Besides the political institutions of the ancient Greeks, some of the general conditions of their life may be noticed. They depended for their subsistence partly on their cattle and partly on the produce of the ground, and most of the poorer free men, not possessing slaves, lived in the country to tend their herds and till their lands. Some, who had no herds and no lands of their own, worked as labourers for hire[34]. The estates and the cattle of the kings and rich men were committed to the charge of slaves captured in war or in freebooting expeditions[35]. The kings and rich men themselves lived, not scattered over the open country after the fashion of the Germans described by Tacitus[36], but collected in cities. Thus at Ithaca the house of the king and the houses of the wooers of Penelope were all close together: for at the end of the first day in the story of the Odyssey the wooers "went each to his house to sleep[37]" and on the morrow at the dawn of day at the summons of the heralds they "came very quickly to the assembly[38]": Pylos, where Nestor lived, is called the gathering place and the abodes of the Pylians[39]: and, not to multiply instances, words denoting cities are regularly applied in the Homeric poems to the dwelling-places of the heroes. [34] _Odyssey_ XI. 489 θητευέμεν. [35] Grote's _Greece_, octavo edition vol. I. p. 487, cabinet edition vol. II. p. 98. [36] Tac. _Germ._ 16. Nullas Germanorum populis urbes habitari satis notum est, ne pati quidem inter se junctas sedes. Colunt discreti ac diversi, ut fons, ut campus, ut nemus placuit. [37] _Odyssey_ I. 424 κακκείοντες ἔβαν ϝοικόνδε ϝέκαστος. [38] _Odyssey_ II. 8 τοὶ δ' ἠγείροντο μάλ' ὦκα. [39] _Odyssey_ III. 31 Πυλίων ἀνδρῶν ἄγυρίν τε καὶ ἕδρας. The cities of the heroic age had, for their defence, in all cases a fortress or strong place of refuge close at hand, and some of them at least were entirely encircled with a wall. Argos lay at the foot of the steep isolated mountain of the Larissa which rose about a thousand feet above it: Corinth was under the still loftier Acrocorinthus; Mycenæ and Athens had each its Acropolis, a strong fortress built on a rock rising abruptly but to no great height above the town. That in some cases the lower city, as distinct from the Acropolis, had also its own outer wall is proved by the whole story of the siege of Troy, which shows that cities entirely enclosed in fortifications were well known to Homer[40].