As the change took place at Athens, 42 then, the old Gentes were entirely broken up, except for certain ceremonial and religious purposes, and the free citizens were placed on the lands on certain localities of the territory without any topographical relation to their former position in the kinship clans. Except for the purposes of a few ritual usages, property in severalty took the place of corporate ownership, and the society of the ancient historical city was thus rendered complete as to its essentials: the federations of the cities so formed, such as the Doric and Ionian confederacies, had no tendency to consolidate into empires as in the East, but remained true federations, the units of which were still sovereign cities, and which developed no overlord destined to grow gradually into the despotic head of a quasi-bureaucratic system.24
The development of the native Italian cities, as distinguished from Greek colonies in Italy, was not in any essential respect different from that of 43 Athens, which may be regarded as the general type of the ancient classical city apart from the Dorian developments, which always retained some show of the ancient survivals.
In Rome, the most historically important of the native Italian cities, the very same resolution took place that we have described as to Athens. The first instalment of it was embodied in the legislation ascribed to “Servius Tullius,” which created the Centuries, political bodies based on the possession of property. These were thrust into the kinship groups, the Curiæ and tribes, and gradually assimilated the latter to their conditions. The bodies so formed became the free men or burgesses of early historical Rome. The plebs, which originally constituted the unprivileged free men, was, thus taken into the political system and attained a measure of privilege, the struggle for the increase of which forms the staple of Roman history for the next three centuries; these plebeian citizens at first were in the main the craftsmen of the city; slave-labour at that period apparently not 44 touching that side of production much. But from the first the idea of conquest was always dominant in