Socialism (1893) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE FIRST HISTORICAL OR ANCIENT SOCIETY A NCIENT barbarism developed naturally into Ancient Civilisation, which, as the name implies, took the form of city life. This development was furthered by the fact that, when the tribes began to settle, those dwellings throve most which were naturally protected by the lie of the land, so that the anxiety for the safeguarding of the wealth of the community was not constantly pressing. And these best protected and consequently most thriving places became the nuclei of the great cities of antiquity, such as Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Jerusalem, Corinth, Athens, Rome, etc. Babylon, by the way, if theaccepted measurements of its walls are anywhere near correctness, seems to have been rather a walled-round district than what we should now call a city, and may therefore be considered a very direct development from the stockaded home- field of the tribal group. As the tribe or people settled, there was a tendency towards a further development of the cultus of the ancestor, which gradually fixed his imagined deeds and tomb in a certain locality. The sanctity of this place made it the centre of the life of the community, and the members of the groups, which were now increasing in numbers, flocked to it for common worship and intercourse, as well as for protection. This greater centralisation tended to obscure the lesser centres (the clan, tribe, etc.), and at last left them rudimentary, mere local names, sometimes with religious rites attached to them.1 The arts of building which began with 1 The great Epos of Troy, in which the Holy City plays such a central and predominating part, is a good illustration of this growth of the burg into the city, and it may be noted that the Holy City was the centre of the Hellenes of Asia, w...