Emergence 3.0
A Novel – In One Page Per Day
Day 146, Saturday
May 26th, 2018
Chapter Six: State
The cities gathered towns and villages to themselves, expanding and
absorbing them, pulling their people away from their homes, relocating them in
the urban centers. Cities did this just as clans and tribes had done with families
and kin in past ages.
The bonds that formed were weaker than family bonds. Individually they
were weak and flimsy, but like the spokes of wheel, together they supported a
structure of great strength, capable of extraordinary movement, Like the spokes
of a wheel, both radiating from the center and supporting the outer frame.
In the urban core social power concentrated in the hands of the few, the
elite and the strong, the wealthy...the cunning.
The poor and the newly arrived, if they were free citizens they needed
representation.
The majority of those living in the urban centers were enslaved, either
owned as private property, or they were they property of the state, its
institutions and its temples, they belonged ot the war machine.
The free people needed sponsorship, the poor enjoined relationships with
the rich, they became clients to their patrons, and these new bonds became
formalized into extra-familial systems of societal structure.
This was a new version of a family, famiglia
only loosely related to blood ties. Inter marriage and progeny strengthened these
bonds, but they were not required.
These were the ancient bonds of vassalage.
They were bonds of the imagination, and bonds of determination. They
were bonds of circumstance, and will, not happenstance or hereditary accident.
They were forged by choices.
The cities became states, and in the cauldrons of statehood the
relationships between all things and beings were redefined and refined.
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