Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/169

 The Mediterranean World and the Early Greeks 1 29 made up the chief wealth of the Greeks for many centuries after they had begun agriculture. Nomad life as we have seen it along the fertile crescent in Earliest Asia (p. 59) possesses no state government, for there is no fnd^s™cTety public business which demands it. No taxes are collected, there ^^JJ"^ ^^^ are no officials, there are no cases at law, no legal business, and Greeks society is controlled by a few customs like the " blood revenge," which places the punishment of the murderer in the hands of the injured family. Such was exactly the condition of the nomad Greeks when they began a settled life in the ^Egean world. From their old wandering life on the grasslands they carried with them the loose groups of families known as tribes, and within each tribe an indefinite number of smaller groups of more intimate families called " brotherhoods." A " council " of the old men (" elders ") occasionally decided Council and matters in dispute, or questions of tribal importance, and prob- ^^^"^ ^ ably once a year, or at some important feast, an " assembly " of all the weapon-bearing men of the tribe might be held, to express its opinion of a proposed war or migration. These are the germs of later European political institutions and even of our own in the United States to-day.-^ At some stage in their early career the old-time nomad leader in war, religion, and the settle- ment of disputes had become a rude shepherd king of the tribe. Each tribe seems to have gained such a king, although King a whole group of tribes might occasionally be found under the rule of one king. During the four centuries from 1000 to 600 B.C. we see the Lack of Greeks entangled in the problem of learning how to transact ^" *"^ the business of settled landholding communities, and how to adjust the ever-growing friction and strife between the rich and the poor, the social classes created by the holding of land and the settled life. We gain some idea of the difficulties to be met as 1 Compare the House of Lords(= the above "council") and the House of Commons (= the above "assembly") in England, or the Senate (derived from the Latin word meaning "old man") and the House of Representatives in the United States.