In the preceding chapters I have been under the necessity of presenting to the reader a picture altogether incoherent and destitute of central effect—to specify briefly each of the two or three hundred towns which agreed in bearing the Hellenic name, and to recount its birth and early life, as far as our evidence goes—but without being able to point out any action and reaction, exploits or sufferings, prosperity or misfortune, glory or disgrace, common to all. To a great degree, this is a characteristic inseparable from the history of Greece from its beginning to its end, for the only political unity which it ever receives is the melancholy unity of subjection under all-conquering Rome. Nothing short of force will efface in the mind of a free Greek the idea of his city as an autonomous and separate organization: the village is a fraction, but the city is an unit,—and the highest of all political units, not admitting of being consolidated with others into a ten or a hundred, to the sacrifice of its own separate and individual mark. Such is the character of the race, both in their primitive country and in their colonial settlements—in their early as well as in their late history—splitting by natural fracture into a multitude of self-administering, indivisible, cities.