The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and MankindWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
To this we must ascribe the fact that there is no temple-state stage, no
stage of priest kings, in the Greek record. The Greeks got at once to
the city organization that in the east had grown round the temple. They
took over the association of temple and city; the idea was ready-made
for them. What impressed them most about the city was probably its wall.
It is doubtful if they took to city life and citizenship straight away.
At first they lived in open villages outside the ruins of the cities
they had destroyed, but there stood the model for them, a continual
suggestion. They thought first of a city as a safe place in a time of
strife, and of the temple uncritically as a proper feature of the city.
They came into this inheritance of a previous civilization with the
ideas and traditions of the woodlands still strong in their minds. The
heroic social system of the _Iliad_ took possession of the land, and
adapted itself to the new conditions. As history goes on the Greeks
became more religious and superstitious as the faiths of the conquered
welled up from below.[173]
We have already said that the social structure of the primitive Aryans
was a two-class system of nobles and commoners, the classes not very
sharply marked off from each other, and led in warfare by a king who was
simply the head of one of the noble families, _primus inter pares_, a
leader among his equals. With the conquest of the aboriginal population
and with the building of towns there was added to this simple social
arrangement of two classes a lower stratum of farm-workers and skilled
and unskilled workers, who were for the most part slaves. But all the
Greek communities were not of this “conquest” type. Some were “refugee”
cities representing smashed communities, and in these the aboriginal
substratum would be missing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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