: On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay by Seebohm Hugh E Hugh Exton - Greece History; Land tenure Greece; Tribes; Greece Law Antiquities; Greece Social life and customs

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PREFACE These notes, brief as they are, owe more than can be told to my father's researches into the structure and methods of the Tribal System. They owe their existence to his inspiration and encouragement. A suitable place for them might possibly be found in an Appendix to his recently published volume on the Structure of the Tribal System in Wales.

In ascribing to the structure of Athenian Society a direct parentage amongst tribal institutions, I am dealing with a subject which I feel to be open to considerable criticism. And I am anxious that the matters considered in this essay should be judged on their own merits, even though, in pursuing the method adopted herein, I may have quite inadequately laid the case before the reader.

My thanks are due, for their ready help, to Professor W. Ridgeway, Mr. James W. Headlam, and Mr. Henry Lee Warner, by means of whose kind suggestions the following pages have been weeded of several of their faults.

Some explanation seems to be needful of the method pursued in this essay with regard to the comparison of Greek customs with those of other countries. The selection for comparison has been entirely arbitrary.

All reference to records of Roman customs has been omitted, not because they are not related or analogous to the Greek, but because they could not reasonably be brought within the scope of this essay. The ancestor-worship among the Romans was so complete, and the organisation of their kindreds so highly developed, that they deserve treatment on their own basis, and are sufficient to form the subject of a separate volume.

H. E. S.

In trying to ascertain the course of social development among the Greeks, the inquirer is met by an initial difficulty. The Greeks were not one great people like the Israelites, migrating into and settling in a new country, flowing with milk and honey. Their movements were erratic and various, and took place at very different times. Several partial migrations are described in Homer, and others are referred to as having taken place only a few generations back. The continuation of unsettled life must have had the effect of giving cohesion to the individual sections into which the Greeks were divided, in proportion as the process of settlement was protracted and difficult.

But in spite of divergencies caused by natural surroundings, by the hostility or subservience of previous occupants of the soil, there are some features of the tribal system, wherever it is examined, so inherent in its structure as to seem almost indelible. A new civilisation was not formed to fit into the angles of city walls. Even modification could take place only of those customs whose roots did not strike too deeply into the essence of the composition of tribal society.

It is the object of these notes to try to put back in their true setting some of the conditions prevailing, sometimes incongruously with city life, among the Greeks in historical times, and by comparison with analogous survivals in known tribal communities, of whose condition we have fuller records, to establish their real historical continuity from an earlier stage of habit and belief.

In the centre of most towns of Greece stood the Prytaneum or magistrates' hall, and in the Prytaneum was the sacred hearth to which attached such reverence that in the most solemn oaths the name of Hestia was invoked even before that of Zeus. Thucydides states that each ???? or village of Attica had its hearth or Prytaneum of its own, but looked up to the Hestia and Prytaneum in the city of Athens as the great centre of their larger polity. In just the same way the lesser kindreds of a tribe would have their sacred hearths and rites, but would look to the hearth and person of their chief as symbolical of their tribal unity. Thucydides also mentions how great a wrench it seemed to the Athenians to be compelled to leave their "sacred" homes, to take refuge within the walls of Athens from the impending invasion by the Spartans.

Mr. Frazer also maintains that the reverence for the hearth and the concentration of such reverence on the hearth of the chieftain was the result of the difficulty of kindling a fire from rubbing sticks together, and of the responsibility thus devolving upon the chieftain unfailingly to provide fire for his people. Whether this was the origin or not, before the times that come within the scope of this inquiry, the hearth had acquired a real sanctity which had become involved in the larger idea of it as the centre of a kindred, including on occasion the mysterious presence also of long dead ancestors.

Although the religious life of the Greeks was always complex, there is not to be found in Homer the broad distinction drawn afterwards between public and private gods. It is noticeable that the later Greeks sought to draw into their homes the beneficent influence of one or other of the greater gods, whose protection and guidance were claimed in times of need by all members of the household. Secondary influences, though none the less strongly felt, were those of the past heroes of the house, sometimes only just dead, to be propitiated at the family tombs or hearth. Anxiety on this head, and the deeply-rooted belief in the real need to the dead of attentions from the living, were, it will be seen, most powerful factors in the development of Greek society.

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