This sublime conception, which has become a permanent possession of the human race, was further elaborated into the picture of the world as a great city. The Greek πόλις, the state, whose equivalent in modern times is not civil but ecclesiastical, was an ideal society, the embodied type of a perfect constitution or organization (σύστημα).[389] Its parts were all interdependent and relative to the whole, the whole was flawless and supreme, working out without friction the divine conception which was expressed in its laws. The world was such an ideal society.[390] It consisted of gods and men: the former were its rulers; the latter, its citizens. The moral law was a reason inherent in human nature, prescribing what men should do, and forbidding what they should not do: human laws were but appendages of it.[391] In this sense man was a “citizen of the world.”[392] To each individual man, as to every other created being, the administrators had assigned a special task. “_Thou_ be Sun: thou hast the power to go on thy circuit and make the year and the seasons, to make fruits grow and ripen, to stir and lull the winds, to warm the bodies of men: go thy way, make thy circuit, and so fulfil thy ministry alike in small things and in great.... _Thou_ hast the power to lead the army to Ilium: be Agamemnon. _Thou_ hast the power to fight in combat with Hector: be Achilles.” To this function of administration the gods were limited. The constitution of the great city was unchangeable. The gods, like men, were, in the Stoical conception, bound by the conditions of things. “That which is best of all things and supreme,” says Epictetus, “have the gods placed in our power—the faculty of rightly dealing with ideas: all other things are out of our power. Is it that they would not? I for my part think that if they had been able they would have placed the other things also in our power; but they absolutely could not.... For what says Zeus? ‘Epictetus, if it had been possible, I would have made thy body and thy possessions free and unhindered. But as it is, forget not that thy body is not thine, but only clay deftly kneaded. And since I could not do this, I gave thee a part of myself, the power of making or not making effort, the power of indulging or not indulging desire; in short, the power of dealing with all the ideas of thy mind.’”[393]