Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/131

125 furthermore, common religious rites and festivals. As a matter of fact, the development of the entire Grecian mythology from the traditional old Aryan cult of nature was essentially due to the gentes and phratries and took place within them. The phratry had an official head (phratriarchos) and also, according to De Coulanges, meetings and binding resolutions, a jurisdiction and administration. Even the state of a later period, while ignoring the gens, left certain public functions to the phratry.

The tribe consisted of several kindred phratries. In Attica there were four tribes of three phratries each; the number of gentes in each phratry was thirty. Such an accurate division of groups reveals the fact of a conscious and well-planned interference with the natural order. How, when and why this was done is not disclosed by Grecian history. The historical memory of the Greeks themselves does not reach beyond the heroic age.

Closely packed in a comparatively small territory as the Greeks were, their dialectic differences were less conspicuous than those developed in the wide American forests. Yet even here we find only tribes of the same main dialect united in a larger organization. Little Attica had its own dialect which later on became the prevailing language in Grecian prose.

In the epics of Homer we generally find the Greek tribes combined into small nations, but so that their gentes, phratries and tribes retained their full independence. They already lived in towns fortified by walls. The population increased with the growth of the herds, with agriculture and the beginnings of the handicrafts. At the same time the differences in wealth became more marked and gave rise to an aristocratic element within the old primordial democracy. The individual little nations carried on an unceasing warfare for the possession of the best land and also