THE GRECIAN GENS.
EARLY CONDITION OF GRECIAN TRIBES.—ORGANIZED INTO
GENTES.—CHANGES IN THE CHARACTER OF THE GENS.—NECESSITY FOR
A POLITICAL SYSTEM.—PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED.—THE FORMATION
OF A STATE.—GROTE’S DESCRIPTION OF THE GRECIAN GENTES.—OF
THEIR PHRATRIES AND TRIBES.—ATTRIBUTES OF THE GENS.—SIMILAR
TO THOSE OF THE IROQUOIS GENTES.—THE OFFICE OF CHIEF OF
THE GENS.—WHETHER ELECTIVE OR HEREDITARY.—THE GENS THE
BASIS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM.—ANTIQUITY OF THE GENTILE
LINEAGE.—INHERITANCE OF PROPERTY.—ARCHAIC AND FINAL
RULE.—RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE MEMBERS OF A GENS.—THE GENS
THE CENTRE OF SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE.
Civilization may be said to have commenced among the Asiatic Greeks
with the composition of the Homeric poems about 850 B. C.; and among
the European Greeks about a century later with the composition of the
Hesiodic poems. Anterior to these epochs, there was a period of several
thousand years during which the Hellenic tribes were advancing through
the Later Period of barbarism, and preparing for their entrance upon
a civilized career. Their most ancient traditions find them already
established in the Grecian peninsula, upon the eastern border of the
Mediterranean, and upon the intermediate and adjacent islands. An
older branch of the same stock, of which the Pelasgians were the chief
representatives, had preceded them in the occupation of the greater
part of these areas, and were in time either Hellenized by them,
or forced into emigration. The anterior condition of the Hellenic
tribes and of their predecessors, must be deduced from the arts and
inventions which they brought down from the previous period, from the
state of development of their language, from their traditions and from
their social institutions, which severally survived into the period of
civilization. Our discussion will be restricted, in the main, to the
last class of facts.
Pelasgians and Hellenes alike were organized in gentes, phratries[234]
and tribes; and the latter united by coalescence into nations. In some
cases the organic series was not complete. Whether in tribes or nations
their government rested upon the gens as the unit of organization,
and resulted in a gentile society or a people, as distinguished from
a political society or a state. The instrument of government was a
council of chiefs, with the co-operation of an agora or assembly
of the people, and of a basileus or military commander. The people
were free, and their institutions democratical. Under the influence
of advancing ideas and wants the gens had passed out of its archaic
into its ultimate form. Modifications had been forced upon it by the
irresistible demands of an improving society; but, notwithstanding
the concessions made, the failure of the gentes to meet these wants
was constantly becoming more apparent. The changes were limited, in
the main, to three particulars: firstly, descent was changed to the
male line; secondly, intermarriage in the gens was permitted in the
case of female orphans and heiresses; and thirdly, children had gained
an exclusive inheritance of their father’s property. An attempt will
elsewhere be made to trace these changes, briefly, and the causes by
which they were produced.
The Hellenes in general were in fragmentary tribes, presenting the same
characteristics in their form of government as the barbarous tribes in
general, when organized in gentes and in the same stage of advancement.
Their condition was precisely such as might have been predicted would
exist under gentile institutions, and therefore presents nothing
remarkable.
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:
I. _Common religious rites._
II. _A common burial place._
III. _Mutual rights of succession to property of deceased
members._
IV. _Reciprocal obligations of help, defense and redress of
injuries._
V. _The right to intermarry in the gens in the cases of orphan
daughters and heiresses._
VI. _The possession of common property, an archon, and a
treasurer._
VII. _The limitation of descent to the male line._
VIII. _The obligation not to marry in the gens except in
specified cases._
IX. _The right to adopt strangers into the gens._
X. _The right to elect and depose its chiefs._
A brief reference to the added characteristics should be made.
7. _The limitation of descent to the male line._ There is no doubt that
such was the rule, because it is proved by their genealogies. I have
not been able to find in any Greek author a definition of a gens or
of a gentilis that would furnish a sufficient test of the right of a
given person to the gentile connection. Cicero, Varro and Festus have
defined the Roman gens and gentilis, which were strictly analogous
to the Grecian, with sufficient fullness to show that descent was in
the male line. From the nature of the gens, descent was either in the
female line or the male, and included but a moiety of the descendants
of the founder. It is precisely like the family among ourselves.
Those who are descended from the males bear the family name, and they
constitute a gens in the full sense of the term, but in a state of
dispersion, and without any bond of union excepting those nearest in
degree. The females lose, with their marriage, the family name, and
with their children are transferred to another family. Grote remarks
that Aristotle was the “son of the physician Nikomachus who belonged to
the gens of the Asklepiads.”[239] Whether Aristotle was of the gens of
his father depends upon the further question whether they both derived
their descent from Aesculapius, through males exclusively. This is
shown by Laertius, who states that “Aristotle was the son of Nikomachus
... and Nikomachus was descended from Nikomachus the son of Machaon,
the son of Aesculapius.”[240] Although the higher members of the series
may be fabulous, the manner of tracing the descent would show the gens
of the person. The statement of Hermann, on the authority of Isaeus,
is also to the point. “Every infant was registered in the phratria and
clan (γένος) of its father.”[241] Registration in the gens of the
father implies that his children were of his gens.
8. _The obligation not to marry in the gens excepting in specified
cases._ This obligation may be deduced from the consequences of
marriage. The wife by her marriage lost the religious rites of her
gens, and acquired those of her husband’s gens. The rule is stated
as so general as to imply that marriage was usually out of the gens.
“The virgin who quits her father’s house,” Wachsmuth remarks, “is no
longer a sharer of the paternal sacrificial hearth, but enters the
religious communion of her husband, and this gave sanctity to the
marriage tie.”[242] The fact of her registration is stated by Hermann
as follows: “Every newly married woman, herself a citizen, was on this
account enrolled in the phratry of her husband.”[243] Special religious
rites (_sacra gentilicia_) were common in the Grecian and Latin gens.
Whether the wife forfeited her agnatic rights by her marriage, as among
the Romans, I am unable to state. It is not probable that marriage
severed all connection with her gens, and the wife doubtless still
counted herself of the gens of her father.
The prohibition of intermarriage in the gens was fundamental in the
archaic period; and it undoubtedly remained after descent was changed
to the male line, with the exception of heiresses and female orphans
for whose case special provision was made. Although a tendency to free
marriage, beyond certain degrees of consanguinity, would follow the
complete establishment of the monogamian family, the rule requiring
persons to marry out of their own gens would be apt to remain so long
as the gens was the basis of the social system. The special provision
in respect to heiresses tends to confirm this supposition. Becker
remarks upon this question, that “relationship was, with trifling
limitations, no hinderance to marriage, which could take place within
all degrees of ἀγχιστεία, or συγγένεια, though naturally not in the
γένος itself.”[244]
9. _The right to adopt strangers into the gens._ This right was
practiced at a later day, at least in families; but it was done with
public formalities, and was doubtless limited to special cases.[245]
Purity of lineage became a matter of high concern in the Attic gentes,
interposing no doubt serious obstacles to the use of the right except
for weighty reasons.
10. _The right to elect and depose its chiefs._ This right undoubtedly
existed in the Grecian gentes in the early period. Presumptively it was
possessed by them while in the Upper Status of barbarism. Each gens
had its archon (ἀρχὸς), which was the common name for a chief. Whether
the office was elective, for example, in the Homeric period, or was
transmitted by hereditary right to the eldest son, is a question.
The latter was not the ancient theory of the office; and a change so
great and radical, affecting the independence and personal rights of
all the members of the gens, requires positive proof to override the
presumption against it. Hereditary right to an office, carrying with
it authority over, and obligations from, the members of a gens is a
very different thing from an office bestowed by a free election, with
the reserved power to depose for unworthy behavior. The free spirit
of the Athenian gentes down to the time of Solon and Cleisthenes
forbids the supposition, as to them, that they had parted with a
right so vital to the independence of the members of the gens. I have
not been able to find any satisfactory explanation of the tenure of
this office. Hereditary succession, if it existed, would indicate
a remarkable development of the aristocratical element in ancient
society, in derogation of the democratical constitution of the gentes.
Moreover, it would be a sign of the commencement, at least, of their
decadence. All the members of a gens were free and equal, the rich and
the poor enjoying equal rights and privileges, and acknowledging the
same in each other. We find liberty, equality and fraternity, written
as plainly in the constitution of the Athenian gentes as in those of
the Iroquois. Hereditary right to the principal office of the gens
is totally inconsistent with the older doctrine of equal rights and
privileges.
Whether the higher offices of anax, koiranos, and basileus were
transmitted by hereditary right from father to son, or were elective
or confirmative by a larger constituency, is also a question. It will
be considered elsewhere. The former would indicate the subversion, as
the latter the conservation, of gentile institutions. Without decisive
evidence to the contrary every presumption is adverse to hereditary
right. Some additional light will be gained on this subject when the
Roman gentes are considered. A careful re-investigation of the tenure
of this office would, not unlikely, modify essentially the received
accounts.
It may be considered substantially assured that the Grecian gentes
possessed the ten principal attributes named. All save three, namely,
descent in the male line, marrying into the gens in the case of
heiresses, and the possible transmission of the highest military office
by hereditary right, are found with slight variations in the gentes
of the Iroquois. It is thus rendered apparent that in the gentes,
both the Grecian and the Iroquois tribes possessed the same original
institution, the one having the gens in its later, and the other in its
archaic form.
Recurring now to the quotation from Mr. Grote, it may be remarked
that had he been familiar with the archaic form of the gens, and with
the several forms of the family anterior to the monogamian, he would
probably have modified essentially some portion of his statement. An
exception must be taken to his position that the basis of the social
system of the Greeks “was the house, hearth, or family.” The form of
the family in the mind of the distinguished historian was evidently
the Roman, under the iron-clad rule of a _pater familias_, to which
the Grecian family of the Homeric period approximated in the complete
domination of the father over the household. It would have been equally
untenable had other and anterior forms of the family been intended.
The gens, in its origin, is older than the monogamian family, older
than the syndyasmian, and substantially contemporaneous with the
punaluan. In no sense was it founded upon either. It does not recognize
the existence of the family of any form as a constituent of itself.
On the contrary, every family in the archaic as well as in the later
period, was partly within and partly without the gens, because husband
and wife must belong to different gentes. The explanation is both
simple and complete; namely, that the family springs up independently
of the gens with entire freedom to advance from a lower into a higher
form, while the gens is constant, as well as the unit of the social
system. The gens entered entire into the phratry, the phratry entered
entire into the tribe, and the tribe entered entire into the nation;
but the family could not enter entire into the gens because husband and
wife must belong to different gentes.
The question here raised is important, since not only Mr. Grote, but
also Niebuhr, Thirlwall, Maine, Mommsen, and many other able and
acute investigators have taken the same position with respect to
the monogamian family of the patriarchal type as the integer around
which society integrated in the Grecian and Roman systems. Nothing
whatever was based upon the family in any of its forms, because it
was incapable of entering a gens as a whole. The gens was homogeneous
and to a great extent permanent in duration, and as such, the natural
basis of a social system. A family of the monogamian type might have
become individualized and powerful in a gens, and in society at large;
but the gens nevertheless did not and could not recognize or depend
upon the family as an integer of itself. The same remarks are equally
true with respect to the modern family and political society. Although
individualized by property rights and privileges, and recognized as
a legal entity by statutory enactment, the family is not the unit of
the political system. The state recognizes the counties of which it
is composed, the county its townships, but the township takes no note
of the family; so the nation recognized its tribes, the tribes its
phratries, and the phratries its gentes; but the gens took no note
of the family. In dealing with the structure of society, organic
relations alone are to be considered. The township stands in the same
relation to political society that the gens did to gentile society.
Each is the unit of a system.
There are a number of valuable observations by Mr. Grote, upon the
Grecian gentes, which I desire to incorporate as an exposition of them;
although these observations seem to imply that they are no older than
the then existing mythology, or hierarchy of the gods from the members
of which some of the gentes claimed to have derived their eponymous
ancestor. In the light of the facts presented, the gentes are seen to
have existed long before this mythology was developed—before Jupiter or
Neptune, Mars or Venus were conceived in the human mind.
Mr. Grote proceeds: “Thus stood the primitive religious and social
union of the population of Attica in its gradually ascending scale—as
distinguished from the political union, probably of later introduction,
represented at first by the trittyes and naukraries, and in after times
by the ten Kleisthenean tribes, subdivided into trittyes and demes.
The religious and family bond of aggregation is the earlier of the
two; but the political bond, though beginning later, will be found to
acquire constantly increasing influence throughout the greater part
of this history. In the former, personal relation is the essential
and predominant characteristic—local relation being subordinate: in
the latter, property and residence become the chief considerations,
and the personal element counts only as measured along with these
accompaniments. All these phratric and gentile associations, the
larger as well as the smaller, were founded upon the same principles
and tendencies of the Grecian mind—a coalescence of the idea of
worship with that of ancestry, or of communion in certain special
religious rites with communion of blood, real or supposed. The god
or hero, to whom the assembled members offered their sacrifices, was
conceived as the primitive ancestor to whom they owed their origin;
often through a long list of intermediate names, as in the case of the
Milesian Hekatæus, so often before referred to. Each family had its
own sacred rites and funeral commemorations of ancestors, celebrated
by the master of the house, to which none but members of the family
were admissible.... The larger associations, called gens, phratry,
tribe, were formed by an extension of the same principle—of the family
considered as a religious brotherhood, worshiping some common god or
hero with an appropriate surname, and recognizing him as their joint
ancestor; and the festival of Theoenia, and Apaturia (the first Attic,
the second common to all the Ionian race) annually brought together
the members of these phratries and gentes for worship, festivity, and
maintenance of special sympathies; thus strengthening the larger ties
without effacing the smaller.... But the historian must accept as an
ultimate fact the earliest state of things which his witnesses make
known to him, and in the case now before us, the gentile and phratric
unions are matters into the beginning of which we cannot pretend to
penetrate.”[246]
“The gentes both at Athens, and in other parts of Greece, bore a
patronymic name, the stamp of their believed common paternity.[247]
... But at Athens, at least after the revolution of Kleisthenês, the
gentile name was not employed: a man was described by his own single
name, followed first by the name of his father, and next by that of
the deme to which he belonged,—as _Aeschinês son of Atromêtus, a
Kothôkid_.... The gens constituted a close incorporation, both as to
property and as to persons. Until the time of Solon, no man had any
power of testamentary disposition. If he died without children, his
gennêtes succeeded to his property, and so they continued to do even
after Solon, if he died intestate. An orphan girl might be claimed
in marriage of right by any member of the gens, the nearest agnates
being preferred; if she was poor, and he did not choose to marry
her himself, the law of Solon compelled him to provide her with a
dowry proportional to his enrolled scale of property, and to give
her out in marriage to another.... If a man was murdered, first his
near relations, next his gennêtes and phrators, were both allowed
and required to prosecute the crime at law; while his fellow demots,
or inhabitants of the same deme, did not possess the like right of
prosecuting. All that we hear of the most ancient Athenian laws is
based upon the gentile and phratric divisions, which are treated
throughout as extensions of the family. It is to be observed that this
division is completely independent of any property qualification—rich
men as well as poor being comprehended in the same gens. Moreover, the
different gentes were very unequal in dignity, arising chiefly from
the religious ceremonies of which each possessed the hereditary and
exclusive administration, and which, being in some cases considered of
pre-eminent sanctity in reference to the whole city, were therefore
nationalized. Thus the Eumolpidæ and Kêrykes, who supplied the
hierophant and superintendent of the mysteries of the Eleusinian
Dêmêtêr—and the Butadæ, who furnished the priestess of Athênê Polias,
as well as the priest of Poseidôn Erechtheus in the Acropolis—seem to
have been reverenced above all the other gentes.”[248]
Mr. Grote speaks of the gens as an extension of the family, and as
presupposing its existence; treating the family as primary and the gens
as secondary. This view, for the reasons stated, is untenable. The two
organizations proceed upon different principles and are independent
of each other. The gens embraces a part only of the descendants of a
supposed common ancestor, and excludes the remainder; it also embraces
a part only of a family, and excludes the remainder. In order to be
a constituent of the gens, the family should enter entire within its
folds, which was impossible in the archaic period, and constructive
only in the later. In the organization of gentile society the gens
is primary, forming both the basis and the unit of the system. The
family also is primary, and older than the gens; the punaluan and the
consanguine families having preceded it in the order of time; but it
was not a member of the organic series in ancient society any more than
it is in modern.
The gens existed in the Aryan family when the Latin, Grecian and
Sanskrit speaking tribes were one people, as is shown by the presence
in their dialects of the same term (gens, γένος, and _ganas_)
to express the organization. They derived it from their barbarous
ancestors, and more remotely from their savage progenitors. If
the Aryan family became differentiated as early as the Middle Period
of barbarism, which seems probable, the gens must have been transmitted
to them in its archaic form. After that event, and during the long
periods of time which elapsed between the separation of these tribes
from each other and the commencement of civilization, those changes in
the constitution of the gens, which have been noticed hypothetically,
must have occurred. It is impossible to conceive of the gens as
appearing, for the first time, in any other than its archaic form;
consequently the Grecian gens must have been originally in this form.
If, then, causes can be found adequate to account for so great a change
of descent as that from the female line to the male, the argument will
be complete, although in the end it substituted a new body of kindred
in the gens in place of the old. The growth of the idea of property,
and the rise of monogamy, furnished motives sufficiently powerful to
demand and obtain this change in order to bring children into the
gens of their father, and into a participation in the inheritance of
his estate. Monogamy assured the paternity of children, which was
unknown when the gens was instituted, and the exclusion of children
from the inheritance was no longer possible. In the face of the
new circumstances, the gens would be forced into reconstruction or
dissolution. When the gens of the Iroquois, as it appeared in the Lower
Status of barbarism, is placed beside the gens of the Grecian tribes as
it appeared in the Upper Status, it is impossible not to perceive that
they are the same organization, the one in its archaic and the other
in its ultimate form. The differences between them are precisely those
which would have been forced upon the gens by the exigencies of human
progress.
Along with these mutations in the constitution of the gens are found
the parallel mutations in the rule of inheritance. Property, always
hereditary in the gens, was first hereditary among the gentiles;
secondly, hereditary among the agnates, to the exclusion of the
remaining gentiles; and now, thirdly, hereditary among the agnates in
succession, in the order of their nearness to the decedent, which gave
an exclusive inheritance to the children as the nearest agnates. The
pertinacity with which the principle was maintained down to the time
of Solon, that the property should remain in the gens of the deceased
owner, illustrates the vitality of the organization through all these
periods. It was this rule which compelled the heiress to marry in her
own gens to prevent a transfer of the property by her marriage to
another gens. When Solon allowed the owner of property to dispose of it
by will, in case he had no children, he made the first inroad upon the
property rights of the gens.
How nearly the members of a gens were related, or whether they were
related at all, has been made a question. Mr. Grote remarked that
“Pollux informs us distinctly that the members of the same gens at
Athens were not commonly related by blood,—and even without any express
testimony we might have concluded such to be the fact. To what extent
the gens, at the unknown epoch of its formation was based upon actual
relationship, we have no means of determining, either with regard
to the Athenian or the Roman gentes, which were in the main points
analogous. Gentilism is a tie by itself; distinct from the family ties,
but presupposing their existence and extending them by an artificial
analogy, partly founded in religious belief, and partly on positive
compact, so as to comprehend strangers in blood. All the members of
one gens, or even of one phratry, believed themselves to be sprung,
not indeed from the same grandfather or great-grandfather, but from
the same divine or heroic ancestor.... And this fundamental belief,
into which the Greek mind passed with so much facility, was adopted and
converted by positive compact into the gentile and phratric principle
of union.... Doubtless Niebuhr, in his valuable discussion of the
ancient Roman gentes, is right in supposing that they were not real
families, procreated from any common historical ancestor. Still it
is not the less true (although he seems to suppose otherwise) that
the idea of the gens involved _the belief_ in a common first father,
divine or heroic—a genealogy which we may properly call fabulous, but
which was consecrated and accredited among the members of the gens
itself; and served as one important bond of union between them.... The
natural families of course changed from generation to generation, some
extending themselves, while others diminished or died out; but the gens
received no alterations, except through the procreation, extinction,
or subdivision of these component families. Accordingly the relations
of the families with the gens were in perpetual course of fluctuation,
and the gentile ancestorial genealogy, adapted as it doubtless was to
the early condition of the gens, became in process of time partially
obsolete and unsuitable. We hear of this genealogy but rarely, because
it is only brought before the public in certain cases pre-eminent and
venerable. But the humbler gentes had their common rites, and common
superhuman ancestor and genealogy, as well as the more celebrated: the
scheme and ideal basis was the same in all.”[249]
The several statements of Pollux, Niebuhr and Grote are true in a
certain sense, but not absolutely so. The lineage of a gens ran back of
the acknowledged ancestor, and therefore the gens of ancient date could
not have had a known progenitor; neither could the fact of a blood
connection be proved by their system of consanguinity; nevertheless
the gentiles not only _believed_ in their common descent, but were
justified in so believing. The system of consanguinity which pertained
to the gens in its archaic form, and which the Greeks probably once
possessed, preserved a knowledge of the relationships of all the
members of a gens to each other. This fell into desuetude with the
rise of the monogamian family, as I shall endeavor elsewhere to show.
The gentile name created a pedigree beside which that of a family
was insignificant. It was the function of this name to preserve the
fact of the common descent of those who bore it; but the lineage of
the gens was so ancient that its members could not prove the actual
relationship existing between them, except in a limited number of
cases through recent common ancestors. The name itself was the evidence
of a common descent, and conclusive, except as it was liable to
interruption through the adoption of strangers in blood in the previous
history of the gens. The practical denial of all relationship between
its members made by Pollux and Niebuhr, which would change the gens
into a purely fictitious association, has no ground to rest upon. A
large proportion of the number could prove their relationship through
descent from common ancestors within the gens, and as to the remainder
the gentile name they bore was sufficient evidence of common descent
for practical purposes. The Grecian gens was not usually a large body
of persons. Thirty families to a gens, not counting the wives of the
heads of families, would give, by the common rule of computation, an
average of one hundred and twenty persons to the gens.
As the unit of the organic social system, the gens would naturally
become the centre of social life and activity. It was organized as a
social body, with its archon or chief, and treasurer; having common
lands to some extent, a common burial place, and common religious
rites. Beside these were the rights, privileges and obligations which
the gens conferred and imposed upon all its members. It was in the gens
that the religious activity of the Greeks originated, which expanded
over the phratries, and culminated in periodical festivals common
to all the tribes. This subject has been admirably treated by M. De
Coulanges in his recent work on “The Ancient City.”
In order to understand the condition of Grecian society, anterior to
the formation of the state, it is necessary to know the constitution
and principles of the Grecian gens; for the character of the unit
determines the character of its compounds in the ascending series, and
can alone furnish the means for their explanation.