Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/133

127 standard the influence and position of the council and of the basileus must be judged.

3. The military chief (basileus). Marx makes the following comment: "The European scientists, mostly born servants of princes, represent the basileus as a monarch in the modern sense. The Yankee republican Morgan objects to this. Very ironically but truthfully he says of the oily Gladstone and his "’Juventua Mundi': ’Mr. Gladstone, who presents to his readers the Grecian chiefs of the heroic age as kings and princes, with the superadded qualities of gentlemen, is forced to admit that, on the whole we seem to have the custom or law of primogeniture sufficiently, but not oversharply defined.' As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone himself must have perceived that a primogeniture resting on a clause of 'sufficient but not oversharp' definition is as bad as none at all."

We saw how the law of heredity was applied to the offices of sachems and chiefs among the Iroquois and other Indians. All offices were subject to the vote of the gentiles and for this reason hereditary in the gens. A vacancy was filled preferably by the next gentile relative—the brother or the sister's son—unless good reasons existed for passing him. That in Greece, under paternal law, the office of basileus was generally transmitted to the son or one of the sons, indicates only that the probability of succession by public election was in favor of the sons. It implies by no means a legal succession without a vote of the people. We here perceive simply the first rudiments of segregated families of aristocrats among Iroquois and Greeks, which led to a hereditary leadership or monarchy in Greece. Hence the facts are in favor of the opinion that among Greeks the basileus was either elected by the people or at last was subject to the indorsement of their appointed organs, the council or agora, aa was the case with the Roman king (rex).