774 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
which differentiation in the interior the empire has facilitated by removing farther and farther the regions exposed to warfare. Thus the almost certain voyages of the Phoenicians around Africa are forgotten ; Africa is considered to be attached to the south of of Asia. It takes several centuries to blot out this error and to establish there the inter-continental traffic.
If we now enter into the details of this Grseco- Roman evolu- tion, the tradition of which forms a part of our own inheritance, we must consider some most interesting facts in respect to the special problem of the social frontiers.
The ancient city was formed through the association of still simpler forms. Tribes, curia, and gentes at Rome are analogous to the same primitive groups in the formation of the Greek city. The ancient city was a confederation whose constituent elements embraced these previous group formations. Each city was strictly closed. "Between two neighboring towns," says Fustel de Coulanges, "there was something more insurmountable than a mountain. It was the tract of sacred boundaries; it was the difference of the cults ; it was the barrier which each town erected between the stranger and its gods."
In reality there are no other frontiers than the social frontiers, whose ethnical and geographical character furnishes but insuffi- cient particular elements for serving as a base for a scientific theory. There were no mountains between Thebes and Plataeae, between Argos and Sparta, between Sybaris and Croton, as little as between the twelve towns of Etruria and those of Latium. To assume a physical, or even simply a fortified, frontier seems a sign of weakness. Sparta, like Berlin, does not possess any forti- fications; it is a military city; Athens, a relatively peaceful and commercial city, surrounds itself with walls, like Antwerp.
However, contrary to the idea of Fustel de Coulanges, it was not primarily the cult that constituted the social and autonomic frontier of the city. This was, above all, conceived as a domain, as an estate with boundaries. Religion, especially the cult of the ancestral manes, was superposed upon this economic conception, and by connecting in an ideal way the present with the past it made of the city the domain inherited from the forefathers, in
