Early condition of Grecian Tribes.—Organized into Gentes.—Changes in the Character of the Gens.—Necessity for a Political System.—Problem to be Solved.—The Formation of a State.—Grote’s Description of the Grecian Gentes.—Of Their Phratries and Tribes.—Attributes of the Gens.—Similar to those of the Iroquois Gentes.—The Office of Chief of the Gens.—Whether Elective or Hereditary.—The Gens the Basis of the Social System.—Antiquity of the Gentile Lineage.—Inheritance of Property.—Archaic and Final Rule.—Relationships between the Members of a Gens.—The Gens the Centre of Social and Religious Influence.
Civilization may be said to have commenced among the Asiatic Greeks with the composition of the Homeric poems about 850 B. C.; and among the European Greeks about a century later with the composition of the Hesiodic poems. Anterior to these epochs, there was a period of several thousand years during which the Hellenic tribes were advancing through the Later Period of barbarism, and preparing for their entrance upon a civilized career. Their most ancient traditions find them already established in the Grecian peninsula, upon the eastern border of the Mediterranean, and upon the intermediate and adjacent islands. An older branch of the same stock, of which the Pelasgians were the chief representatives, had preceded them in the occupation of the greater part of these areas, and were in time either Hellenized by them, or forced into emigration. The anterior condition of the Hellenic tribes and of their predecessors, must be deduced from the arts and inventions which they brought down from the previous period, from the state of development of their language, from their traditions and from their social institutions, which severally survived into the period of civilization. Our discussion will be restricted, in the main, to the last class of facts.
Pelasgians and Hellenes alike were organized in gentes, phratries234 and tribes; and the latter united by coalescence into nations. In some cases the organic series was not complete. Whether in tribes or nations their government rested upon the gens as the unit of organization, and resulted in a gentile society or a people, as distinguished from a political society or a state. The instrument of government was a council of chiefs, with the co-operation of an agora or assembly of the people, and of a basileus or military commander. The people were free, and their institutions democratical. Under the influence of advancing ideas and wants the gens had passed out of its archaic into its ultimate form. Modifications had been forced upon it by the irresistible demands of an improving society; but, notwithstanding the concessions made, the failure of the gentes to meet these wants was constantly becoming more apparent. The changes were limited, in the main, to three particulars: firstly, descent was changed to the male line; secondly, intermarriage in the gens was permitted in the case of female orphans and heiresses; and thirdly, children had gained an exclusive inheritance of their father’s property. An attempt will elsewhere be made to trace these changes, briefly, and the causes by which they were produced.
The Hellenes in general were in fragmentary tribes, presenting the same characteristics in their form of government as the barbarous tribes in general, when organized in gentes and in the same stage of advancement. Their condition was precisely such as might have been predicted would exist under gentile institutions, and therefore presents nothing remarkable.
When Grecian society came for the first time under historical observation, about the first Olympiad (776 B. C.) and down to the legislation of Cleisthenes (509 B. C.), it was engaged upon the solution of a great problem. It was no less than a fundamental change in the plan of government, involving a great modification of institutions. The people were seeking to transfer themselves out of gentile society, in which they had lived from time immemorial, into political society based upon territory and upon property, which had become essential to a career of civilization. In fine, they were striving to establish a state, the first in the experience of the Aryan family, and to place it upon a territorial foundation, such as the state has occupied from that time to the present. Ancient society rested upon an organization of persons, and was governed through the relations of persons to a gens and tribe; but the Grecian tribes were outgrowing this old plan of government, and began to feel the necessity of a political system. To accomplish this result it was only necessary to invent a deme or township, circumscribed with boundaries, to christen it with a name, and organize the people therein as a body politic. The township, with the fixed property it contained, and with the people who inhabited it for the time being, was to become the unit of organization in the new plan of government. Thereafter the gentilis, changed into a citizen, would be dealt with by the state through his territorial relations, and not through his personal relations to a gens. He would be enrolled in the deme of his residence, which enrollment was the evidence of his citizenship; would vote and be taxed in his deme; and from it be called into the military service. Although apparently a simple idea, it required centuries of time and a complete revolution of pre-existing conceptions of government to accomplish the result. The gens, which had so long been the unit of a social system, had proved inadequate, as before suggested, to meet the requirements of an advancing society. But to set this organization aside, together with the phratry and tribe, and substitute a number of fixed areas, each with its community of citizens, was, in the nature of the case, a measure of extreme difficulty. The relations of the individual to his gens, which were personal, had to be transferred to the township and become territorial; the demarch of the township taking, in some sense, the place of the chief of the gens. A township with its fixed property would be permanent, and the people therein sufficiently so; while the gens was a fluctuating aggregate of persons, more or less scattered, and now growing incapable of permanent establishment in a local circumscription. Anterior to experience, a township, as the unit of a political system, was abstruse enough to tax the Greeks and Romans to the depths of their capacities before the conception was formed and set in practical operation. Property was the new element that had been gradually remoulding Grecian institutions to prepare the way for political society, of which it was to be the mainspring as well as the foundation. It was no easy task to accomplish such a fundamental change, however simple and obvious it may now seem; because all the previous experience of the Grecian tribes had been identified with the gentes whose powers were to be surrendered to the new political bodies.
Several centuries elapsed, after the first attempts were made to found the new political system, before the problem was solved. After experience had demonstrated that the gentes were incapable of forming the basis of a state, several distinct schemes of legislation were tried in the various Grecian communities, who copied more or less each other’s experiments, all tending to the same result. Among the Athenians, from whose experience the chief illustrations will be drawn, may be mentioned the legislation of Theseus, on the authority of tradition; that of Draco (624 B. C.); that of Solon (594 B. C.); and that of Cleisthenes (509 B. C.), the last three of which were within the historical period. The development of municipal life and institutions, the aggregation of wealth in walled cities, and the great changes in the mode of life thereby produced, prepared the way for the overthrow of gentile society, and for the establishment of political society in its place.
Before attempting to trace the transition from gentile into political society, with which the closing history of the gentes is identified, the Grecian gens and its attributes will be first considered.
Athenian institutions are typical of Grecian institutions in general, in whatever relates to the constitution of the gens and tribe, down to the end of ancient society among them. At the commencement of the historical period, the Ionians of Attica were subdivided, as is well known, into four tribes (Geleontes, Hopletes, Aegicores, and Argades), speaking the same dialect, and occupying a common territory. They had coalesced into a nation as distinguished from a confederacy of tribes; but such a confederacy had probably existed in anterior times.235 Each Attic tribe was composed of three phratries, and each phratry of thirty gentes, making an aggregate of twelve phratries, and of three hundred and sixty gentes in the four tribes. Such is the general form of the statement, the fact being constant with respect to the number of tribes, and the number of phratries in each, but liable to variation in the number of gentes in each phratry. In like manner the Dorians were generally found in three tribes (Hylleis, Pamphyli, and Dymanes), although forming a number of nationalities; as at Sparta, Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, Epidaurus and Troezen; and beyond the Peloponnesus at Megara, and elsewhere. One or more non-Dorian tribes were found in some cases united with them, as at Corinth, Sicyon and Argos.
In all cases the Grecian tribe presupposes the gentes, the bond of kin and of dialect forming the basis upon which they united in a tribe; but the tribe did not presuppose the phratry, which, as an intermediate organization, although very common among all these tribes, was liable to be intermitted. At Sparta, there were subdivisions of the tribes called obês (ὠβαί), each tribe containing ten, which were analogous to phratries; but concerning the functions of these organizations some uncertainty prevails.236
The Athenian gentes will now be considered as they appeared in their ultimate form and in full vitality; but with the elements of an incipient civilization arrayed against them, before which they were yielding step by step, and by which they were to be overthrown with the social system they created. In some respects it is the most interesting portion of the history of this remarkable organization, which had brought human society out of savagery, and carried it through barbarism into the early stages of civilization.
The social system of the Athenians exhibits the following series: first, the gens (γένος) founded upon kin; second, the phratry (φράτρα and φρατρία), a brotherhood of gentes derived by segmentation, probably, from an original gens; third, the tribe (φῦλον, later φυλὴ), composed of several phratries, the members of which spoke the same dialect; and fourth, a people or nation, composed of several tribes united by coalescence into one gentile society, and occupying the same territory. These integral and ascending organizations exhausted their social system under the gentes, excepting the confederacy of tribes occupying independent territories, which, although it occurred in some instances in the early period and sprang naturally out of gentile institutions, led to no important results. It is likely that the four Athenian tribes confederated before they coalesced, the last occurring after they had collected in one territory under pressure from other tribes. If true of them, it would be equally true of the Dorian and other tribes. When such tribes coalesced into a nation, there was no term in the language to express the result, beyond a national name. The Romans, under very similar institutions, styled themselves the Populus Romanus, which expressed the fact exactly. They were then simply a people, and nothing more; which was all that could result from an aggregation of gentes, curiæ and tribes. The four Athenian tribes formed a society or people, which became completely autonomous in the legendary period under the name of the Athenians. Throughout the early Grecian communities, the gens phratry and tribe were constant phenomena of their social systems, with the occasional absence of the phratry.
Mr. Grote has collected the principal facts with respect to the Grecian gentes with such critical ability that they cannot be presented in a more authoritative manner than in his own language, which will be quoted where he treats the subject generally. After commenting upon the tribal divisions of the Greeks, he proceeds as follows: “But the Phratries and Gentes are a distribution completely different from this. They seem aggregations of small primitive unities into larger; they are independent of, and do not presuppose, the tribe; they arise separately and spontaneously, without preconcerted uniformity, and without reference to a common political purpose; the legislator finds them pre-existing, and adapts or modifies them to answer some national scheme. We must distinguish the general fact of the classification, and the successive subordination in the scale, of the families to the gens, of the gentes to the phratry, and of the phratries to the tribe—from the precise numerical symmetry with which this subordination is invested, as we read it,—thirty families to a gens, thirty gentes to a phratry, three phratries to each tribe. If such nice equality of numbers could ever have been procured, by legislative constraint, operating upon pre-existent natural elements, the proportions could not have been permanently maintained. But we may reasonably doubt whether it did ever so exist.... That every phratry contained an equal number of gentes, and every gens an equal number of families, is a supposition hardly admissible without better evidence than we possess. But apart from this questionable precision of numerical scale, the Phratries and Gentes themselves were real, ancient, and durable associations among the Athenian people, highly important to be understood. The basis of the whole was the house, hearth, or family,—a number of which, greater or less, composed the Gens or Genos. This gens was therefore a clan, sept, or enlarged, and partly factitious, brotherhood, bound together by,—1. Common religious ceremonies, and exclusive privilege of priesthood, in honor of the same god, supposed to be the primitive ancestor, and characterized by a special surname. 2. By a common burial place.237 3. By mutual rights of succession to property. 4. By reciprocal obligations of help, defense, and redress of injuries. 5. By mutual right and obligation to intermarry in certain determinate cases, especially where there was an orphan daughter or heiress. 6. By possession, in some cases, at least, of common property, an archon and treasurer of their own. Such were the rights and obligations characterizing the gentile union. The phratric union, binding together several gentes, was less intimate, but still included some mutual rights and obligations of an analogous character; especially a communion of particular sacred rites, and mutual privileges of prosecution in the event of a phrator being slain. Each phratry was considered as belonging to one of the four tribes, and all the phratries of the same tribe enjoyed a certain periodical communion of sacred rites under the presidency of a magistrate called the Phylo-Basileus or tribe-king selected from the Eupatrids.”238
The similarities between the Grecian and the Iroquois gens will at once be recognized. Differences in characteristics will also be perceived, growing out of the more advanced condition of Grecian society, and a fuller development of their religious system. It will not be necessary to verify the existence of the several attributes of the gens named by Mr. Grote, as the proof is plain in the classical authorities. There were other characteristics which doubtless pertained to the Grecian gens, although it may be difficult to establish the existence of all of them; such as: 7. The limitation of descent to the male line; 8. The prohibition of intermarriage in the gens excepting in the case of heiresses; 9. The right of adopting strangers into the gens; and 10. The right of electing and deposing its chiefs.
The rights, privileges and obligations of the members of the Grecian gens may be recapitulated, with the additions named, as follows:
A brief reference to the added characteristics should be made.
7. The limitation of descent to the male line. There is no doubt that such was the rule, because it is proved by their genealogies. I have not been able to find in any Greek author a definition of a gens or of a gentilis that would furnish a sufficient test of the right of a given person to the gentile connection. Cicero, Varro and Festus have defined the Roman gens and gentilis, which were strictly analogous to the Grecian, with sufficient fullness to show that descent was in the male line. From the nature of the gens, descent was either in the female line or the male, and included but a moiety of the descendants of the founder. It is precisely like the family among ourselves. Those who are descended from the males bear the family name, and they constitute a gens in the full sense of the term, but in a state of dispersion, and without any bond of union excepting those nearest in degree. The females lose, with their marriage, the family name, and with their children are transferred to another family. Grote remarks that Aristotle was the “son of the physician Nikomachus who belonged to the gens of the Asklepiads.”239 Whether Aristotle was of the gens of his father depends upon the further question whether they both derived their descent from Aesculapius, through males exclusively. This is shown by Laertius, who states that “Aristotle was the son of Nikomachus ... and Nikomachus was descended from Nikomachus the son of Machaon, the son of Aesculapius.”240 Although the higher members of the series may be fabulous, the manner of tracing the descent would show the gens of the person. The statement of Hermann, on the authority of Isaeus, is also to the point. “Every infant was registered in the phratria and clan (γένος) of its father.”241 Registration in the gens of the father implies that his children were of his gens.
8. The obligation not to marry in the gens excepting in specified cases. This obligation may be deduced from the consequences of marriage. The wife by her marriage lost the religious rites of her gens, and acquired those of her husband’s gens. The rule is stated as so general as to imply that marriage was usually out of the gens. “The virgin who quits her father’s house,” Wachsmuth remarks, “is no longer a sharer of the paternal sacrificial hearth, but enters the religious communion of her husband, and this gave sanctity to the marriage tie.”242 The fact of her registration is stated by Hermann as follows: “Every newly married woman, herself a citizen, was on this account enrolled in the phratry of her husband.”243 Special religious rites (sacra gentilicia) were common in the Grecian and Latin gens. Whether the wife forfeited her agnatic rights by her marriage, as among the Romans, I am unable to state. It is not probable that marriage severed all connection with her gens, and the wife doubtless still counted herself of the gens of her father.
The prohibition of intermarriage in the gens was fundamental in the archaic period; and it undoubtedly remained after descent was changed to the male line, with the exception of heiresses and female orphans for whose case special provision was made. Although a tendency to free marriage, beyond certain degrees of consanguinity, would follow the complete establishment of the monogamian family, the rule requiring persons to marry out of their own gens would be apt to remain so long as the gens was the basis of the social system. The special provision in respect to heiresses tends to confirm this supposition. Becker remarks upon this question, that “relationship was, with trifling limitations, no hinderance to marriage, which could take place within all degrees of [ἀγχιστεία Greek: agchisteia], or συγγένεια, though naturally not in the [γένος Greek: genos] itself.”244
9. The right to adopt strangers into the gens. This right was practiced at a later day, at least in families; but it was done with public formalities, and was doubtless limited to special cases.245 Purity of lineage became a matter of high concern in the Attic gentes, interposing no doubt serious obstacles to the use of the right except for weighty reasons.
10. The right to elect and depose its chiefs. This right undoubtedly existed in the Grecian gentes in the early period. Presumptively it was possessed by them while in the Upper Status of barbarism. Each gens had its archon (ἀρχὸς), which was the common name for a chief. Whether the office was elective, for example, in the Homeric period, or was transmitted by hereditary right to the eldest son, is a question. The latter was not the ancient theory of the office; and a change so great and radical, affecting the independence and personal rights of all the members of the gens, requires positive proof to override the presumption against it. Hereditary right to an office, carrying with it authority over, and obligations from, the members of a gens is a very different thing from an office bestowed by a free election, with the reserved power to depose for unworthy behavior. The free spirit of the Athenian gentes down to the time of Solon and Cleisthenes forbids the supposition, as to them, that they had parted with a right so vital to the independence of the members of the gens. I have not been able to find any satisfactory explanation of the tenure of this office. Hereditary succession, if it existed, would indicate a remarkable development of the aristocratical element in ancient society, in derogation of the democratical constitution of the gentes. Moreover, it would be a sign of the commencement, at least, of their decadence. All the members of a gens were free and equal, the rich and the poor enjoying equal rights and privileges, and acknowledging the same in each other. We find liberty, equality and fraternity, written as plainly in the constitution of the Athenian gentes as in those of the Iroquois. Hereditary right to the principal office of the gens is totally inconsistent with the older doctrine of equal rights and privileges.
Whether the higher offices of anax, koiranos, and basileus were transmitted by hereditary right from father to son, or were elective or confirmative by a larger constituency, is also a question. It will be considered elsewhere. The former would indicate the subversion, as the latter the conservation, of gentile institutions. Without decisive evidence to the contrary every presumption is adverse to hereditary right. Some additional light will be gained on this subject when the Roman gentes are considered. A careful re-investigation of the tenure of this office would, not unlikely, modify essentially the received accounts.
It may be considered substantially assured that the Grecian gentes possessed the ten principal attributes named. All save three, namely, descent in the male line, marrying into the gens in the case of heiresses, and the possible transmission of the highest military office by hereditary right, are found with slight variations in the gentes of the Iroquois. It is thus rendered apparent that in the gentes, both the Grecian and the Iroquois tribes possessed the same original institution, the one having the gens in its later, and the other in its archaic form.
Recurring now to the quotation from Mr. Grote, it may be remarked that had he been familiar with the archaic form of the gens, and with the several forms of the family anterior to the monogamian, he would probably have modified essentially some portion of his statement. An exception must be taken to his position that the basis of the social system of the Greeks “was the house, hearth, or family.” The form of the family in the mind of the distinguished historian was evidently the Roman, under the iron-clad rule of a pater familias, to which the Grecian family of the Homeric period approximated in the complete domination of the father over the household. It would have been equally untenable had other and anterior forms of the family been intended. The gens, in its origin, is older than the monogamian family, older than the syndyasmian, and substantially contemporaneous with the punaluan. In no sense was it founded upon either. It does not recognize the existence of the family of any form as a constituent of itself. On the contrary, every family in the archaic as well as in the later period, was partly within and partly without the gens, because husband and wife must belong to different gentes. The explanation is both simple and complete; namely, that the family springs up independently of the gens with entire freedom to advance from a lower into a higher form, while the gens is constant, as well as the unit of the social system. The gens entered entire into the phratry, the phratry entered entire into the tribe, and the tribe entered entire into the nation; but the family could not enter entire into the gens because husband and wife must belong to different gentes.
The question here raised is important, since not only Mr. Grote, but also Niebuhr, Thirlwall, Maine, Mommsen, and many other able and acute investigators have taken the same position with respect to the monogamian family of the patriarchal type as the integer around which society integrated in the Grecian and Roman systems. Nothing whatever was based upon the family in any of its forms, because it was incapable of entering a gens as a whole. The gens was homogeneous and to a great extent permanent in duration, and as such, the natural basis of a social system. A family of the monogamian type might have become individualized and powerful in a gens, and in society at large; but the gens nevertheless did not and could not recognize or depend upon the family as an integer of itself. The same remarks are equally true with respect to the modern family and political society. Although individualized by property rights and privileges, and recognized as a legal entity by statutory enactment, the family is not the unit of the political system. The state recognizes the counties of which it is composed, the county its townships, but the township takes no note of the family; so the nation recognized its tribes, the tribes its phratries, and the phratries its gentes; but the gens took no note of the family. In dealing with the structure of society, organic relations alone are to be considered. The township stands in the same relation to political society that the gens did to gentile society. Each is the unit of a system.
There are a number of valuable observations by Mr. Grote, upon the Grecian gentes, which I desire to incorporate as an exposition of them; although these observations seem to imply that they are no older than the then existing mythology, or hierarchy of the gods from the members of which some of the gentes claimed to have derived their eponymous ancestor. In the light of the facts presented, the gentes are seen to have existed long before this mythology was developed—before Jupiter or Neptune, Mars or Venus were conceived in the human mind.
Mr. Grote proceeds: “Thus stood the primitive religious and social union of the population of Attica in its gradually ascending scale—as distinguished from the political union, probably of later introduction, represented at first by the trittyes and naukraries, and in after times by the ten Kleisthenean tribes, subdivided into trittyes and demes. The religious and family bond of aggregation is the earlier of the two; but the political bond, though beginning later, will be found to acquire constantly increasing influence throughout the greater part of this history. In the former, personal relation is the essential and predominant characteristic—local relation being subordinate: in the latter, property and residence become the chief considerations, and the personal element counts only as measured along with these accompaniments. All these phratric and gentile associations, the larger as well as the smaller, were founded upon the same principles and tendencies of the Grecian mind—a coalescence of the idea of worship with that of ancestry, or of communion in certain special religious rites with communion of blood, real or supposed. The god or hero, to whom the assembled members offered their sacrifices, was conceived as the primitive ancestor to whom they owed their origin; often through a long list of intermediate names, as in the case of the Milesian Hekatæus, so often before referred to. Each family had its own sacred rites and funeral commemorations of ancestors, celebrated by the master of the house, to which none but members of the family were admissible.... The larger associations, called gens, phratry, tribe, were formed by an extension of the same principle—of the family considered as a religious brotherhood, worshiping some common god or hero with an appropriate surname, and recognizing him as their joint ancestor; and the festival of Theoenia, and Apaturia (the first Attic, the second common to all the Ionian race) annually brought together the members of these phratries and gentes for worship, festivity, and maintenance of special sympathies; thus strengthening the larger ties without effacing the smaller.... But the historian must accept as an ultimate fact the earliest state of things which his witnesses make known to him, and in the case now before us, the gentile and phratric unions are matters into the beginning of which we cannot pretend to penetrate.”246
“The gentes both at Athens, and in other parts of Greece, bore a patronymic name, the stamp of their believed common paternity.247 ... But at Athens, at least after the revolution of Kleisthenês, the gentile name was not employed: a man was described by his own single name, followed first by the name of his father, and next by that of the deme to which he belonged,—as Aeschinês son of Atromêtus, a Kothôkid.... The gens constituted a close incorporation, both as to property and as to persons. Until the time of Solon, no man had any power of testamentary disposition. If he died without children, his gennêtes succeeded to his property, and so they continued to do even after Solon, if he died intestate. An orphan girl might be claimed in marriage of right by any member of the gens, the nearest agnates being preferred; if she was poor, and he did not choose to marry her himself, the law of Solon compelled him to provide her with a dowry proportional to his enrolled scale of property, and to give her out in marriage to another.... If a man was murdered, first his near relations, next his gennêtes and phrators, were both allowed and required to prosecute the crime at law; while his fellow demots, or inhabitants of the same deme, did not possess the like right of prosecuting. All that we hear of the most ancient Athenian laws is based upon the gentile and phratric divisions, which are treated throughout as extensions of the family. It is to be observed that this division is completely independent of any property qualification—rich men as well as poor being comprehended in the same gens. Moreover, the different gentes were very unequal in dignity, arising chiefly from the religious ceremonies of which each possessed the hereditary and exclusive administration, and which, being in some cases considered of pre-eminent sanctity in reference to the whole city, were therefore nationalized. Thus the Eumolpidæ and Kêrykes, who supplied the hierophant and superintendent of the mysteries of the Eleusinian Dêmêtêr—and the Butadæ, who furnished the priestess of Athênê Polias, as well as the priest of Poseidôn Erechtheus in the Acropolis—seem to have been reverenced above all the other gentes.”248
Mr. Grote speaks of the gens as an extension of the family, and as presupposing its existence; treating the family as primary and the gens as secondary. This view, for the reasons stated, is untenable. The two organizations proceed upon different principles and are independent of each other. The gens embraces a part only of the descendants of a supposed common ancestor, and excludes the remainder; it also embraces a part only of a family, and excludes the remainder. In order to be a constituent of the gens, the family should enter entire within its folds, which was impossible in the archaic period, and constructive only in the later. In the organization of gentile society the gens is primary, forming both the basis and the unit of the system. The family also is primary, and older than the gens; the punaluan and the consanguine families having preceded it in the order of time; but it was not a member of the organic series in ancient society any more than it is in modern.
The gens existed in the Aryan family when the Latin, Grecian and Sanskrit speaking tribes were one people, as is shown by the presence in their dialects of the same term (gens, [γένος Greek: genos], and ganas) to express the organization. They derived it from their barbarous ancestors, and more remotely from their savage progenitors. If the Aryan family became differentiated as early as the Middle Period of barbarism, which seems probable, the gens must have been transmitted to them in its archaic form. After that event, and during the long periods of time which elapsed between the separation of these tribes from each other and the commencement of civilization, those changes in the constitution of the gens, which have been noticed hypothetically, must have occurred. It is impossible to conceive of the gens as appearing, for the first time, in any other than its archaic form; consequently the Grecian gens must have been originally in this form. If, then, causes can be found adequate to account for so great a change of descent as that from the female line to the male, the argument will be complete, although in the end it substituted a new body of kindred in the gens in place of the old. The growth of the idea of property, and the rise of monogamy, furnished motives sufficiently powerful to demand and obtain this change in order to bring children into the gens of their father, and into a participation in the inheritance of his estate. Monogamy assured the paternity of children, which was unknown when the gens was instituted, and the exclusion of children from the inheritance was no longer possible. In the face of the new circumstances, the gens would be forced into reconstruction or dissolution. When the gens of the Iroquois, as it appeared in the Lower Status of barbarism, is placed beside the gens of the Grecian tribes as it appeared in the Upper Status, it is impossible not to perceive that they are the same organization, the one in its archaic and the other in its ultimate form. The differences between them are precisely those which would have been forced upon the gens by the exigencies of human progress.
Along with these mutations in the constitution of the gens are found the parallel mutations in the rule of inheritance. Property, always hereditary in the gens, was first hereditary among the gentiles; secondly, hereditary among the agnates, to the exclusion of the remaining gentiles; and now, thirdly, hereditary among the agnates in succession, in the order of their nearness to the decedent, which gave an exclusive inheritance to the children as the nearest agnates. The pertinacity with which the principle was maintained down to the time of Solon, that the property should remain in the gens of the deceased owner, illustrates the vitality of the organization through all these periods. It was this rule which compelled the heiress to marry in her own gens to prevent a transfer of the property by her marriage to another gens. When Solon allowed the owner of property to dispose of it by will, in case he had no children, he made the first inroad upon the property rights of the gens.
How nearly the members of a gens were related, or whether they were related at all, has been made a question. Mr. Grote remarked that “Pollux informs us distinctly that the members of the same gens at Athens were not commonly related by blood,—and even without any express testimony we might have concluded such to be the fact. To what extent the gens, at the unknown epoch of its formation was based upon actual relationship, we have no means of determining, either with regard to the Athenian or the Roman gentes, which were in the main points analogous. Gentilism is a tie by itself; distinct from the family ties, but presupposing their existence and extending them by an artificial analogy, partly founded in religious belief, and partly on positive compact, so as to comprehend strangers in blood. All the members of one gens, or even of one phratry, believed themselves to be sprung, not indeed from the same grandfather or great-grandfather, but from the same divine or heroic ancestor.... And this fundamental belief, into which the Greek mind passed with so much facility, was adopted and converted by positive compact into the gentile and phratric principle of union.... Doubtless Niebuhr, in his valuable discussion of the ancient Roman gentes, is right in supposing that they were not real families, procreated from any common historical ancestor. Still it is not the less true (although he seems to suppose otherwise) that the idea of the gens involved the belief in a common first father, divine or heroic—a genealogy which we may properly call fabulous, but which was consecrated and accredited among the members of the gens itself; and served as one important bond of union between them.... The natural families of course changed from generation to generation, some extending themselves, while others diminished or died out; but the gens received no alterations, except through the procreation, extinction, or subdivision of these component families. Accordingly the relations of the families with the gens were in perpetual course of fluctuation, and the gentile ancestorial genealogy, adapted as it doubtless was to the early condition of the gens, became in process of time partially obsolete and unsuitable. We hear of this genealogy but rarely, because it is only brought before the public in certain cases pre-eminent and venerable. But the humbler gentes had their common rites, and common superhuman ancestor and genealogy, as well as the more celebrated: the scheme and ideal basis was the same in all.”249
The several statements of Pollux, Niebuhr and Grote are true in a certain sense, but not absolutely so. The lineage of a gens ran back of the acknowledged ancestor, and therefore the gens of ancient date could not have had a known progenitor; neither could the fact of a blood connection be proved by their system of consanguinity; nevertheless the gentiles not only believed in their common descent, but were justified in so believing. The system of consanguinity which pertained to the gens in its archaic form, and which the Greeks probably once possessed, preserved a knowledge of the relationships of all the members of a gens to each other. This fell into desuetude with the rise of the monogamian family, as I shall endeavor elsewhere to show. The gentile name created a pedigree beside which that of a family was insignificant. It was the function of this name to preserve the fact of the common descent of those who bore it; but the lineage of the gens was so ancient that its members could not prove the actual relationship existing between them, except in a limited number of cases through recent common ancestors. The name itself was the evidence of a common descent, and conclusive, except as it was liable to interruption through the adoption of strangers in blood in the previous history of the gens. The practical denial of all relationship between its members made by Pollux and Niebuhr, which would change the gens into a purely fictitious association, has no ground to rest upon. A large proportion of the number could prove their relationship through descent from common ancestors within the gens, and as to the remainder the gentile name they bore was sufficient evidence of common descent for practical purposes. The Grecian gens was not usually a large body of persons. Thirty families to a gens, not counting the wives of the heads of families, would give, by the common rule of computation, an average of one hundred and twenty persons to the gens.
As the unit of the organic social system, the gens would naturally become the centre of social life and activity. It was organized as a social body, with its archon or chief, and treasurer; having common lands to some extent, a common burial place, and common religious rites. Beside these were the rights, privileges and obligations which the gens conferred and imposed upon all its members. It was in the gens that the religious activity of the Greeks originated, which expanded over the phratries, and culminated in periodical festivals common to all the tribes. This subject has been admirably treated by M. De Coulanges in his recent work on “The Ancient City.”
In order to understand the condition of Grecian society, anterior to the formation of the state, it is necessary to know the constitution and principles of the Grecian gens; for the character of the unit determines the character of its compounds in the ascending series, and can alone furnish the means for their explanation.
The Athenian Phratry.—How Formed.—Definition of Dikæarchus.—Objects chiefly Religious.—The Phratriarch.—The Tribe.—Composed of Three Phratries.—The Phylo-basileus.—The Nation.—Composed of Four Tribes.—Boule, or Council of Chiefs.—Agora, or Assembly of the People.—The Basileus.—Tenure of the Office.—Military and Priestly Functions.—Civil Functions not shown.—Governments of the Heroic Age, Military Democracies.—Aristotle’s Definition of a Basileus.—Later Athenian Democracy.—Inherited From the Gentes.—Its powerful Influence upon Athenian Development.
The phratry, as we have seen, was the second stage of organization in the Grecian social system. It consisted of several gentes united for objects, especially religious, which were common to them all. It had a natural foundation in the bond of kin, as the gentes in a phratry were probably subdivisions of an original gens, a knowledge of the fact having been preserved by tradition. “All the contemporary members of the phratry of Hekatæus,” Mr. Grote remarks, “had a common god for their ancestor at the sixteenth degree,”250 which could not have been asserted unless the several gentes comprised in the phratry of Hekatæus, were supposed to be derived by segmentation from an original gens. This genealogy, although in part fabulous, would be traced according to gentile usages. Dikæarchus supposed that the practice of certain gentes in supplying each other with wives, led to the phratric organization for the performance of common religious rites.
This is a plausible explanation, because such marriages would intermingle the blood of the gentes. On the contrary, gentes formed, in the course of time, by the division of a gens and by subsequent subdivisions, would give to all a common lineage, and form a natural basis for their re-integration in a phratry. As such the phratry would be a natural growth, and as such only can it be explained as a gentile institution. The gentes thus united were brother gentes, and the association itself was a brotherhood as the term imports.
Stephanus of Byzantium has preserved a fragment of Dikæarchus, in which an explanation of the origin of the gens, phratry and tribe is suggested. It is not full enough, with respect to either, to amount to a definition; but it is valuable as a recognition of the three stages of organization in ancient Grecian society. He uses patry (πάτρᾶ) in the place of gens (γένος), as Pindar did in a number of instances, and Homer occasionally. The passage may be rendered: “Patry is one of three forms of social union among the Greeks, according to Dikæarchus, which we call respectively, patry, phratry, and tribe. The patry comes into being when relationship, originally solitary, passes over into the second stage [the relationship of parents with children and children with parents], and derives its eponym from the oldest and chief member of the patry, as Aicidas, Pelopidas.”
“But it came to be called phatria and phratria when certain ones gave their daughters to be married into another patry. For the woman who was given in marriage participated no longer in her paternal sacred rites, but was enrolled in the patry of her husband; so that for the union, formerly subsisting by affection between sisters and brothers, there was established another union based on community of religious rites, which they denominated a phratry; and so that again, while the patry took its rise in the way we have previously mentioned, from the blood relation between parents and children and children and parents, the phratry took its rise from the relationship between brothers.”
“But tribe and tribesmen were so called from the coalescence into communities and nations so called, for each of the coalescing bodies was called a tribe.”251
It will be noticed that marriage out of the gens is here recognized as a custom, and that the wife was enrolled in the gens, rather than the phratry, of her husband. Dikæarchus, who was a pupil of Aristotle, lived at a time when the gens existed chiefly as a pedigree of individuals, its powers having been transferred to new political bodies. He derived the origin of the gens from primitive times; but his statement that the phratry originated in the matrimonial practices of the gentes, while true doubtless as to the practice, is but an opinion as to the origin of the organization. Intermarriages, with common religious rites, would cement the phratric union; but a more satisfactory foundation of the phratry may be found in the common lineage of the gentes of which it was composed. It must be remembered that the gentes have a history running back through the three sub-periods of barbarism into the previous period of savagery, antedating the existence even of the Aryan and Semitic families. The phratry has been shown to have appeared among the American aborigines in the Lower Status of barbarism; while the Greeks were familiar with so much only of their former history as pertained to the Upper Status of barbarism.
Mr. Grote does not attempt to define the functions of the phratry, except generally. They were doubtless of a religious character chiefly; but they probably manifested themselves, as among the Iroquois, at the burial of the dead, at public games, at religious festivals, at councils, and at the agoras of the people, where the grouping of chiefs and people would be by phratries rather than by gentes. It would also naturally show itself in the array of the military forces, of which a memorable example is given by Homer in the address of Nestor to Agamemnon.252 “Separate the troops by tribes and by phratries, Agamemnon, so that phratry may support phratry, and tribes, tribes (κρῖν' ἄνδρας κατὰ φῦλα, κατὰ φρήτρας, Ἀγάμεμνον, ὡς φρήτρη φρήτρηφιν ἀρήγῃ, φῦλα δὲ φύλοις). If thou wilt thus act, and the Greeks obey, thou wilt then ascertain which of the commanders and which of the soldiers is a coward, and which of them may be brave, for they will fight their best.” The number from the same gens in a military force would be too small to be made a basis in the organization of an army; but the larger aggregations of the phratries and tribes would be sufficient. Two things may be inferred from the advice of Nestor: first, that the organization of armies by phratries and tribes had then ceased to be common; and secondly, that in ancient times it had been the usual plan of army organization, a knowledge of which had not then disappeared. We have seen that the Tlascalans and Aztecs, who were in the Middle Status of barbarism, organized and sent out their military bands by phratries which, in their condition, was probably the only method in which a military force could be organized. The ancient German tribes organized their armies for battle on a similar principle.253 It is interesting to notice how closely shut in the tribes of mankind have been to the theory of their social system.
The obligation of blood revenge, which was turned at a later day into a duty of prosecuting the murderer before the legal tribunals, rested primarily upon the gens of the slain person; but it was also shared in by the phratry, and became a phratric obligation.254 In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the Erinnys, after speaking of the slaying of his mother by Orestes, put the question: “What lustral water of his phrators shall await him?”255 which seems to imply that if the criminal escaped punishment final purification was performed by his phratry instead of his gens. Moreover, the extension of the obligation from the gens to the phratry implies a common lineage of all the gentes in a phratry.
Since the phratry was intermediate between the gens and the tribe, and not invested with governmental functions, it was less fundamental and less important than either of the others; but it was a common, natural and perhaps necessary stage of re-integration between the two. Could an intimate knowledge of the social life of the Greeks in that early period be recovered, the phenomena would centre probably in the phratric organization far more conspicuously than our scanty records lead us to infer. It probably possessed more power and influence than is usually ascribed to it as an organization. Among the Athenians it survived the overthrow of the gentes as the basis of a system, and retained, under the new political system, some control over the registration of citizens, the enrollment of marriages and the prosecution of the murderer of a phrator before the courts.
It is customary to speak of the four Athenian tribes as divided each into three phratries, and of each phratry as divided into thirty gentes; but this is merely for convenience in description. A people under gentile institutions do not divide themselves into symmetrical divisions and subdivisions. The natural process of their formation was the exact reverse of this method; the gentes fell into phratries, and ultimately into tribes, which reunited in a society or a people. Each was a natural growth. That the number of gentes in each Athenian phratry was thirty is a remarkable fact incapable of explanation by natural causes. A motive sufficiently powerful, such as a desire for a symmetrical organization of the phratries and tribes, might lead to a subdivision of gentes by consent until the number was raised to thirty in each of these phratries; and when the number in a tribe was in excess, by the consolidation of kindred gentes until the number was reduced to thirty. A more probable way would be by the admission of alien gentes into phratries needing an increase of number. Having a certain number of tribes, phratries and gentes by natural growth, the reduction of the last two to uniformity in the four tribes could thus have been secured. Once cast in this numerical scale of thirty gentes to a phratry and three phratries to a tribe, the proportion might easily have been maintained for centuries, except perhaps as to the number of gentes in each phratry.
The religious life of the Grecian tribes had its centre and source in the gentes and phratries. It must be supposed that in and through these organizations, was perfected that marvelous polytheistic system, with its hierarchy of gods, its symbols and forms of worship, which impressed so powerfully the mind of the classical world. In no small degree this mythology inspired the great achievements of the legendary and historical periods, and created that enthusiasm which produced the temple and ornamental architecture in which the modern world has taken so much delight. Some of the religious rites, which originated in these social aggregates, were nationalized from the superior sanctity they were supposed to possess; thus showing to what extent the gentes and phratries were nurseries of religion. The events of this extraordinary period, the most eventful in many respects in the history of the Aryan family, are lost, in the main, to history. Legendary genealogies and narratives, myths and fragments of poetry, concluding with the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, make up its literary remains. But their institutions, arts, inventions, mythological system, in a word the substance of civilization which they wrought out and brought with them, were the legacy they contributed to the new society they were destined to found. The history of the period may yet be reconstructed from these various sources of knowledge, reproducing the main features of gentile society as they appeared shortly before the institution of political society.
As the gens had its archon, who officiated as its priest in the religious observances of the gens, so each phratry had its phratriarch (φρατριάρχος), who presided at its meetings, and officiated in the solemnization of its religious rites. “The phratry,” observes M. De Coulanges, “had its assemblies and its tribunals, and could pass decrees. In it, as well as in the family, there was a god, a priesthood, a legal tribunal and a government.”256 The religious rites of the phratries were an expansion of those of the gentes of which it was composed. It is in these directions that attention should be turned in order to understand the religious life of the Greeks.
Next in the ascending scale of organization was the tribe, consisting of a number of phratries, each composed of gentes. The persons in each phratry were of the same common lineage, and spoke the same dialect. Among the Athenians as before stated each tribe contained three phratries, which gave to each a similar organization. The tribe corresponds with the Latin tribe, and also with those of the American aborigines, an independent dialect for each tribe being necessary to render the analogy with the latter complete. The concentration of such Grecian tribes as had coalesced into a people, in a small area, tended to repress dialectical variation, which a subsequent written language and literature tended still further to arrest each tribe from antecedent habits, however, was more or less localized in a fixed area, through the requirements of a social system resting on personal relations. It seems probable that each tribe had its council of chiefs, supreme in all matters relating to the tribe exclusively. But since the functions and powers of the general council of chiefs, who administered the general affairs of the united tribes, were allowed to fall into obscurity, it would not be expected that those of an inferior and subordinate council would be preserved. If such a council existed, which was doubtless the fact from its necessity under their social system, it would have consisted of the chiefs of the gentes.
When the several phratries of a tribe united in the commemoration of their religious observances it was in their higher organic constitution as a tribe. As such, they were under the presidency, as we find it expressed, of a phylo-basileus, who was the principal chief of the tribe. Whether he acted as their commander in the military service I am unable to state. He possessed priestly functions, always inherent in the office of basileus, and exercised a criminal jurisdiction in cases of murder; whether to try or to prosecute a murderer, I am unable to state. The priestly and judicial functions attached to the office of basileus tend to explain the dignity it acquired in the legendary and heroic periods. But the absence of civil functions, in the strict sense of the term, of the presence of which we have no satisfactory evidence, is sufficient to render the term king, so constantly employed in history as the equivalent of basileus, a misnomer. Among the Athenians we have the tribe-basileus, where the term is used by the Greeks themselves as legitimately as when applied to the general military commander of the four united tribes. When each is described as a king it makes the solecism of four tribes each under a king separately, and the four tribes together under another king. There is a larger amount of fictitious royalty here than the occasion requires. Moreover, when we know that the institutions of the Athenians at the time were essentially democratical it becomes a caricature of Grecian society. It shows the propriety of returning to simple and original language, using the term basileus where the Greeks used it, and rejecting king as a false equivalent. Monarchy is incompatible with gentilism, for the reason that gentile institutions are essentially democratical. Every gens, phratry and tribe was a completely organized self-governing body; and where several tribes coalesced into a nation the resulting government would be constituted in harmony with the principles animating its constituent parts.
The fourth and ultimate stage of organization was the nation united in a gentile society. Where several tribes, as those of the Athenians and the Spartans, coalesced into one people, it enlarged the society, but the aggregate was simply a more complex duplicate of a tribe. The tribes took the same place in the nation which the phratries held in the tribe, and the gentes in the phratry. There was no name for the organism257 which was simply a society (societas), but in its place a name sprang up for the people or nation. In Homer’s description of the forces gathered against Troy, specific names are given to these nations, where such existed, as Athenians, Ætolians, Locrians; but in other cases they are described by the name of the city or country from which they came. The ultimate fact is thus reached, that the Greeks, prior to the times of Lycurgus and Solon, had but the four stages of social organization (gens, phratry, tribe and nation), which was so nearly universal in ancient society, and which has been shown to exist, in part, in the Status of savagery, and complete in the Lower, in the Middle and in the Upper Status of barbarism, and still subsisting after civilization had commenced. This organic series expresses the extent of the growth of the idea of government among mankind down to the institution of political society. Such was the Grecian social system. It gave a society, made up of a series of aggregates of persons, with whom the government dealt through their personal relations to a gens, phratry or tribe. It was also a gentile society as distinguished from a political society, from which it was fundamentally different and easily distinguishable.
The Athenian nation of the heroic age presents in its government three distinct, and in some sense co-ordinate, departments or powers, namely: first, the council of chiefs (βουλή); second, the agora (ἀγορά), or assembly of the people; and third, the basileus (βασιλεύς), or general military commander. Although municipal and subordinate military offices in large numbers had been created, from the increasing necessities of their condition, the principal powers of the government were held by the three instrumentalities named. I am unable to discuss in an adequate manner the functions and powers of the council, the agora or the basileus, but will content myself with a few suggestions upon subjects grave enough to deserve reinvestigation at the hands of professed Hellenists.
I. The Council of Chiefs. The office of basileus in the Grecian tribes has attracted far more attention than either the council or the agora. As a consequence it has been unduly magnified while the council and the agora have either been depreciated or ignored. We know, however, that the council of chiefs was a constant phenomenon in every Grecian nation from the earliest period to which our knowledge extends down to the institution of political society. Its permanence as a feature of their social system is conclusive evidence that its functions were substantial, and that its powers, at least presumptively, were ultimate and supreme. This presumption arises from what is known of the archaic character and functions of the council of chiefs under gentile institutions, and from its vocation. How it was constituted in the heroic age, and under what tenure the office of chief was held, we are not clearly informed; but it is a reasonable inference that the council was composed of the chiefs of the gentes. Since the number who formed the council was usually less than the number of gentes, a selection must have been made in some way from the body of chiefs. In what manner the selection was made we are not informed. The vocation of the council as a legislative body representing the principal gentes, and its natural growth under the gentile organization, rendered it supreme in the first instance, and makes it probable that it remained so to the end of its existence. The increasing importance of the office of basileus, and the new offices created in their military and municipal affairs with their increase in numbers and in wealth, would change somewhat the relations of the council to public affairs, and perhaps diminish its importance; but it could not be overthrown without a radical change of institutions. It seems probable, therefore, that every office of the government, from the highest to the lowest, remained accountable to the council for their official acts. The council was fundamental in their social system;258 and the Greeks of the period were free self-governing peoples, under institutions essentially democratical. A single illustration of the existence of the council may be given from Aeschylus, simply to show that in the Greek conception it was always present and ready to act. In The Seven against Thebes, Eteocles is represented in command of the city, and his brother Polynices as one of the seven chiefs who had invested the place. The assault was repelled, but the brothers fell in a personal combat at one of the gates. After this occurrence a herald says: “It is necessary for me to announce the decree and good pleasure of the councilors of the people of this city of Cadmus. It is resolved,”259 etc. A council which can make and promulgate a decree at any moment, which the people are expected to obey, possesses the supreme powers of government. Aeschylus, although dealing in this case with events in the legendary period, recognizes the council of chiefs as a necessary part of the system of government of every Grecian people. The boulê of ancient Grecian society was the prototype and pattern of the senate under the subsequent political system of the state.
II. The Agora. Although an assembly of the people became established in the legendary period, with a recognized power to adopt or reject public measures submitted by the council, it is not as ancient as the council. The latter came in at the institution of the gentes; but it is doubtful whether the agora existed, with the functions named, back of the Upper Status of barbarism. It has been shown that among the Iroquois, in the Lower Status, the people presented their wishes to the council of chiefs through orators of their own selection, and that a popular influence was felt in the affairs of the confederacy; but an assembly of the people, with the right to adopt or reject public measures, would evince an amount of progress in intelligence and knowledge beyond the Iroquois. When the agora first appears, as represented in Homer, and in the Greek Tragedies, it had the same characteristics which it afterwards maintained in the ecclesia of the Athenians, and in the comitia curiata of the Romans. It was the prerogative of the council of chiefs to mature public measures, and then submit them to the assembly of the people for acceptance or rejection, and their decision was final. The functions of the agora were limited to this single act. It could neither originate measures, nor interfere in the administration of affairs; but nevertheless it was a substantial power, eminently adapted to the protection of their liberties. In the heroic age certainly, and far back in the legendary period, the agora is a constant phenomenon among the Grecian tribes, and, in connection with the council, is conclusive evidence of the democratical constitution of gentile society throughout these periods. A public sentiment, as we have reason to suppose, was created among the people on all important questions, through the exercise of their intelligence, which the council of chiefs found it desirable as well as necessary to consult, both for the public good and for the maintenance of their own authority. After hearing the submitted question discussed, the assembly of the people, which was free to all who desired to speak,260 made their decision in ancient times usually by a show of hands.261 Through participation in public affairs, which affected the interests of all, the people were constantly learning the art of self-government, and a portion of them, as the Athenians, were preparing themselves for the full democracy subsequently established by the constitutions of Cleisthenes. The assembly of the people to deliberate upon public questions, not unfrequently derided as a mob by writers who were unable to understand or appreciate the principle of democracy, was the germ of the ecclesia (ἐκκλησία) of the Athenians, and of the lower house of modern legislative bodies.
III. The Basileus. This officer became a conspicuous character in the Grecian society of the heroic age, and was equally prominent in the legendary period. He has been placed by historians in the centre of the system. The name of the office (βασιλεύς) was used by the best Grecian writers to characterize the government, which was styled a basileia (βᾶσίλειᾶ). Modern writers, almost without exception, translate basileus by the term king, and basileia by the term kingdom, without qualification, and as exact equivalents. I wish to call attention to this office of basileus, as it existed in the Grecian tribes, and to question the correctness of this interpretation. There is no similarity whatever between the basileia of the ancient Athenians and the modern kingdom or monarchy; certainly not enough to justify the use of the same term to describe both. Our idea of a kingly government is essentially of a type in which a king, surrounded by a privileged and titled class in the ownership and possession of the lands, rules according to his own will and pleasure by edicts and decrees; claiming an hereditary right to rule, because he cannot allege the consent of the governed. Such governments have been self-imposed through the principle of hereditary right, to which the priesthood have sought to superadd a divine right. The Tudor kings of England and the Bourbon kings of France are illustrations. Constitutional monarchy is a modern development, and essentially different from the basileia of the Greeks. The basileia was neither an absolute nor a constitutional monarchy; neither was it a tyranny or a despotism. The question then is, what was it.
Mr. Grote claims that “the primitive Grecian government is essentially monarchical, reposing on personal feeling and divine right;”262 and to confirm this view he remarks further, that “the memorable dictum in the Iliad is borne out by all that we hear in actual practice: ‘the rule of many is not a good thing; let us have one ruler only—one king—him to whom Zeus has given the sceptre, with the tutelary sanctions.’”263 This opinion is not peculiar to Mr. Grote, whose eminence as a historian all delight to recognize; but it has been steadily and generally affirmed by historical writers on Grecian themes, until it has come to be accepted as historical truth. Our views upon Grecian and Roman questions have been moulded by writers accustomed to monarchical government and privileged classes, who were perhaps glad to appeal to the earliest known governments of the Grecian tribes for a sanction of this form of government, as at once natural, essential and primitive.
The true statement, as it seems to an American, is precisely the reverse of Mr. Grote’s; namely, that the primitive Grecian government was essentially democratical, reposing on gentes, phratries and tribes, organized as self-governing bodies, and on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. This is borne out by all we know of the gentile organization, which has been shown to rest on principles essentially democratical. The question then is, whether the office of basileus passed in reality from father to son by hereditary right; which, if true, would tend to show a subversion of these principles. We have seen that in the Lower Status of barbarism the office of chief was hereditary in a gens, by which is meant that the vacancy was filled from the members of the gens as often as it occurred. Where descent was in the female line, as among the Iroquois, an own brother was usually selected to succeed the deceased chief, and where descent was in the male line, as among the Ojibwas and Omahas, the oldest son. In the absence of objections to the person such became the rule; but the elective principle remained, which was the essence of self-government. It cannot be claimed, on satisfactory proof, that the oldest son of the basileus took the office, upon the demise of his father, by absolute hereditary right. This is the essential fact; and it requires conclusive proof for its establishment. The fact that the oldest, or one of the sons, usually succeeded, which is admitted, does not establish the fact in question; because by usage he was in the probable line of succession by a free election from a constituency. The presumption, on the face of Grecian institutions, is against succession to the office of basileus by hereditary right; and in favor either of a free election, or of a confirmation of the office by the people through their recognized organizations, as in the case of the Roman rex.264 With the office of basileus transmitted in the manner last named, the government would remain in the hands of the people. Because without an election or confirmation he could not assume the office; and because further, the power to elect or confirm implies the reserved right to depose.