Village

Based on agriculture, fishing, trade, or mining small communities supported the growth of Greek city-states and the later Hellenic empires, providing every raw material needed. Villages only happen where there is something worth exploiting, and the best placed ones soon grow into larger towns. In the Greek world, such settlements could be as varied as the hamlets of the Spartan perioikoi, who helped keep the helots enslaved inside the state and acted as intermediaries with the outside world, to the "thousand golden cities" of Bactria which thrived on agriculture and flourishing trade in Asia Minor.