On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay

Vitality of the tribal system.

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 [pg 002] only of those customs whose roots did not strike too deeply into the essence of the composition of tribal society.

Its survivals form the subject of this inquiry.

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.

The centres of political and tribal society.

There were three important public places necessary to every Greek community and symbolical to the Greek mind of the very foundations of their institutions. These were:-the Agora or place of assembly, the place of justice, and the place of religious sacrifice. From these three sacred precincts the man who stirred up civil strife, who was at war with his own people, cut himself off. Such an one is described in Homer as being, by his very act, "clanless" (?φρ?τωρ), "out-law" (?θ?μιστο?), and "hearthless" (?ν?στιο?).1 In the camp of the Greeks before Troy the ships and huts of his followers were congregated by the hut of their chief or leader. Each sacrificed or poured libation to his favourite or familiar god at his own hut door.2 But in front of Odysseus' ships, which, we are told, were drawn up at the very centre of the camp, stood the great altar of Zeus Panomphaios-lord of all oracles-"exceeding fair."3 "Here," says the poet, "were Agora, Themis, and the altars of the gods."

[pg 003] The Trojans held agora at Priam's doors,4 and it is noticeable that the space in front of the chief's hut or palace was generally considered available for such purposes as assembly, games, and so forth, just as it was with the ancient Irish.

The Prytaneum and Hestia.

In the centre of most towns of Greece5 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.6 Thucydides states that each κ?μη 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.7

The word Prytanis means "chieftain." It is probable that, as the duties sacred and magisterial of the chief became disseminated among the other officers of later civilisation, the chief's dwelling, called the [pg 004] Prytaneum, acquiring vitality from the indelible superstition attaching to the hearth within its precincts, maintained thereby its political importance, when nothing but certain religious functions remained to its lord and master in the office of Archon Basileus.

Their origin.

Mr. Frazer, in his article in the Journal of Philology8 upon the resemblance of the Prytaneum in Greece to the Temple of Vesta in Rome, shows that both had a direct connection with, if not an absolute origin in the domestic hearth of the chieftain. The Lares and Penates worshipped in the Temple of Vesta, he says, were originally the Lares and Penates of the king, and were worshipped at his hearth, the only difference between the hearth in the temple and the hearth in the king's house being the absence of the royal householder.9

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.

Qualification for share in religious rites one of blood.

The basis of tribal coherence was community of blood, actual or supposed; the visible evidence of the [pg 005] possession of tribal blood was the undisputed participation, as one of a kindred, in the common religious ceremonies, from which the blood-polluted and the stranger-in-blood were so strictly shut out.10 It is therefore in the incidence of religious duties, and in the qualifications of the participants, that it is reasonable to seek survivals of true tribal sentiment.

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.

Ancestor-worship not obvious in Homer.

The worship of ancestors or household gods as such is not evident in the visible religious exercises of the Homeric poems. But this can hardly be a matter of surprise. The Greek chieftains mentioned in the poems are so nearly descended from the gods themselves, are in such immediate relation each with his guardian deity, and are so indefatigable in their attentions thereto, that it would surely be [pg 006] extremely irrelevant if any of the libations or hecatombs were perverted to any intermediate, however heroic, ancestor from the all-powerful and ever ready divinity who was so often also himself the boasted founder of the family.11

Offerings of food to the gods,

The libations and hecatombs themselves, however, seem to serve much the same purpose as the offerings to the manes or household gods, and relieved the luxurious craving for sustenance in the immortals, left unsatisfied by their ethereal diet of nectar and ambrosia.12

and to the dead.

Yet it is strange that if libations and sacrifices were paid to the dead periodically at their tombs, no mention of the occurrence is to be found in Homer. That the dead were believed to appreciate such attentions may be gathered from the directions given by Circe to Odysseus.

"Then pour a drink-offering to all the dead, first with mead (μελικρ?τ?), and thereafter with sweet wine, and for the third time with water, and sprinkle white meal thereon.... and promise thou wilt offer in thy halls13 a barren heifer, the best thou hast, and fill the pyre with treasure, and wilt sacrifice apart to Teiresias alone a black sheep without spot, the fairest of your flock."

The continuance of his name quite as important as offerings of food.

This done, the ghosts flock up to drink of the blood of the victim. But the ghost of Elpenor, who met his death at the house of Circe by falling from the roof in his drunken haste to join his already departed [pg 007] comrades, and who had therefore received no burial at their hands, demands no libations or sacrifices for the refreshment of his thirsty soul, but merely burial with tears and a barrow upon the shore of the gray sea, that his name may be remembered by men to come.

Nestor's son elsewhere is made to remark that one must not grudge the dead their meed of tears; for the times are so out of joint, "this is now the only due we pay to miserable men, to cut the hair and let the tear fall from the cheek."14

Is the right conclusion then that the Homeric Greeks did not sacrifice at the tombs of their fathers, and that the so-called ancestor-worship prevalent later was introduced or revived under their successors? Or is it that the aristocratic tone of the poet did not permit him to bear witness to the intercourse with any deity besides the one great family of Olympic gods, less venerable than a river or other personification of nature?15

There exists such close family relationship amongst Homer's gods, extended as it is also to most of his chieftains, that taking into account the conspicuous [pg 008] reverence displayed towards the hearth and the respect for seniority in age, it may perhaps be justifiable to suppose that domestic religious observances, other than those directed to the Olympic gods, were thought by the poet to be as much beneath his notice as the swarms of common tribesmen who shrink and shudder in the background of the poems.

Offerings to the dead in the Old Testament.

Ancestor-worship would be as much out of place in the Old Testament; and yet there are references in the Bible to offerings to the dead which, unless they are held to refer only to importations from outside religions and not to relapses in the Israelites themselves to former superstitions of their own people, imply that the great tribal religion of the Israelites had superseded pre-existing ceremonies of ancestor-worship.

Deut. xxvi. 13. "And thou shalt say before the Lord thy God, I have brought away the hallowed things out of mine house, and also have given them unto the Levite and the stranger, to the fatherless and to the widow, according to all thy commandments which thou hast commanded me: I have not transgressed thy commandments, neither have I forgotten them: I have not eaten thereof in my mourning, neither have I taken away ought thereof for any unclean use, nor given ought thereof for the dead."

The transgressions of the Israelites in the wilderness are described in the Psalms:-"They joined themselves also unto Baalpeor and ate the sacrifices of the dead."16

It was not necessary for an ancestor to become a god to be worthy of worship, or to need the attentions of the living. If he was thought to haunt tomb or hearth, and to keep his connection thus with his family in the upper world, he required nourishment on his visits. He was also considered [pg 009] to keep a jealous watch on the continuance of his fair fame among the living.

Resemblance between Homer and the Old Testament.

A close resemblance in this point lies between the Homeric poems and the Old Testament. Though actual food and drink is not provided for the dead, yet the stress laid on the permanence of the family, lest the name of the dead be cut off from his place, is quite in keeping with the request of Elpenor to Odysseus to insure the continuance of his name in the memory of living men.

It is quite possible that, as the story of the interview of Odysseus with the dead reveals that the idea of the dead enjoying sacrifices of food and drink was familiar at that time, even though the periodical supply of such is not mentioned, so the existence of Laban's household gods and the gathering of the kindred of Jesse to their family ceremony17 may bear witness to the presence of a survival of ancestor-worship in some equivalent form, underlying the all-absorbing religion of the Israelites. At this day the spirits of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are considered by the Mohammedans of Hebron actually to inhabit the cave of Machpelah, and, in the case of Isaac at any rate, to be extremely angered by any negligence shown to their altars, either by omission of the customary ceremonies or by admission within the sacred precinct of any stranger of alien faith.

It must not therefore be inferred altogether that the regular ancestor-worship so-called was of later origin amongst the Greeks, but rather that the constitution of society did not afford it the same [pg 010] prominence to the mind of Homer and perhaps his contemporaries, as it acquired later.

Ancestor-worship in India and Rome.

M. Fustel de Coulanges, in La Cité Antique, has so well established the prevalence of ancestor-worship among the Greeks, drawing illustration both from Indian and Roman sources, that no further instances of its existence are needed here.

The ceremonies however and offerings at the tombs of their fathers did not supersede, amongst the Athenians at any rate, their worship of the Olympic gods. The Olympic gods themselves moreover were clearly connected with their family life. The protection of Zeus was specially claimed under the title of γεν?θλιο? or even σ?ναιμο?18 and as ?ρκε?ο? he received worship upon the altar that stood in the court-yard of nearly every house in Attica.19 The permanent place of these gods in the homes of the people is further denoted by the use of such epithets as ?γγενε??20 and πατρ?οι.21

The need of food for the dead;

The tombs, on the other hand, were not approached with the purpose of invoking powerful aid, but rather with the intent of soothing a troubled spirit with care and attention, and of providing it with such nourishing refreshment as could not be procured in the regions of the starving dead.

"I come, bringing to my son's sire propitiating libations, such as are soothing to the dead, from hallowed cow white milk, sweet to drink; the flower distiller's dew-clear honey; the virgin spring's refreshing draught; and undefiled from its wild mother, the liquid gladness of the time-honoured vine; also from the ever-leafy [pg 011] growth of the pale green olive fragrant fruit is here, and twined flowers, children of the teeming earth."22

the same in Egypt,

The same idea of nourishment of the dead, though shared with the other gods, determines the offerings in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.23

"I live upon loaves, white wheat, beer, red wheat.... Place me with vases of milk and wine, with cakes and loaves, and plenty of meat in the dwelling of Anubis."24

"Grant to me the funereal food, the drinks, the oxen, the geese, the fabrics, the incense, the oil, and all the good and pure things upon which the gods live."25

There is one passage that almost implies that the dead retained in idea a claim upon the produce of the land which nourished them whilst alive, or that they had a special allotment even in the other world:-

"I sit down among the very great gods of Nut. A field extends for me; the products of the ground are for me. I eat them; I am favoured with them; I live in plenty by them.... I am given corn and wheat for my mouth."26