Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/242

 236 THE CITV. BOOK 111, sacrifices, they command in war, and they administer justice." Dionysius of Halicarnassus expresses himself in the same manner regarding the kings of Rome. The constitutional rules of this monarchy were very simple; it was not necessary to seek long for themj they flowed from the rules of the worship themselves. The founder, who had establislied the sacred fire, was naturally the first priest. Hereditary succession was the constant rule, in the beginning, for the transmission of this worship. Whether the sacred fire was that of a family or that of a city, religion prescribed that the care of supporting it should always jjass from father to son. The priesthood was therefore hereditary, and the power went with it.' A well-known fact in the history of Greece proves, in a striking manner that, in the beginning, tiie kingly ofiice belonged to the man who set up the hearth of the city. We know that the population of the Ionian col- onies was not composed of Athenians, but that it was a mixture of Pelasgians, Cohans, Abantes, and Cad- raeans. Yet all the hearths of the cities were placed by the members of the religious family of Codrus. It followed that these colonists, instead of having for leaders men of their own race, — the Pelasgi a Pelasgian, the Abantes an Abantian, the Cohans an ^olian, — all gave the royalty in their twelve cities to the Codridaj.* Assuredly these persons had not acquired their author- ity by force, for they were almost the only Athenians in this numerous agglomeration. But as they had • Wc speak here only of the early ages of cities. We shall Bcc, farther on, that a time came when hereditary succession ceased to be the rule, and we shall explain why at Rome royalty was not iiereditary.
 * ikrodotus, I. 142-148. Pausanias, VI. Strabo,