Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/70

54 HISTORY OF G^KECE. pose ; the legislator finds them preexisting, and adapts or modifies them to answer some national scheme. We must distinguish the general fact of the classification, and the successive subordination in the scale, of the families to the gens, of the gentes to the phratry, and of the phratries to the tribe, from the precise numerical sym- metry with which this subordination is invested, as we read it, thirty families to a gens, thirty gentes to a phratry, three phratries to each tribe. If such nice equality of numbers could ever have been procured, by legislative constraint 1 operating upon preexist- ent natural elements, the proportions could not have been per- manently maintained. But we may reasonably doubt whether it did ever so exist : it appears more like the fancy of an author who pleased himself by supposing an original systematic creation in times anterior to records, by multiplying together the number of days in the month and of months in the year. That every phratry contained an equal number of gentes, and every gens an equal number of families, is a supposition hardly admissible with- out better evidence than we possess. But apart from this question- able precision of numerical scale, the phratries and gentes them- selves were real, ancient, and durable associations among the Athenian people, highly important to be understood. 2 The basis of the whole was the house, hearth, or family, a number of which. 1 Meier, DC Gcntilitate Attica, pp. 22-24, conceives that this numerical completeness was enacted by Solon ; but of this there is no proof, nor is it in harmony with the general tendencies of Solon's legislation. 2 So in reference to the Anglo-Saxon Tytftings and Hundreds, and to the still more widely-spread division of the Hundred, which seems to pervade the whole of Teutonic and Scandinavian antiquity, much more extensively than the tything ; there is no ground for believing that these precise numer- ical proportions were in general practice realized : the systematic nomencla- ture served its purpose by marking the idea of graduation and the type to which a certain approach was actually made. Mr. Thorpe observes, respect- ing the Hundred, in his Glossary to the " Ancient Laws and Institi tcs of England," v, Hundred, Tytlring, Frid-Borij, etc. " In the Dialogus dc Scac- cario. it is said that a Hundred ' ex hydarum aliquot centenariis, sed non determinatis, constat: quidam enim ex pluribus, qitidam ex paucioribus constat.' Some accounts make it consist of precisely a hundred hydes, others of a hundred tythings, others of a hundred free families. Certain it is, that whatever may have been its original organization, the Hundred, at the time when it becomes known to us, differed greatly in extent in various parts of England."