Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/182

 176 THE CITY. BOOK III. went to found another, he took with him commonly only a small number of his fellow-citizens. He associ- ated with them a multitude of other men who came froni different parts, and might even belong to different races. Bat this chief never failed to organize the new state after the model of the one he had just quitted. Consequently he divided his people into tribes and phratries. Each of these little associations had an altar, sacrifices, and festivals; each even invented an ancient hero, whom it honored with its worship, and from whom, with the lapse of time, it believed itself to have been descended. It often happened, too, that the men of some country lived without laws and without order, either because no one had ever been able to establish a social organiza- tion there, as in Arcadia, or because it had been cor- rupted and dissolved by too rapid revolutions, as at Cyrene and Thurii. If a legislator undertook to estab- lish order among these men, he never failed to com- mence by dividing them into tribes and phratries, as if this were the only type of society. In each of these organizations he named an eponymous hero, established sacrifices, and inaugurated traditions. This was always the manner of commencing, if he wished to found a regular society.' Thus Plato did when he imagined a model city. » Herodotus, IV. ICl. Cf. Plato, Laws, V. 738; VI. 771.