ceremony to remove the profanation; and after a city had been recovered from an enemy, the temples must be repurified and every sacred fire extinguished and lit again, in order to efface the desecration wrought by the enemies' presence.
There seems to have been the greatest difficulty about granting the right of citizenship to strangers. Down to the time of Herodotus, Sparta had but accorded it to one person, a soothsayer, on whose behalf the honour had been demanded by an oracle from Delphi. By Athens the favour was granted more than once, but only after precautions which to our ideas seem excessive. Two assemblies of the whole people, with an interval of nine days between each were required, and no less than six thousand favourable votes must be recorded at each. Further, a vote of the Senate was required to confirm these two decisions; and then after all the decree was not safe from the opposition of any citizen who might choose to accuse it of being in contradiction with the old law. War might be declared or an entirely new law passed with far less difficulty than was found in thus conferring citizenship upon a stranger. The reason of this exclusiveness was not that the people were afraid of giving more votes to a party, but rather (as we gather from Demosthenes) that the sacrifices must be kept pure.[1] The exclusion of strangers seemed to be merely the exercise of proper vigilance over the sacred ceremonies. For it was admitting the stranger to participation in the city's religion, when the gods were known to be very jealous of the presence of any foreigner. Hence the fewness of the instances in which it had been granted, and the denial, even after admission to citizenship, of eligibility to the offices of archon or priest. And yet, generally speaking, a share in the worship conveyed all other rights, since the citizen who could be present at the sacrifice with which the assembly commenced could vote also in the assembly, and he who could sacrifice in the name of the city might be prytanis or archon. But it was death for a stranger to enter the sacred space marked out by the priest for the assembly; and a member of any other city was counted a stranger, seeing he could not belong
- ↑ Demosth., Neœra, 89, 91, 92, 113, 114.
