inhabitants of a countryside give up their villages and assemble themselves as a town, marks the moment at which, having arrived at self-consciousness, the Classical nation constitutes itself as such. We can still trace the way in which this form of the nation steadily makes good from Homeric times[245] to the epoch of the great colonizations. It responds exactly to the Classical prime-symbol: each folk was a body, visible and surveyable, a σῶμα, the express negation of the idea of geographical space. It is of no importance to Classical history whether or not the Etruscans in Italy were identical physically or linguistically with the bearers of this name amongst the “Sea-peoples,” or what the relation was between the pre-Homeric units of the Pelasgi or Danai and the later bearers of the Doric or the Hellenic name. If, about 1100, there are Doric and Etruscan primitive peoples (as is probable), nevertheless _a Doric or an Etruscan nation never existed_. In Tuscany as in the Peloponnese there were only City-states, _national points_ which in the period of colonization _could only multiply, never expand_. The Etruscan wars of Rome were always waged against one or more cities,[246] and the nations that the Persians and the Carthaginians confronted were of this same type. To speak of “the Greeks and the Romans” as the eighteenth century did (and as we still do) is completely erroneous. A Greek “nation” in our sense is a misconception--the Greeks themselves never knew such an idea at all. The name of “Hellenes,” which arose about 500, did not denote a people, but the aggregate of Classical Culture-men, the _sum_ of their nations,[247] in contradistinction to the “Barbarian” world. And the Romans, a true urban people, could not conceive of their Empire otherwise than in the form of innumerable nation-points, the _civitates_ into which, juridically as in other respects, they dissolved all the primitive peoples of their Imperium.[248] When national feeling in _this_ shape is extinguished, there is an end to Classical history. It will be the task--one of the heaviest tasks of historians--to trace, generation by generation, the quiet fading-out of the Classical nations in the eastern Mediterranean during the “Late Classical” age, and the ever stronger inflow of a new nation-spirit, the Magian.