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Another less heroic expedient for bringing about a permanent entente between cities was the grant of isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship. In certain cases this was the concession of the passive rights of citizenship (civitas sine suffragio) to all citizens of a particular city who should take up residence in, or even merely visit, the territory of the grantor. Thus circumscribed, however, it amounted simply to an exchange of commercial privileges, and proved barren of political consequences in that each city reserved to itself complete control of its own policy, thus rendering impossible any advance in state building. It remained for the Romans to render this institution fruitful to an astonishing degree by making the legal exercise of Roman citizenship independent of migration to Rome.

Substantially the same result was achieved by the Greeks through what they termed sympolity, or joint citizenship. This was possessed from of old by rudimentary nations, like the Achæans and the Ætolians,ssss1 among whom the towns and hamlets had never become independent and self-sufficient political units; so that the inhabitants were Achæans from Ægium, or Achæans from Cerynia, or Achæans from some other of the ten so-called cities of which the Achæan nation or league was constituted. In like fashion the Ætolian hamlets had a double citizenship. An essential part of this scheme, evidently, was that each city had an equal voice in the election of the officials of the league and in the settlement of all federal matters. And so satisfactory a safeguard of urban autonomy did this prove to be that in the last half of the third century B.C. city after city in the Peloponnesus outside the ancient limits of Achæa took the irrevocable step of acquiring Achæan citizenship in addition to its own; while in Central Greece the Ætolians by fair means or foul bestowed a dual citizenship upon all their neighbors. Athens and Sparta alone persisted in their isolation, the former on the strength of an international guarantee of autonomy, the latter in stubborn reliance upon its own powers. The other city-states entrusted to an international board, not for a definite or indefinite term of years, but for all future time, complete control of their foreign relations. Each city put permanently the international authority between itself and the outside world, thus escaping individual danger by the surrender of individual diplomacy.ssss1