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: