Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/383

 CHAP. VII. THE PLEBS ENTEE THE CITY. 377 These tribes and demes resembled in nppearnnce the ancient tribes and gentes. In each one of tliese or- ganizations there were a worship, a priest, a judge, assemblies for religious ceremonies, and assemblies to deliberate upon the common interests.' But the new groups differed from the old in two essential points. First, all the free men of Athens, even those who had not belonged to the old tribes and gentes, were included in the divisions of Cleisthenes." This Avas a great reform ; it gave a worship to those who before had none, and included in a religious association those who had previously been excluded from every associa- tion. In the second place, men were distributed m the tribes and demes, not according to birth, as for- merly, but according to their locality. Birth was of uo account; men were equal, and privileges were no longer known. The worship for which the new tribe and demo were established was no longer the heredita- ry worship of an ancient family ; men no longer assem- bled around the hearth of a Eupatrid. The tribe or deme no longer venerated an ancient Eupatrid as a divine ancestor ; the tribes had new eponymous heroes chosen from among the ancient personages of whom the people had preserved a grateful recollection, and as for the demes, they uniformly adopted as their protect- ing gods Zeus, the guardian of the walls, and the pater- nal Apollo. Henceforth there was no reason why the priesthood should be hereditary in the deme, as it had been in the gens,- or why the priest should always be a Eupatrid. In the new groups the priestly office, as ' iEschines, in Ctesiph., SO. Demosthenes, in JEubul. Pol- lux, Vlir. 19, 95, 107. chines, edit. Didot, p. 611.
 * Aristotle, Politics, III. 1, 10; VII. 2. Scholiast on Ms'