Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/122

I I 2 Reviews of Books Ages, a change came about, and the clan law was extended with the clan gods to the whole community. Thus the pollution, which earlier involved only the clan of the fratricide, if it failed to cast him out now affected the whole city, and this religious idea armed the state with the authority needful for the punishment of the murderer. So M. Glotz (pp. 1-67; 277-300). The reader is impelled to ask: Is it true that two views of early Greek development — the Sophists' opposites — are equally tenable, the one making men gregarious at the start, the other presenting them to us in family groups, solitary like beasts of prey: the one making the brotherhood (phratry) the chief minor group of the political herd, the other regarding the clan (genos) as originally a state in itself: the one letting the brotherhood disintegrate and the clans rise in its midst through the accumulation of property in the hands of a few, the other seeing in the later nobles all the earlier citizens, the serfs being immigrants or conquered peoples? If it is true that these two opinions can be maintained by equally conclusive arguments, then historians will do well to withdraw from this field altogether. If it is not true, the reader must insist that a Socrates — say in the person of Eduard Meyer (Gesch. d. Altertums, II. 79 ff.; 291 ff.; Forsch. z. alt. Gesch., II. 517 ff.) — is required to interrupt M. Glotz's facile exposition, and ask him some questions. How came it that the clan had nothing whatever to do with the enforcement of the criminal law of Draco? The clans coalesced in the Greek Middle Ages (after Homer): in a few generations this amazing revolution (p. 287) took place. What were men doing in the thousands of generations prior to 800 B.C.? What great force came into Greek life in the Middle Ages that was not previously operative? Homer, it must be remarked, knows no isolated clans. Was not Alcinoos' people divided into thirteen tribes and fifty-two brotherhoods (pp. 239 ff.)? Were the clans isolated when the mountaineers, marshalled in the three Doric tribes (p. 223), conquered the Peloponnese? Did they lack community of action in the Mycenaean Age, when the great road was built from Mycenae to Corinth, and Cnossus ruled the seas? Perhaps their day belongs before 1500 B. C. If so, M. Glotz should have operated with Schrader's Lexicon, and not so much with those will-o'-the-wisps, Greek myths. To the reviewer M. Glotz seems to have exaggerated the autonomy of the clan in the seventh century B. C, and to have projected it backwards to the age of origins. He certainly contradicts himself in his description of the decline of la solidarité familiale in Athens. On page 50 he affirms that in classic times the initiative in a murder case must come from the relatives of the slain man, while in his fine apology for the study of Greek public law (p. 292), he properly credits Solon with the removal of this restriction. What a difference that makes! Is it right none the less to insist upon the importance (p. 289) of the family in Greek criminal law?

The other essays in the volume deal with the Ordeal (novel and suggestive), the Oath, the Exposure of Children (a sympathetic treatment