Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/382

 376 THE KEVOLUTIONS. B( OK IV^ ated. All these had been established by religion, and in tlieir turn they maintained religion — that is to say^ the power of the great families. There were in each of these organizations two classes of men. On the one side were the Eupatrids, who had, by right of birth, the priesthood and the authority; on the other,, men of an inferior condition, who were no longer either slaves or clients, but who were still retained by reli- gion under the authority of the Eupatrids. In vain did the laws of Solon declare that all Athenians were free. The old religion seized a man as he went out of the assembly where he had voted freely, and said to him,. " Thou art bound to the Eupatrid through worship ;. thou owest him respect, deference, submission ; as a member of the city, Solon has freed thee ; but as a member of a tribe, thou obeyest the Eupati'id ; as a. member of a phratry, thou also hast a Eupatrid for a chief; in the family itself, in the gens where thou wei-t born, and which thou canst not leave, thou still findest the authority of the Eupatrid." Of what avail was it that the political law had made a citizen of this man, if religion and manners persisted in making him a cli- ent ? For several generations, it is true, many men lived outside these organizations, w^hether they had come from foreign countries, or had escaped from the gens and the tribe, to be free. But these men suffered in another way ; they found themselves in a state of moral inferiority compared with other men, and a sort of ignominy was attached to their independence. There was, therefore, after the political reform of So- lon, another leform to be made in the domain of reli- gion. Cleisthenes accomplished it by suppressing the four old religious tribes, and replacing them with ten tribes, which were divided into demes.