CHAP. X - NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND FORMS OF GOVERNMENT

Summary

The series of migrations and conquests by which the Thessalians, Bœotians, and Dorians became masters of the countries which they finally occupied, was attended by changes of two kinds, one affecting the internal condition of Greece itself, the other the foreign lands in which the numerous colonies, which received their first impulse from the revolutions of the mother country, successively settled. We shall take a review of the colonies in another chapter; in the present we will notice some of the most important effects produced by the above-mentioned causes on the state of Greece. This subject will fall under two heads: we shall first consider some national institutions, which either sprang up in this new period, or assumed a new character in it; and shall then enquire into the political changes which took place within particular states, in the interval between the Return of the Heracleids, and the time when we shall see Greece first engaged in a struggle with Persia.

We have hitherto made scarcely any mention of institutions tending to embody the Greeks in one nation. In the Trojan expedition indeed, as it is described by Homer, we see them united by a common language, a common religion, and a common enterprise. The former two were permanent bonds of union; but the latter was an accidental and transitory one: nor does the poet indicate any which could supply its place.