Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/661

 STUDY OF HOMERIC RELIGION 647

show a strain toward compatibility among themselves.^ The industrial organization is in transition between the cattle-raising and the agricultural modes : the ox is the standard of value and the chief sacrificial offering; wealth is reckoned in cattle rather than in anything else ; and yet agriculture is flourishing, the exist- ence of good farming land unworked is a condition to be depre- cated, and bread is one of the staple foods. The system of property-holding is in accord with this status of the industrial organization; property in land is still of no more than rudi- mentary development, only the king and the shrine possessing a "piece-cut-out'^ ( Tefi€vo<i ) ; land-tenure is approaching, through a quasi-feudal form, the stage of private holdings. The family organization rests upon wife-purchase and "juridic monogamy," and, as befits this stage of the arts, is strongly patriarchal. In- heritance shows progress toward the system of primogeniture. The military system is distinctly barbaric, though the grosser practices, such as the use of poisoned weapons, are coming under the disapproval of the gods, which shows that they have prac- tically passed out of the folkways. However, when a town is captured, the men are killed, and what advance to slavery is found has to do only with women and children. Class-distinc- tions based upon the military organization are normal; on the whole the scale of social worth follows that of fighting ability — the king must be, actually or through a fiction, the strongest warrior. Government is monarchical in fact and also in theory — that is, it is a prosperity-policy for the society — but the power of the king is checked, at least in form, through a council of nobles and an assembly of the people. It rests ultimately, of course, upon a public approval strong and general enough to discounten- ance dethronement. Law is still mere precedent, and the personal righting of private wrongs is the rule, although, in the case of the taking of life, retaliation in kind is yielding to commutation. Vengeance may be visited upon the family or community of the transgressor. Evidently, reviewed along these general lines, the type of society is primitive. Hence we should not look for a form of religion that should be more than primitive.

■Sumner, Folkways, p. 5.