The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
have grown; here are the germs of all the various forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.
But in the most ancient times this political organisation was weak and loose. The true power in primitive society was the family. When we first meet the Greeks they live together in family communities. Their villages are habitations of a genos, that is, of a clan, or family in a wide 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 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 phylē 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 organization 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 a same institutions among the Romans and among the Germans. The clan 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.
The importance of the family is most vividly shown in the manner in which the Greeks possessed the lands which they conquered. The 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 king was at once the chief priest, the chief judge, and the supreme leader 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 king had various privileges—the seat of honour at feasts, a large and 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 to enforce his will, if it did not meet the approval of the heads of the 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 descent from Zeus; and the Council was composed of this nobility. In the puissant authority of this Council of Elders lay the germ of future aristocracy.
More important than either King or Council for the future growth of Greece was the Gathering of the people, out of which democracy was to spring. All the freemen of the tribe—all the freemen of the 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 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 was surrounded by a body of Companions, or retainers, who were attached to him by personal ties of service, and seem often to have abode in his palace. The Companions are the same institution as the thanes of our own English kings. If monarchy 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, and was already passing away when the latest lays were written, it survived in a few outlying regions which lagged behind the rest of the Hellenic world in political development. Thus the Macedonian Greeks in the lower valley of the Axius retained a constitution of the old Homeric type till the latest times—the royal power continually growing. At the 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 primitive monarchy, have had their day, we shall see the Macedonian warrior, who is to complete the work that was begun by the Achaean conqueror of Bresa, attended by his Companions like Agamemnon or Achilles, and ruling his people like an Achaean king of men.
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 history. The city begins to emerge and take form and shape out of the loose aggregate of villages. The inhabitants of a plain or valley 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 long afterwards. The movement was promoted by the kings; and it 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.
In the heroic age, then, and even in the later days when the Homeric poems were composed, 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