Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/143

137, navigation, etc.—had developed more fully with the progress of industry and traffic. The population was now divided according to occupations into rather well defined groups, everyone of which had separate interests not guarded by the gens or phratry and therefore necessitating the creation of new offices. The number of slaves had increased considerably and must have surpassed by far that of the free Athenians even at this early stage. Gentile society originally knew no slavery and was, therefore, ignorant of any means to hold this mass of bondsmen in check. And finally, commerce had attracted a great many strangers who settled in Athens for the sake of the easier living it afforded. According to the old constitution, the strangers had neither civil rights nor the protection of the law. Though tacitly admitted by tradition, they remained a disturbing and foreign element.

In short, gentile constitution approached its doom. Society was daily growing more and more beyond it. It was powerless to stop or allay even the most distressing evils that had grown under its very eyes. But in the meantime the state had secretly developed. The new groups formed by division of labor, first between city and country, then between the various branches of city industry, had created new organs for the care of their interests. Public offices of every description had been instituted. And above all the young state needed its own fighting forces. Among the seafaring Athenians this had to be at first only a navy, for occasional short expeditions and the protection of the merchant vessels. At some uncertain time before Solon, the naukrariai were instituted, little territorial districts, twelve in each tribe. Every naukraria had to furnish, equip and man a war vessel and to detail two horsemen. This arrangement was a twofold attack on the gentile constitution. In the first place it created