When this poor class, after several civil wars, saw that victories gained them nothing, that the opposite party always returned to power, and that, a… - Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

Thus the ancient city was transformed by degrees. In the beginning it was an association of some hundred chiefs of families. Later the number of citizens increased, because the younger branches obtained a position of equality. Later still, the freed clients, the plebs, all that multitude which during centuries had remained outside the political and religious association, sometimes even outside the sacred enclosure of the city, broke down the barriers which were opposed to them, and penetrated into the city, where they immediately became the masters.

The ancient city, like all human society, had ranks, distinctions, and inequalities. We know the distinction originally made at Athens between the Eupatnids and the Thetes; at Sparta we find the class of Equals and that of the Inferiors; and in Euboea, that of the Knights and that of the People. The history of Rome is full, of the struggles between the Patricians and Plebeians, struggles that we find in all the Sabine, Latin, and Etruscan cities. We can even remark that the higher we ascend in the history of Greece and, Italy the more profound and the more strongly marked the distinction appears — a positive proof that the inequality did not grow up with time, but that it existed from the beginning, and that it was contemporary with the birth of cities.

It is a strong proof of the antiquity of this belief, and of these practices, to find them at the same time among men on the shores of the Mediterranean and among those of the peninsula of India. Assuredly the Greeks did not borrow this religion from the Hindus, nor the Hindus from the Greeks. But the Greeks, the Italians, and the Hindus belonged to the same race; their ancestors, in a very distant past, lived together in Central Asia. There this creed originated and these rites were established. The religion of the sacred fire dates, therefore, from the distant and dim epoch when there were yet no Greeks, no Italians, no Hindus; when there were only Aryas. When the tribes separated they carried this worship with them, some to the banks of the Ganges, others to the shores of the Mediterranean. Later, when these tribes had no intercourse with each other, some adored Brahma, others Zeus, and still others Janus; each group chose its own gods; but all preserved, as an ancient legacy, the first religion which they had known and practiced in the common cradle of their race.