Southern Greece doubtless had its singers too, and here, we may suspect, the story of the homecoming of Odysseus took its first shape, Odyssey. marked, as it is, by a lively interest in the Peloponnesus and Crete. SECT. 6. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL tions. The Homeric poems give us our Old Aryan earliest glimpse of the working of institu those political institutions which were the common heritage of most of the children, whether children by adoption or by birth, of the Aryan stock, -of Greek, Roman, and German alike. They show us the King at the head. But he does not govern wholly of his own will; he is guided by a Council of the chief men of the community whom he consults; and the decisions of the Council and King deliberating together are brought before the Assembly of the whole people. Out of these three elements-King, Council, and Assembly-the constitutions of Europe have grown; here are the germs of all the various forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. But in the most ancient times this Family orpolitical organisation was weak and ganisation, loose. The true power in primitive society was the family. When we gether in family communities. Their FIG. 27. -Bronze Idol (from Phyla- that is, of a clan, or family in a wide gens. kopi, Melos). sense; all the members being descended from a common ancestor and bound together by the tie of blood. Originally the chief of the family had the power of life and death over all who belonged to the family; and it was only as the authority of the state grew and asserted itself against the comparative independence of the H φυλή, tribus. δῆμος. φράτρα. Clan, phratry, and tribe were family, that this power gradually passed away. But the village communities are not, as they were in the Asian foreworld, isolated and independent; they are part of a larger community which is called the phyle or tribe. The tribe is the whole people of the kingdom, in the kingdom's simplest form; and the territory which the tribe inhabited was called its deme. When a king became powerful and won sway over the demes of neighbouring kings, a community consisting of more than one tribe would arise; and, while each tribe had to merge its separate political institutions in the common institutions of the whole state, it would retain its separate identity within the larger union. It was usual for several families to group themselves together into a society called a phratra or brotherhood, which had certain common religious usages. The organisation of clan and tribe, with the intermediate unit of the phratry, was a framework derived from Aryan forefathers, shared at least by other Aryan races. For we find the same institutions among the Romans and among the Germans. The clan Aryan institutions. is the foundation of Roman society; the Julian gens, for instance, has exactly the same social significance as the genos of the Alcmaeonids of Attica. The phyle is the Roman tribe; and the phratry corresponds to the Roman curia, and to our own English hundred. The importance of the brotherhood is illustrated by Homer's description of an outcast, as one who has no "brothers" and no hearth. Family The importance of the family is most vividly shown in the manner property in in which the Greeks possessed the lands which they conquered. The land. soil did not become the private property of individual freemen, nor yet the public property of the whole community. The king of the tribe or tribes marked out the whole territory into parcels, according to the number of families in the community; and the families cast lots for the estates. Each family then possessed its own estate; the head of the family administered it, but had no power of alienating it. The land belonged to the whole kin, but not to any particular member. The right of property in land seems to have been based, not on the right of conquest, but on a religious sentiment. Each family buried their dead within their own domain; and it was held that the dead possessed for ever and ever the soil where they lay, and that the land round about a sepulchre belonged rightfully to their living kinsfolk, one of whose highest duties was to protect and tend the tombs of their fathers. The Basileus or king." The king was at once the chief priest, the chief judge, and the supreme war-lord of the tribe. He exercised a general control over religious ceremonies, except in cases where there were special priesthoods; he pronounced judgment and dealt out justice to those who came to his judgment-seat to have their wrongs righted, and he led forth the host to war. He belonged to a family which claimed descent from the gods themselves. His relation to his people was conceived as that of a protecting deity; "he was revered as a god in the deme." The kingship passed from sire to son, but it is probable that personal fitness was recognised as a condition of the kingly office, and the people might refuse to accept a degenerate son who was unequal to the tasks that his father had fulfilled. The sceptred σκηπτking had various privileges the seat of honour at feasts, a large and oxos βασιλεύς. choice share of booty taken in war and of food offered at sacrifices. A special close of land was marked out and set apart for him as a royal domain, distinct from that which his family owned. The royal functions were vague enough, and a king had no power The bulê or to enforce his will if it did not meet the approval of the heads of the council. people. He must always look for the consent and seek the opinion of the deliberative Council of the Elders. Strictly, perhaps, the members of the Council ought to have been the heads of all the clans, and they would thus have represented the whole tribe, or all the tribes if there were more than one. But we must take it for granted, as an ultimate fact, which we have not the means of explaining, that certain families had come to hold a privileged position above the others-had, in fact, been marked out as noble, and claimed Class of descent from Zeus; and the Council was composed of this nobility, nobles. In the puissant authority of this Council of Elders lay the germ of future aristocracy. is the assembly. More important than either King or Council for the future growth Agora, or of Greece was the Gathering of the people, out of which democracy Gathering was to spring. All the freemen of the tribe-all the freemen of the of the folk. nation, when more tribes had been united-met together, not at stated times, but whenever the king summoned them, to hear and acclaim what he and his councillors proposed. To hear and acclaim, but not to debate or propose themselves. As yet the Gathering of The arm. the folk for purposes of policy had not been differentiated from the Gathering for the purpose of war. The host which the king led forth against the foe was the same as the folk which assented, by silence or applause, to the declarations of his will in the Agora. The Assembly was not yet distinguished as an institution from the army; and if Agamemnon summons his host to declare his resolutions in the plain of Troy, such a gathering is the Agora in no figurative sense, it is no mere military assembly formed on the model of a political assembly; it is in the fullest sense the Assembly of the people—the fellow institution of the Roman comitia, our own gemot, derived all three from the same old Aryan gatherings. The king's The king was surrounded by a body of Companions, or retainers, Comwho were attached to him by personal ties of service, and seem often panions. to have abode in his palace. The Companions are the same institution as the thanes of our English kings. And if kingship had held its ground in Greece, the Companions might possibly, as in England, have developed into a new order of nobility, founded, not on birth, but on the king's own choice for his service. Though the monarchy of this primitive form, as we find it reflected in the Homeric lays, generally passed away, it survived in a few outlying regions which lagged behind the rest of the Hellenic world in Survival of political development. Thus the Macedonian Greeks in the lower old form of valley of the Axius retained a constitution of the old Homeric type monarchy till the latest times the royal power continually growing. At the in Macedonia. close of the tale of Greek conquest and expansion, which began on the Cayster and ended on the Hyphasis, we shall come back by a strange revolution to the Homeric state. When all the divers forms of the rule of the few and the rule of the many, which grew out of the Alexander primitive monarchy, have had their day, we shall see the Macedonian the Great. warrior, who is to complete the work that was begun by the Achaean conquerors of Troy, attended by his Companions like Agamemnon or Achilles, and ruling his people like an Achaean king of men. cent. B. C. The constitutional fabric of the Greek states was thus simple and loose in the days of Homer. Perhaps few large communities had come into Greece, but larger communities were constantly formed in the course of the conquest. In the later part of the royal period a new movement is setting in which is to decide the future of Greek Beginning history. The city begins to emerge and take form and shape out of of the CITY: the loose aggregate of villages. The inhabitants of a plain or valley 10th to 9th are induced to leave their scattered villages and make their dwellings side by side in one place, which would generally be under the shadow of the king's fortress. At first the motive would be to gain the protection afforded by joint habitation in unsettled times; just as we find in an earlier age villages grouped under the citadel of Mycenae. Sometimes the group of villages would be girt by a wall; sometimes the protection of the castle above would be deemed enough. The change from village to city life was general, but not universal; many communities continued to live in villages, and did not form cities till The movement was promoted by the kings; and it long afterwards. is probable that strong kings often brought it about by compulsion. But in promoting it they were unwittingly undermining the monarchical constitution, and paving the way for their own abolition. A city-state naturally tends to be a republic. Some peoples (e.g. the Eleans) continue to live in villages. The state not yet differen tiated. (θέμιστες.) In the heroic age, then, the state had not fully emerged from the society. No laws were enacted and maintained by the state. Those ordinances and usages which guided the individual man in his conduct, and which are necessary for the preservation of any society, were maintained by the sanction of religion. There were certain crimes which the gods punished. But it was for the family, not for the Manwhole community, to deal with the shedder of blood. The justice slaughter which the king administered was really arbitration. A stranger had avenged by kinsfolk. no right of protection, and might be slain in a foreign community, Attitude to unless he was bound by the bond of guest friendship with a member strangers. of that community, and then he came under the protection of Zeus (Zeus Xenios.) the Hospitable. Wealth in these ages consisted of herds and flocks; Wealth. for, though the Greeks were tillers of the soil and had settled in a country which was already agricultural, the land was not rich enough to bestow wealth. The value of a suit of armour, for instance, or a slave was expressed in oxen. Piracy was a common trade, as was Piracy. inevitable in a period when there was no organised maritime power strong enough to put it down. So many practised this means of livelihood that it bore no reproach; and when seamen landed on a strange strand, the natural question to ask them was: "Outlanders, whence come ye? are ye robbers that rove the seas?" SECT. 7. THE DORIAN CONQUEST The heroic age of Greece may be said to have come to an end within two generations after the Trojan War. A dark period of about two centuries followed, which were marked by the disappearance of the old civilisation, by the expansion of the Greek race over the Aegean, and by wide political changes in the mother country. The transition to the new period corresponds to the transition from the bronze to the iron age. The old Aegean fashions Iron age. of pottery are replaced by a style distinguished by geometrical decorations; and hence in the history of art the "Geometric age" is often used as a convenient designation. The pressure of Illyrian peoples across the northern frontiers of Illyrian Greece seems to have been the principal cause of the changes. The invasions. Dorians who appear upon the scene and play the leading part in transforming Greece were probably of Illyrian stock. Unlike the earlier northern invaders, the Achaeans, they destroyed instead of adopting the civilisation which they found. The Dorians did not come with horses, they fought on foot; and their weapons were iron. The southward pressure of the Illyrians was fatal to Aetolia. I. Destruction of In the Homeric poems we have a reflected glimpse of the prosperity Actolian of the Aetolian coast-land. We see that "Pleuron by the sea and civilisarocky Calydon" and the other strong cities of that region were tion. abreast of the civilisation of the heroic age; and the Aetolian myth of Meleager and the hunting of the Calydonian boar became a part of the heritage of the national legend of Greece. Maritime Aetolia |
