Sparta adhered with singular tenacity to the code of Lycurgus; and the Athenians, while they advanced from step to step in the development of a democracy, were bent on realizing the ideal they had set before them.
Religion, which in Greece, owing to its local and genealogical character, was favorable to this stability, proved in Italy one of the most potent causes of disorder.

The Greek city grew up under the protection of a local deity, whose blood had been transmitted in many instances to the chief families of the burgh.

This ancestral god gave independence and autonomy to the State; and when the Nomothetes appeared, he was understood to have interpreted and formulated the inherent law that animated the body politic.

Thus the commonwealth was a divinely founded and divinely directed organism, self-sufficing, with no dependence upon foreign sanction, with no question of its right.

The Italian cities, on the contrary, derived their law from the common _jus_ of the Imperial system, their religion from the common font of Christianity.