Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/149

THE KLEISTHENEAN CONSTITUTION. 181 nnderstaud. For, necessary as the change had become, it was not the less a shock to ancient Attic ideas. It radically altered the very idea of a tribe, which now became an aggregation of demes, not of gentes, of fellow-demots, not of fellow-gentiles ; and it thus broke up those associations, religious, social, and po- litical, between the whole and the parts of the old system, which operated powerfully on the mind of every old-fashioned Athe- nian. The patricians at Rome, who composed the gentes and curice, and the plebs, who had no part in these corporations, formed for a long time two separate and opposing fractions in the same city, each with its own separate organization. It was only by slow degrees that the plebs gained ground, and the political value of the patrician gens was long maintained alongside of and apart from the plebeian tribe. So too in the Italian and Ger- man cities of the Middle Ages, the patrician families refused tc part with their own separate political identity, when the guilds grew up by the side of them ; even though forced to renounce a portion of their power, they continued to be a separate fraternity, and would not submit to be regimented anew, under an altered category and denomination, along with the traders who had grown into wealth and importance. 1 But the reform of Kleis- thenes effected this change all at once, both as to the name and as to the reality. In some cases, indeed, that which had been the name of a gens was retained as the name of a demc, but even then the old gentiles were ranked indiscriminately among the remaining demots ; and the Athenian people, politically coii- Bidered, thus became one homogeneous whole, distributed for con venience into parts, numerical, local, and politically equal. It is, however, to be remembered, that while the four Ionic tribes were abolished, the gentes and phratries which composed them were left untouched, and continued to subsist as family and religious associations, though carrying with them no political privilege. The ten newly-created tribes, arranged in an established order of precedence, were called, * Erechtheis, JEgeis, PandiSnis, 1 In illustration of what is here stated, see the account of the modifica- tions of the constitution of Zurich, in Bliintschli, Staats und Kechts Gesch- ichte der Stadt Zurich, book iii, ch. 2, p. 322 ; also, Kortum, Entstehungi Gehichte der Freistadtischen Biinde im Mittelalter, ch. 5, pp. 74-75.