There were three important public places necessary to every Greek community and symbolical to the Greek mind of the very foundations of their institutions. These were:—the Agora or place of assembly, the place of justice, and the place of religious sacrifice. From these three sacred precincts the man who stirred up civil strife, who was at war with his own people, cut himself off. Such an one is described in Homer as being, by his very act, “clanless” (ἀφρήτωρ), “out-law” (ἀθέμιστος), and “hearthless” (ἀνέστιος).[1] In the camp of the Greeks before Troy the ships and huts of his followers were congregated by the hut of their chief or leader. Each sacrificed or poured libation to his favourite or familiar god at his own hut door.[2] But in front of Odysseus' ships, which, we are told, were drawn up at the very centre of the camp, stood the great altar of Zeus Panomphaios—lord of all oracles—“exceeding fair.”[3] “Here,” says the poet, “were Agora, Themis, and the altars of the gods.”
The Trojans held agora at Priam's doors,[4] and it is noticeable that the space in front of the chief's hut or palace was generally considered available for such purposes as assembly, games, and so forth, just as it was with the ancient Irish.
The Prytaneum and Hestia.
In the centre of most towns of Greece[5] stood the Prytaneum or magistrates' hall, and in the Prytaneum was the sacred hearth to which attached such reverence that in the most solemn oaths the name of Hestia was invoked even before that of Zeus.[6] Thucydides states that each κώμη or village of Attica had its hearth or Prytaneum of its own, but looked up to the Hestia and Prytaneum in the city of Athens as the great centre of their larger polity. In just the same way the lesser kindreds of a tribe would have their sacred hearths and rites, but would look to the hearth and person of their chief as symbolical of their tribal unity. Thucydides also mentions how great a wrench it seemed to the Athenians to be compelled to leave their “sacred” homes, to take refuge within the walls of Athens from the impending invasion by the Spartans.[7]
The word Prytanis means “chieftain.” It is probable that, as the duties sacred and magisterial of the chief became disseminated among the other officers of later civilisation, the chief's dwelling, called the [pg 004] Prytaneum, acquiring vitality from the indelible superstition attaching to the hearth within its precincts, maintained thereby its political importance, when nothing but certain religious functions remained to its lord and master in the office of Archon Basileus.
Their origin.
Mr. Frazer, in his article in the Journal of Philology[8] upon the resemblance of the Prytaneum in Greece to the Temple of Vesta in Rome, shows that both had a direct connection with, if not an absolute origin in the domestic hearth of the chieftain. The Lares and Penates worshipped in the Temple of Vesta, he says, were originally the Lares and Penates of the king, and were worshipped at his hearth, the only difference between the hearth in the temple and the hearth in the king's house being the absence of the royal householder.[9]
Mr. Frazer also maintains that the reverence for the hearth and the concentration of such reverence on the hearth of the chieftain was the result of the difficulty of kindling a fire from rubbing sticks together, and of the responsibility thus devolving upon the chieftain unfailingly to provide fire for his people. Whether this was the origin or not, before the times that come within the scope of this inquiry, the hearth had acquired a real sanctity which had become involved in the larger idea of it as the centre of a kindred, including on occasion the mysterious presence also of long dead ancestors.
Qualification for share in religious rites one of blood.
The basis of tribal coherence was community of blood, actual or supposed; the visible evidence of the [pg 005] possession of tribal blood was the undisputed participation, as one of a kindred, in the common religious ceremonies, from which the blood-polluted and the stranger-in-blood were so strictly shut out.[10] It is therefore in the incidence of religious duties, and in the qualifications of the participants, that it is reasonable to seek survivals of true tribal sentiment.