rightly, i.e. according to traditional ritual, for to him all looked for the due maintenance of salutary relations with the gods. Every chieftain, great or small, must have exercised this duty at home in his own community, though in time of war it might fall to the greatest only. To him and to his family alone were known the secrets of the office; it might happen that even if he ceased to be king in the Homeric sense, — if his kingship were merged in a larger one, or if his family became only one among other noble ones in a newly-formed City-State, it still retained the sacrificial knowledge and the sole right to minister to the deity of the community. Hence arose the hereditary local priesthood of early Greece; it begins with the chieftain, and descends as an heirloom in his family long after his secular authority has passed away. Aristotle tells us that the Homeric Basileus controlled all sacrifices except those which specially belonged to priests;[1] by which I understand him to mean, not so much that there was a distinction between the kingly and the priestly offices, but that already some noble (or kingly) families had lost the one while they retained the other. It will be important to bear this
- ↑ Politics, 1285 B.
Dict. of Classical Antiquities (new edition). It was on this side of the king's power that Fustel de Coulanges laid so much stress in his brilliant book La Cité antique. He found the origin of early monarchies almost entirely in the religious importance of the chiefs of family, gens, and city. But this is not borne out by what we know of the early history of the king, or by the etymology of the names by which he was called. Sacrificial knowledge was a necessary condition, but not the only one, of his power.
