“The patrician class that made up the officer corp of the Roman military, as wel

—“The patrician class that made up the officer corp of the Roman military, as well as the civilian leadership of their society during the Republican era lived in villas outside the city center.

They weren’t unlike knights who lived as small scale rural lords and had their station due to being able to maintain their accouterments, go on extended campaigns without financial ruin (because their wealth was based on ownership and not labor) and could provide additional soldiers from among the vassals in their patronage networks. Which is how Roman society was structured with patricians having a direct relationship with a particular constituency of plebs. Rome was not ruled by an “urban” population initially and it was noted by Romans themselves that their society had decayed when their ruling cohort became strictly urban and the patricians no longer had a direct connection to any particular constituency and whose wealth was self-perpetuating and non-generative.

The various Greek polis had many different systems and not all of them had an urbanized ruling coalition and they were also independent of each other. Athens had an urban ruling cohort but it was a maritime trading city built on a rocky peninsula. There almost wasn’t such a thing as a rural Athenian to have divergent interests with.

If New York was an independent city-state whose interests lay with maintaining relationships to people who could feed them and in maintaining its’ own class of defenders so as to not be conquered by this rural population its’ people and leadership would have a vastly different outlook. Ancient cities didn’t start out full of consumerist free riders, nor did rulers descend from such a cohort.”—