But the phratry seems never to have reached so high a development among the Greeks as among the Romans and the early English.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 114: Compare parliament from parler. These twenty were the "grandees," "counsellors," and "captains" mentioned by Bernal Diaz as always in Montezuma's company; "y siempre á la contina estaban en su compañía veinte grandes señores y consejeros y capitanes," etc. Historia verdadera, ii. 95. See Bandelier, op. cit. p. 646.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 115: Mr. Bandelier's note on this point gives an especially apt illustration of the confusion of ideas and inconsistencies of statement amid which the early Spanish writers struggled to understand and describe this strange society: op. cit. p. 651.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 116: In Aztec mythology Cihuacoatl was wife of the supreme night deity, Tezcatlipoca. Squier, Serpent Symbol in America, pp. 159-166, 174-183. On the connection between serpent worship and human sacrifices, see Fergusson's Tree and Serpent Worship, pp. 3-5, 38-41. Much evidence as to American serpent worship is collected in J. G. Müller's Geschichte der amerikanischen Urreligionen, Basel, 1855. The hieroglyphic emblem of the Aztec tribal sachem was a female head surmounted by a snake.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 117: Other tribes besides the Aztec had the "snake-woman." In the city of Mexico the Spaniards mistook him for a "second-king," or "royal lieutenant." In other towns they regarded him, somewhat more correctly, as "governor," and called him gobernador,—a title still applied to the tribal sachem of the pueblo Indians, as e. g. in Zuñi heretofore mentioned; see above p. [89].[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 118: This title seems precisely equivalent to ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, commonly applied to Agamemnon, and sometimes to other chieftains, in the Iliad.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 119: Ramsay's Roman Antiquities, p. 64; Hermann's Political Antiquities of Greece, p. 105; Morgan, Anc. Soc., p. 248.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 120: Such would naturally result from the desirableness of securing unity of command. If Demosthenes had been in sole command of the Athenian armament in the harbour of Syracuse, and had been a basileus, with priestly authority, who can doubt that some such theory of the eclipse as that suggested by Philochorus would have been adopted, and thus one of the world's great tragedies averted? See Grote, Hist. Greece, vol. vii. chap. lx. M. Fustel de Coulanges, in his admirable book La Cité antique, pp. 205-210, makes the priestly function of the king primitive, and the military function secondary; which is entirely inconsistent with what we know of barbarous races.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 121: It is worthy of note that the archon who retained the priestly function was called basileus, showing perhaps that at that time this had come to be most prominent among the royal functions, or more likely that it was the one with which reformers had some religious scruples about interfering. The Romans, too, retained part of the king's priestly function in an officer called rex sacrorum, whose duty was at times to offer a sacrifice in the forum, and then run away as fast as legs could carry him,—ἣν θύσας ὁ βασιλεὺς, κατὰ τάχος ἄπεισι φεύγων ἐξ ἀγορᾶς (!) Plutarch, Quæst. Rom. 63.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 122: Something of the priestly quality of "sanctity," however, surrounded the king's person; and the ceremony of anointing the king at his coronation was a survival of the ancient rite which invested the head war-chief with priestly attributes.[Back to Main Text]