Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/76

 60 HISTORY OF GRKKCK. like Aristotle might discern the difference between the gens ami the family, so as to distinguish the former as the offspring of some special compact, still, this is no fair test of the feelings usual among early Greeks ; nor is it certain that Aristotle him- self, son of the physician Nikomachus, who belonged to the gens of the Asklepiads, 1 would have consented to disallow the pro- creative origin of all these religious families without any ex- ception. 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 ances- torial genealogy, adapted as it doubtless was to the early condi- tion 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 preeminent 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. Analogies, borrowed from very different people and parts of the world, prove how readily these enlarged and factitious family unions assort with the ideas of an early stage of society. The Highland clan, the Irish sept, 2 the ancient legally constituted 1 Diogen. Laih-t. v, 1. 2 See Colonel Lcake's Travels in Northern Greece, ch. 2, p. 85 (the Greek word (jtpurpiai seems to be adopted in Albania) ; Boue', La Turquie en Europe, vol. ii, ch. 1, pp. 15-17 ; chap. 4, p. 530 ; Spenser's View of the State of Ireland (vol. vi, pp. 1542-1543, of Tonson's editio'n of Spenser's Works, 1715) ; Cypricn Robert, Die Slavcn in Turkey, b. 1, chs. 1 and 2. So, too, in the laws of king Alfred in England, on the subject of murder, the guild-brethren, or members of the same guild, are made to rank in the position of distant relatives, if there happen to be no blood relatives : " If a man, kinless of paternal relatives, fight and slay a man. then, if he have maternal relatives, le' them pay a third of the wer: his guild-brethren a third part : for a third let him flee. If he have no maternal relatives, let his guild-brethren pay half : for half let him flee. . . .If a man kill a man thus circumstanced, if he have no relatives, let half be paid to the king, half to bis guild-brethren." (Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, vol. I, pp. 79-81.) Again, in the same work, Leges Hcnrici Pri.TU, vol. i, p 596 tha ideas of the kindred and the guild run together in the most intimate ma