On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay

by Hugh E. Seebohm

Ancestor-worship not necessarily post-Homeric.

Being thus surrounded by nations that believed intensely in the need in the dead of nourishment at the hands of their relatives on earth, it would indeed be surprising if the Greeks were found not to share in the belief. But the fact remains that in the earliest Greek literature it is least conspicuous, and the gulf seems widest between the living and the dead. Can this be laid to the charge of the artificial superstitions of a philosophical class of poets? Or is it due to the true evolution of such beliefs, that as long as our search touches upon the unsettled periods of semi-migratory life, the tombs of individual members of a family being scattered here or there wherever they meet their deaths, the offering to the dead takes a special form, inasmuch as the solidarity of the tribe eclipses the importance of the family as a unit, and the religious ceremonies of the chieftain absorb the attention of the lesser members of the tribe?

M. de Coulanges points out that the meaning of the Latin word Lar is lord, prince or master, and [pg 013] that Hestia was sometimes designated by the Greeks with the similar title of mistress of the house, or princess.[27]

If, as long as the tribe was felt to be a real unit, the religious instincts of the tribesmen were concentrated upon the worship of their tribal deities—the great ancestors of the tribe, and more emphatically and directly the ancestors of their chieftain—it would be quite natural, in the weakening of the central worship, for the titles of honour and respect to be used equally towards those meaner ancestors who henceforth occupied the religious energies of the head of each family or household. In fulfilment of a similar sentiment, the later Greeks commonly used the word ἥρως in speaking of a dead friend, deeming that any one who departed this life passed to the ranks of those princes of the community from whom all were proud to trace descent.

The hearth and the tie of common blood.

M. de Coulanges considers that the sacred rites of the family at the hearth formed a more real tie than the belief in a common blood; and that upon this religious basis was built up the greater hearth of the Prytaneum as the centre of city life, to bind together the several families composing the community. But without pretending to come to a final decision on this the main tendency of social development, surely something may yet be said in favour of the contrary theory; that the reverence that centred in the hearth was in effect the expression of the sanctity of the tie of blood, as felt by all members of the house, and that this feeling drew its real importance for the community, [pg 014] not from the founding of the city by the amalgamation of several families, but as a survival from an earlier stage of life, when society circled round what was then in more than name the Prytaneum of the tribal chieftain.

Facts are wanting to justify a conclusion as to which of these theories bears the closest resemblance to the truth, but it is easy to imagine what might be the line of development if the latter hypothesis be maintained.

Possible course of social development.

During the wanderings and migrations of peoples in the search for greener pastures or broader lands, each community or tribe would be constantly under arms and subject to attack from the enemies they were passing through or subjugating. This constant sojourning in a strange land, surrounded by foes, would be a source of much solidarity to the tribe itself, drawing its members closely together for mutual defence and subsistence.

But when once the tribe had found a country to its taste, and had made a settlement with borders comparatively permanently established, emphasis would be transferred to the petty quarrels and internal dissensions arising between different sections within the community itself. The tie of common blood, uniting all members of the tribe, would be gradually disregarded and displaced by the less homely and more political relation of fellow-citizenship, which, though retaining many of the characteristics of the tribal bond, would necessarily be felt in a very different manner.