My thanks are due, for their ready help, to Professor W. Ridgeway, Mr. James W. Headlam, and Mr. Henry Lee Warner, by means of whose kind suggestions the following pages have been weeded of several of their faults.
It is impossible to say how much I have consciously or unconsciously absorbed from the works [pg vi] of the late M. Fustel de Coulanges. His La Cité Antique and his Nouvelles Recherches sur quelques Problèmes d'Histoire (1891) are stores of suggestive material for the student of Greek and Roman customs. They are rendered all the more instructive by the charm of his style and method. I have merely dipped a bucket into his well.
In quoting from Homer, I have made free use of the translations of Messrs. Lang, Leaf, and Myers of the Iliad, and of Messrs. Butcher and Lang of the Odyssey; and I wish to make full acknowledgment here of the debt that I owe to them.
Some explanation seems to be needful of the method pursued in this essay with regard to the comparison of Greek customs with those of other countries. The selection for comparison has been entirely arbitrary.
Wales has been chosen to bear the brunt of illustration, partly, as I have said, because of my father's work on the Welsh Tribal System, partly because the Ancient Laws of Wales afford a peculiarly vivid glimpse into the inner organisation of a tribal people, such as cannot be obtained elsewhere.
The Ordinances of Manu, on the other hand, are constantly quoted by writers on Greek institutions; and, I suppose, in spite of the uncertainty of their date, they can be taken as affording a very fair account of the customs of a highly developed Eastern people. It would be hard, moreover, to [pg vii] say where the connection of the Greeks with the East began or ended.
The use made of the Old Testament in these notes hardly needs further remark. Of no people, in their true tribal condition before their settlement, have we a more graphic account than of the Israelites. Their proximity geographically to the Phœnicians, and the accounts of the widespread fame of Solomon and the range of his commerce, at once suggest comparison with the parallel and contemporaneous period of Achaian history, immediately preceding the Dorian invasion, when, if we may trust the accounts of Homer, the intercourse between the shores of the Mediterranean must have been considerable.
All reference to records of Roman customs has been omitted, not because they are not related or analogous to the Greek, but because they could not reasonably be brought within the scope of this essay. The ancestor-worship among the Romans was so complete, and the organisation of their kindreds so highly developed, that they deserve treatment on their own basis, and are sufficient to form the subject of a separate volume.
H. E. S.
The Hermitage, Hitchin.
July, 1895.