Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/71

REAL, CHARACTER OF THE A1TIC GENTES. 5ft greater or less, composed the gens, or genos. This gens was therefore a clan, sept, or enlarged, and partly factitious, brother hood, bound together by, 1. Common religious ceremonies, and exclusive privilege of priesthood, in honor of the same god, sup- posed to be the primitive ancestor, and characterized by a special surname. 2. By a common burial-place. 3. By mutual rights of succession to property. 4. By reciprocal obligations of help, defence, and redress of injuries. 5. By mutual right and obliga- tion to intermarry in certain determinate cases, especially where there was an orphan daughter or heiress. 6. By possession, in some cases at least, of common property, an archon and a treas- urer of their own. Such were the rights and obligations charac- terizing the gentile union : l the phratric union, binding together several gentes, was less intimate, but still included some mutual rights and obligations of an analogous character, and especially a communion of particular sacred rites and mutual privileges of prosecution in the event of a phrator being slain. Each phratry was considered as belonging to one of the four tribes, and all the phratries of the same tribe enjoyed a certain periodical commu- nion of sacred rites, under the presidency of a magistrate called the phylo-basileus, or tribe-king, selected from the Eupatrids ; Zeus Geleon was in this manner the patron-god of the tribe Ge- leontes. Lastly, all the four tribes were linked together by the common worship of Apollo Patrous, as their divine father and guardian ; for Apollo was the father of Ion, and the eponyms of all the four tribes were reputed sons of Ion. Such was the primitive religious and social union of the popu- lation of Attica in its gradually ascending scale, as distin- guished from the political union, probably of later introduction, represented at lirst by the trittyes and naukraries, and in after times by the ten Kleisthenean tribes, subdivided into trittyes and denies. The religious and family bond of aggregation is the ear- lier of the two : but the political bond, though beginning later, 1 See the instructive inscription in Professor Eoss'.s work (Uber die Die- men von Attika, p. 26) of the yivor 'ApvvavdpidCiv, commemorating the archon of that gens, the priest of Kekrops, the Tafiiaf, or treasurer, and the names of the members, with the deme and tribe of each individual Com- pare Bossier, De Gent. Atticis, p. 53. About the peculiar religious rites of the gens called Gephyrrei, see Herodot v, 61.