most typical instances of the development of city life, and as those of whom we have the most definite information.
With the period of the Homeric poems this civilisation of the classical peoples emerges from its prehistoric beginnings. In the literature of this period there are few indications on the surface of the barbaric group-society, although search reveals at least some of these, amongst which may be mentioned the account in the Iliad of the household of Priam, which seems to have been a complete and recognised Gens. Again, the end of the Odyssey, which appears from the modern literary point of view such a purposeless anti-climax, was once a history that the rhapsodist could not possibly evade, of the bloodfeud after the suitors, the slaying of whom, according to modern ideas of ancient manners, was a perfectly justifiable homicide. But in an earlier society it was not crime that had to be punished, but a tribal injury, which had to be atoned 39 for either by blood or the price of blood. Whatever the merits of the quarrel might have been, the ethics of kinship would compel the Gentes, to whom the slain men belonged, to follow up the feud to appeasement, which even in the present state of the text takes place in the Odyssey.
The remains of so-called cities, as at Mycenæ and Tyryns, turn out on investigation to have been the dwelling of the chieftain of the clan, or the burg, that is to say, the germ of the city of civilisation. The two typical forms of this city which went through a long development, very obscure at certain stages, are Lacedæmon and Athens. The former retained in its constitution a great part of the communal organisation, and even habits of the group-society, out of which it had grown. This is shown on one hand by the common dinner of the freemen, and the general tendency of the Lycurgan legislation, some of the instances of which have been so curiously misunderstood by later exponents, who saw in them mere artificial and arbitrary regulations having the conscious end of sustaining the warlike spirit of the citizens, 40 instead of being, as they were, survivals crystallised from the early stage of development. An obvious