Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/147

141 into any of the old groups of kinship. Besides, there was a steadily increasing number of foreign immigrants who were only protected by traditional sufferance.

Meanwhile the struggles of the parties proceeded. The nobility tried to regain their former privileges and for a short time recovered their supremacy, until the revolution of Kleisthenes (509 B. C.) brought their final downfall and completed the ruin of gentile law. In his new constitution, Kleisthenes ignored the four old tribes founded on the gentes and phraties. Their place was taken by an entirely new organization based on the recently attempted division of the citizens into naukrariai according to residence. No longer was membership in a group of kindred the dominant fact, but simply local residence. Not the nation, but the territory was now divided; the inhabitants became mere political fixtures of the territory.

The whole of Attica was divided into one hundred communal districts, so-called demoi, every one of which was autonomous. The citizens living in a demos (demotoi) elected their official head (demarchos), treasurer and thirty judges with jurisdiction in minor cases. They also received their own temple and divine guardian or heros, whose priest they elected. The control of the demos was in the hands of the council of demotoi. This is, as Morgan correctly remarks, the prototype of the autonomous American township. The modern state in its highest development ended in the same unit with which the rising state began its career in Athens.

Ten of these units (demoi) formed a tribe, which, however, was now designated as local tribe in order to distinguish it from the old sex tribe. The local tribe was not only an autonomous political, but also a military group. It elected the phylarchos or tribal head who commanded the horsemen, the taxiarchos