were the expression.1 In reality, the feuds and jealousies of the Hellenic tribes made them practically a mere aggregate of independent, if not hostile, units; and until we reach the traditional history of these tribes separately, it is unnecessary to fill in with more minute detail the outlines of a geographical sketch which is intended to convey a mere general notion of the physical features and conditions of the country lying between the ranges of Olympos and the southernmost promontories of Pelopon

nesos.

CHAPTER II.

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF HELLENIC CIVILISATION.

Character of ancient civilisation.

ENGLISHMEN, it is said, are tempted to regard their constitution as something possessed of a necessary and eternal existence. If they care to take their stand on facts, it would be more safe to assert that the forms and principles to which the most ancient polities in the world may be traced are altogether in antagonism with the principles not of English law only, but of the laws of all civilised nations of the present day. Modern law, if we speak roughly, raises no impassable barrier between men who belong to different nations or even different races, far less between the inhabitants of different cities or the members of different families. In all the states of that which we call the ancient world, as in some which are not yet things of the past, absolute isolation stands out in glaring contrast with the modern tendency to international uniou. The member of one country or city or even family had nothing to do, and according to the earliest ideas could have nothing to do, with the members of any other. For the primitive Aryan, whether in the East or in the West, the world beyond the limits of his own family contained nothing, or contained his natural and necessary enemies. With all who lay beyond the bounds of his own precincts he had nothing in common. They were by birth foes, for whom in the event of war he could feel no pity, and on whom he could have no mercy. In such a state of things war meant to the defeated utter and hopeless ruin. Their lives were at the absolute disposal of the conqueror; and if these

1 Thus Tanagra was supposed to be the abode of envy, Thebes of insolence, Haliartos of stupidity.

and so with the rest of the Boiotian towns.

were spared, the alternative was the doom of life-long slavery. In peace the barriers between them were scarcely less rigid. The stranger could have no rights whether of intermarriage or of inheritance; nor could the lapse of generations furnish the faintest legal ground for the relaxation of these conditions. If, again, the old society was thus hard in its relations with all who lay beyond its narrow boundaries, it was not less imperious within its own limits. The father was the absolute lord within his own home. He was master of the lives of his children, who, so long as he lived, could be nothing but his subjects; and his wife was in theory his slave.

The family the original unit of

The origin of this state of things can be understood only if we trace the society and laws of all the Aryan tribes to their earliest forms; and in this task we may be greatly aided by an examination of social conditions which even at society. the present day exhibit the primitive type. Such conditions may be found in the village communities of India and other countries; but the inquiry is obviously one which extends beyond the limits of Greek history, and we may here start from the fact as proved that the narrow limitations and absolute intolerance which were rather forced on than congenial with the legislation of the Greek or Roman states, carry us back to a time when the house of each of our Aryan progenitors was to him what the den is to the wild beast which dwells in it; something, namely, to which he only has a right and which he allows his mate and his offspring to share, but which no other living thing may enter except at the risk of life.

Excln-ive

2

This utter isolation of the primitive Aryan, as doubtless of every other, human home, is sufficiently attested by ness of the social conditions which we find existing in historical times. In Latium and Rome, as in Hellas, every house was a fortress, carefully cut off by its precinct from every

ancient

family.

The word father, warp, denoted, at first, mere power, without a trace of the holier feeling since associated with it. It is but another name for the potent man, and reappears in the Greek deamorns, dasa-pati, the lord or conqueror of enemies. Pre cisely the same notion of mere power is expressed in the Greek πόσις, ε husband.

2 It cannot be questioned that the Roman patria potestas is not the creation of Roman state law. It is of the very essence of a state to be intolerant of private jurisdiction. It cannot possibly recognise in any

except itself a right to deal with the lives and property of its members. If these do wrong, the state_must claim to be their sole judge. If the right of judging them be under

certain circumstances conceded to others, this must clearly be the result of a compromise. The same remark applies to the ancient laws of marriage and inheritance. The history of investitures and of the legal immunities of the Clergy shows the natural workings of a state in reference to claims of private or alien jurisdiction.

other. No party walls might join together the possessions of different families; no plough might break the neutral ground which left each abode in impenetrable seclusion. The action of the state, as such, must be to unite its citizens, so far as may be possible, into a single body, by common interests, by a common law, and by a common religion. When then we have before us a condition of society in which each house or family standa wholly by itself and is only accidentally connected with any other, worshipping each its own deity at its own altar, and owning no obedience to a law which may extend its protection to aliens, we see that the materials out of which states have grown are not those which the state would have desired as most suitable for its work. Such as they were, they must be rough hewn to serve a wider purpose; and the history of the Greek and Latin tribes is the history of efforts to do away with distinctions on which their progenitors had insisted as indispensable.

1

This

Origin of
the religious
character of
the family.

But the den which the primitive man defended for his mate and his offspring with the instinctive tenacity of a brute would have remained a den for ever, if no higher feeling had been evoked in the mind of its possessor. impulse was imparted by the primitive belief in the continuity of human life. The owner of the den had not ceased to live because he was dead. He retained the wants and felt the pleasures and pains of his former life; his power to do harm was even greater than it had been; but above all, his rights of property were in no way changed. He was still the lord of his own house, with the further title to reverence that he had now become the object of its worship, its god. This religious foun dation once laid, the superstructure soon assumed the form of a systematic and well-ordered fabric. If the disembodied soul cannot obtain the rest which it needs, it will wreak its vengeance on the living; and it cannot rest if the body remain unburied. This last office can be discharged only by the dead man's legitimate representative,—in other words, his eldest son, born in lawful wedlock of a woman initiated into the family religion. Thus, as the generations went on, the living master of the house ruled simply as the vicegerent of the man from whom he had

1 That this belief would become a source of frightful cruelty, it is easy to imagine. The dead man would still hunt and eat and sleep as in the days of his life; therefore his horse, his cook, and his wife must be dispatched to bear him company in the spirit world. He must be clothed : and therefore the costliest raiment must be offered to him and con

sumed by fire, as in the story of Periandros and Melissa. Herod. v. 92,7. If he be slain, his spirit must be appeased by human sacrifices, as by the slaughter of the Trojan captives on the pyre of Patroklos. In short, the full developement of Chthonian worship with all its horrors would follow in a natural and rapid

course.

inherited his authority; and he ruled strictly by virtue of a religious sanction which set at defiance the promptings and impulses of natural affection. His wife was his slave. He might have sons grown up about him, and they might even be fathers of children; but so long as he lived, they could not escape from the sphere of his authority. Nor even, when he died, could he leave his daughter as his heiress or co-heiress with her brothers; and for the younger brothers themselves the death of their father brought no freedom. They became now the subjects of the elder brother, as before they had all been at the absolute disposal of their father. At once, then, the master of each household became its priest and its king. He alone could offer the sacrifices before the sacred hearth; and so long as these sacrifices were duly performed, he was strong in the protection of all his predecessors. In the worship which he thus conducted they only who belonged to the family could take part, as the lion's cubs alone would have a right to share the lion's den. Hence the continuity of the family became an indispensable condition for the welfare and repose of the dead. These could neither rest nor be rightly honoured, if the regular succession from father to son was broken. Hence first for the father of the family and then for all its male members marriage became a duty, and celibacy brought with it in later times not merely a stigma but political degradation. If the natural succession failed, the remedy lay in adoption. But this adoption was effected by a religious ceremony of the most solemn kind; and the subject of it renounced his own family and the worship of its gods to pass to another hearth and to the worship of other deities. Nor can the solemnity of this sanction be better attested than by the fact that except in case of failure of natural heirs resort could not be had to adoption.

The house

pendents.

Thus each house became a temple, of which the master or father (for, as we have seen, the two terms have but the same meaning) was also the priest, who, as serving only and its de- the gods of his own recesses, knew nothing of any religious bonds which linked him with anyone beyond the limits of his own household. These, of course, were extended with each generation, the younger sons becoming the heads of new families which were kept in strict subordination to the chief who in a direct line represented the original progenitor and who thus became the king of a number of houses or a clan. But it was indispensable that the same blood should flow or be thought to flow through the veins of every member of these houses, and that they must worship the same gods with the same sacrifices. All who could not satisfy these conditions were aliens or enemies, for the two words were synony

mous; and thus we have in the East the growth of caste, in the West that of a plebs or a clientela, beneath whom might be placed the serf or the helot.1

property.

Hence in the primitive Aryan states whether of the East or the West the distinction of orders was altogether based on religion; and if in these states citizenship was deriv- Ideas of able, as it has been said, only from race, this was the necessary result of the action of the earliest religious faith, and nothing more. The question of property was at first merely a secondary consideration. The home of the family must, it is true, have its hearth and its altar; but the notion of property in the soil was fully developed only when the death of the founder made it necessary to set apart a certain spot of ground as his tomb and as the burialplace of his successors; and from the inviolability of the grave followed necessarily the doctrine that the soil itself might not be alienated.

Laws of inheritance.

From the reverence or the worship paid to the master or the founder of the family after death followed that strict law of primogeniture which made the eldest son, as his father had been, the absolute lord of all other members of his house. It was impossible for the father to divest him of his sacred character, and impossible for him to admit any of his younger sons to a share of his dignity. From this root sprang that exclusive and intolerant spirit which pervaded the whole civilisation of the ancient world and which in its intensity is to us almost inconceivable.

Identity of religious

and civil penalties.

But if the walls of separation between the orders in the state or city slowly crumbled away, the barriers which cut off the stranger from the rights of citizenship were never removed. The Athenian, the Spartan, the Megarian, and the Theban were as closely akin as the men of Kent and Essex, of Norfolk and Lincoln. Yet out of the bounds of his own city each was a stranger or alien who had no proper claim to the protection of the laws, who could not become an owner of land in a soil sacred to the worship of other gods, or inherit from the citizens, because all inheritance involved the maintenance of a particular ritual. In short, to the citizen of the ancient communities the city was not merely his home; it was his world. Here alone could he live under the protection of law, that is, of religion. Hence the doom of banishment became not less terrible than that of death, and was regarded as an adequate punishment for the gravest political offences, for the

1 The position of the domestic slave was in one sense, higher. He was initiated into the family worship, and so far had a community of interest with his master.

The

plebeian, as such, could have no worship at all, and had therefore no title to the consideration of those who were above him.