Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/74

 58 HISTORY OF GREECE second common to all the Ionic race, annually brought togethei the members of these phratries and gentes for worship, festivity, and maintenance of special sympathies ; thus strengthening the larger ties without effacing the smaller. Such were the manifestations of Grecian sociality, as we read them in the early constitution, not merely of Attica, but of other Grecian states besides. To Aristotle and Dikaearchus, it was an interesting inquiry to trace back all political society into cer- tain assumed elementary atoms, and to show by what motives and means the original families, each having its separate meal- bin and fireplace, 1 had been brought together into larger aggre- gates. 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 pene- trate. Pollux probably from Aristotle's last work on the Constitu- tions of Greece 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 fact : to what extent the gens, at the unknown epoch of its first 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 all 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 on religious belief and partly on positive compact, so as to comprehend strangers in blood. All the mem- bers of one gens, or even of one phratry, believed themselves to he sprung, not, indeed, from the same grandfather or great- 4>purpiof 'Adjjvaia parpia, the presiding god of the phratric union. Plato, Euthydem. c. 28, p. 302 ; Demosth. adv. Makart. p. 1054. See Meier, De Gentilitatc Attidi, pp. 11-14. The TTurptai at Byzantium, which were different from diaaoi, and which possessed corporate property (ru re -diaauTiKu nal ra TrarptuTiKil, Aristot. (Economic, ii, 4), are uoubtless the parallel of the Athenian phratries. 1 Diktearchus ap. Stephan. Byz. v, Tlarpii; Aristot. Polit. i, 1, 0: 'Ofioai- Kvo-'f and oinoKum'ovf are the old words cited by the lattci from Charonda and Epiirenides.