_Note._ I do not venture to follow Fynes Clinton (_Fasti Hellenici_ vol. I. Appendix, chapter 6, page 337) in giving precise dates for the important reign of Theopompus and Polydorus and for the Messenian wars, because the passages which he quotes are taken from authors who lived after Myron of Prienê and who may have relied on his romances. There are however two genealogies of Spartan kings (Herodotus VII. 204 and VIII. 131) which compel us, unless we assume either that in one royal house the generations were extravagantly long or that in the other they were abnormally short, to place the beginning of the joint reign of the two kings not earlier than 730 B.C., and its end not later than 650 B.C. We shall probably be right in placing the first Messenian war somewhere before 700 B.C. and in the reign of Theopompus and Polydorus: the second war may be placed somewhere between 680 B.C. and 650 B.C.: but further precision seems to be unattainable. CHAPTER V. THE GREEK CITIES. I have already stated that between 650 B.C. and 338 B.C. the Greek communities with the exception of Sparta are to be classed as city states, or communities in which a walled city is of supreme importance and the rural districts count for very little. It seems right to place the beginning of the city states so early as 650 B.C., because at that time three out of the four communities of which we have records were ruled oppressively by bodies of magnates who lived in the cities or close to them, and who owed their power to the protection of the city walls and to the facilities for concerted action which they gained from living close to a common centre. It must however be admitted that the evidence of the great importance of the cities is not so clear at the early date which I have named as it is a century later, in the age of the tyrants. The examination of the political institutions of the Greek cities will be divided into four parts: I. The early aristocracies and oligarchies; II. The tyrannies; III. The democracies and the later oligarchies; IV. The conquest of Greece by Macedonia. I. _The early aristocracies and oligarchies._ Before the year 650 B.C. the heroic monarchies had ceased to exist in all the more important Greek peoples and other governments had taken their place. Of the process of the change from the old tribal system to other systems we have no contemporary records in any case: and traditions even of a later date are absent except in regard to Corinth, Megara, Athens and Argos.