ix. 574-84, a passage in which we are told that the Elders and Priests

of the Aetolians offered a choice of their richest lands as a ‘domain’ to Meleager. H. Seebohm holds[81] that it is improbable that the richest lands were at the time unoccupied and that such an offer therefore proves the existence of a communal land-tenure which would admit of such a rapid partition and consequent readjustment. Again, we admit that tribal ownership may be inferred from this passage, but we deny that the donors of the domain were necessarily members of the Achaean caste. It is true that the Achaeans ruled over Aetolia, but there still survived many rich Pelasgian tribes. Even if we knew that the donors were Achaeans, it would not be necessary to conclude that the Achaeans lived in tribal groups, for the partition and readjustment might have been equally simple for rich quasi-feudal owners acting in unison.

In _Iliad_ ix. 147-155 Agamemnon, the Achaean war-chief, says that he will give to Achilles, as a dowry with his daughter, ‘seven cities, around Pylos, having men abounding in flocks who will worship him with gifts as a god and obey him.’ Those who conceive the Achaean heroes as tribal chieftains will find it very difficult to explain how a chief can thus wantonly confiscate the territory of his allies. Pylos was in the ‘kingdom’ of Nestor, a Minoan ally of the Achaeans. No confederation of tribal chiefs engaged in a common war could survive such a confiscation. But the offer of Agamemnon becomes intelligible enough if we regard him as the leader of a dominant military power, or as the feudal over-lord who possessed by right of office a ‘superior ownership’ of all the lands of Greece.

In _Odyssey_ iv. 171-177 Menelaus says that he would have given to Odysseus, had he been there on his return from Troy, a whole ‘city to dwell in,’ and that he would have built for him a house, and brought him from Ithaca, together with all his wealth, his son and all his people, ‘making one city desolate, of those that lay around, in his domain.’ H. Seebohm finds it difficult to understand this passage in the light of his tribal theory of the Achaeans. It is, he says,[82] unusual, and merely shows the despotism to which a tribal chief frequently attained. But we prefer to see in Menelaus the typical Achaean over-lord, who by virtue of his kinship with Agamemnon, and of his own feudal and military power, tramples with impunity upon a whole city and moves a whole people from place to place, not as a chief would lead his tribe, but as a medieval baron might move his _villeins_ from one part of his territory to another.

In the realm of Odysseus one seeks in vain for cogent evidence of tribal conditions. The shameless conduct of the suitors of Penelope, in devouring the substance of the absent Odysseus, and in plotting the assassination of his son and heir,[83] as also the cruel hyper-vengeance which Odysseus with impunity wreaked upon them, seem to us more suggestive of feudalism and autocracy than of genuine tribalism. In tribal communities an immense importance attaches to questions of marriage and inheritance. The voice of the ‘folk-moot,’ of the clan-gathering, can and must be heard. It is true that in the _Odyssey_[84] the disguised Odysseus, in questioning his son as to why he had not driven the suitors from his house, asks significantly: ‘Do the people hate thee?’ But it is equally true that in the domestic drama of the realm of Odysseus the rank and file of the people are ignored. For our part we feel that we move in that atmosphere of autocratic militarism which, in ancient Thessaly or Macedonia, and in medieval Europe, exalts the dagger of the assassin and the intrigue of the paramour.

In _Odyssey_ xiv. 208 we are told that when a certain rich man, named Castor, died, his sons divided up and cast lots for his property. This procedure would be perfectly normal in modern society if the owner died intestate and the property was not entailed. We hear nothing in this narration of any clan-council having determined the right of succession, as would ordinarily occur in tribal conditions.

In _Odyssey_ xix. 294 it is said that the wealth which Odysseus has amassed would suffice for his posterity even unto the tenth generation. The selection of the number _ten_ in this passage seems to us to indicate a possible reference to tribal life. F. Seebohm, speaking of medieval Welsh tribes, lays stress on the length of time which had to elapse before a ‘stranger’ could become a tribesman, pointing out[85] that even the great-grandson of a stranger could not be a tribesman, though he could be recognised as the founder of an embryonic clan, whereas a semi-servile stranger’s descendants could not attain to the rank of tribesmen until the ninth generation had passed away. Hence the saying that a man’s wealth would suffice for ten generations could easily, in tribal language, have become a proverb. It would simply mean that a man’s posterity would never be in want, for after nine generations any man’s descendants could have formed a tribal organisation and possessed tribal wealth of their own. But must we conclude from this that Odysseus was a tribesman? No conclusion could be less cogent. It is true that the Achaeans, at the time of the Trojan war, were long enough settled in the country to have produced the nucleus of clans and tribes, for they had ruled over Greece for two hundred years. Thus the Achaean Melampus, a contemporary of Nestor and Atreus, founded a family in Argos, the development of which may thus be traced in Homer[86]:

{ Antiphates— Oicles——Amphiaraus— { Alcmaeon Melampus—> { { Amphilochus. { Mantius — { Polypheides—Theoclymenus. { { Cleitus.

Here we find kinship extending to second and third cousins. Such kinship exists everywhere in the world to-day, but it clearly does not constitute a clan or a tribe. When, therefore, in Homer,[87] Theoclymenus is said to have killed a man who is described as ἔμφυλος in relation to his slayer, we must not suppose that the deceased was a tribesman. The word ἔμφυλος should be translated as kinsman,[88] not tribesman. Several instances may be found in Homer of tribal phrases and expressions applied in non-tribal contexts. Thus the word γένος which ordinarily means ‘clan’ is used in Homer to denote a family in the modern sense,[89] or to mean ‘blood-descent,’ and kinship.[90] Rarely or never does it carry its proper meaning. If the social organisation of the Achaeans had been of a tribal character, surely the Homeric use of the word γένος would have been different from what it actually is. Leaf calls attention[91] to the very rare occasions on which Homer refers to such groups as the clan, the phratry, and the tribe. Nestor says to Achilles that ‘the lover of domestic strife is a man without hearth or law or phratry,’[92] and the same Nestor urges Agamemnon to divide his fighting forces ‘by tribes and phratries,’[93] but these solitary references no more compel us to regard Achilles and Agamemnon as tribal chiefs than the tribal proverb concerning the tenth generation compels us to regard Odysseus as a tribal patriarch. Such references are rather, as Leaf says,[91] ‘reminiscences,’ reflections, whether in the mind of a Minoan or of an Achaean, of conditions which prevailed universally amongst the subject Pelasgian peoples.

We may then confidently conclude that the evidence of the Homeric poems is much more consistent with the theory that the Achaeans were a quasi-feudal military caste than with the theory which conceives them as tribal nobles. We may think of the Achaeans, in their relation to the Pelasgians, very much as we should think of the soldiers of the ancient Roman Empire quartered in a province.[94] When the Burgundians came to France about A.D. 500 they were regarded,[94] by a polite fiction, as guests, and were presented with _hospitalitas_, consisting of two-thirds of the land and one-third of the slaves! When the Achaeans conquered Greece, they lived, indeed, in garrison-towns and sought to maintain a splendid isolation in their lofty fortresses, but they took unto themselves the richest lands and the fattest cattle and sheep, leaving the Pelasgians to till the soil and to squabble about boundaries. But when after two or three hundred years the Achaeans met a somewhat similar fate to that which they had meted out to Greece and to Troy, the tribal nobility of the primitive Pelasgians once more asserted its ancient privileges.

FOOTNOTES

[1] _Infra_, p. 4 f.

[2] See _infra_, pp. 6-11.

[3] _Numbers_ xxxv.

[4] _Il._ xviii. 500 ff.

[5] See Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 201.

[6] 621 B.C. onwards.

[7] See _Numbers_ xxxv.

[8] See Récluse, _Universal Geography_, vol. i. p. 181 ff.

[9] _Ib._ pp. 346-7.

[10] See Récluse, _op. cit._, vol. i. p. 366.

[11] _Ib._ p. 321 ff.

[12] _Ib._ pp. 121-122.

[13] _Early Age of Greece_, p. 277.

[14] Récluse, _op. cit._ pp. 175-6.

[15] _Ib._ vol. xviii. p. 442.

[16] _Ib._ p. 246.

[17] See Glotz, _La Solidarité de la Famille_, p. 213.

[18] See Glotz, _loc. cit._

[19] _Deut._ xxi. 1-8.

[20] _Infra_, pp. 64-74.

[21] _Germania_, chap. xxi.

[22] See article _s.v._ ‘Homicidium’ in Ramsay’s _Dict. Rom. Ant._ p. 348 ff.

[23] See _Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law_, pp. 30-55.

[24] _Op. cit._ pp. 43 ff.

[25] F. Seebohm, _op. cit._ pp. 150 ff., and Maine, _Ancient Law_, p. 233.

[26] _Bell. Gall._ vi. 21.

[27] _Germania_, chap. xxvi.

[28] _Op. cit._ p. 55.

[29] _Il._ ii. 662 ff.; _infra_, p. 47 ff.

[30] See _Ancient City_ (trans.), p. 125.

[31] Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 55; Glotz, _op. cit._ p. 34.

[32] See _infra_, p. 44 ff.

[33] _Genesis_ iv. 11-16.

[34] Glotz, _op. cit._ p. 45.

[35] Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 109.

[36] Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 123

[37] _Ib._ p. 323.

[38] _Loc. cit._

[39] _Op. cit._ p. 164.

[40] _Ib._ p. 356.

[41] See Dareste-Reinach, _I.J.G._ tome i. pp. 352-493.

[42] See Caillemer, in Daremberg and Saglio’s _Dictionnaire_, p. 1630.

[43] See also Glotz, _op. cit._ pp. 383-5.

[44] See _infra_, p. 31 ff.

[45] _Op. cit._ pp. 56-72.

[46] See Leaf, _Homer and History_, pp. 83-86, 98 ff.

[47] See his _Homer and History_ and _Troy_.

[48] See _Early Age of Greece_, p. 635.

[49] See _Rise of the Greek Epic_, _passim_.

[50] See _Themis_, pp. 335, 445 ff.

[51] _Op. cit._ pp. 90-337.

[52] _Ib._ pp. 339, 355, 370, 406.

[53] _Ib._ p. 95.

[54] _Ib._ pp. 678 ff.

[55] See _J.H.S._ vol. vi. pp. 319 ff.

[56] See _Greek Tribal Society_.

[57] See _Homer and History_, p. 41; also Bury’s article, _Quarterly Review_, July 1916.

[58] Leaf, _op. cit._ p. 37.

[59] Leaf, _op. cit._ p. 37.

[60] _Ib._ pp. 41, 49.

[61] _Ib._ pp. 49-50.

[62] P. 51.

[63] P. 222.

[64] Pp. 50-52.

[65] Pp. 37, 247.

[66] P. 252.

[67] Pp. 37, 247.

[68] Pp. 251-252.

[69] Pp. 250, 251, 258.

[70] Pp. 251-252.

[71] _J.H.S._ vol. vi. pp. 319 ff.

[72] See _Ancient Law_, pp. 214 ff.

[73] _Op. cit._ p. 223.

[74] _Ancient Law_, p. 223.

[75] _Ib._ p. 221.

[76] _Ib._ p. 223.

[77] _Bell. Gall._ vi. 21.

[78] _Germania_, chap. xxvi. adopting emendation _vicis_.

[79] _Op. cit._ p. 221.

[80] _Ancient City_ (trans.), p. 57.

[81] _Op. cit._ pp. 103, 118.

[82] _Op. cit._ p. 115.

[83] _Od._ xvi. 369-385.

[84] xvi. 95 ff.

[85] _Op. cit._ p. 51.

[86] _Od._ xv.

[87] _Od._ xv. 273 ff.

[88] So Butcher and Lang, trans. _ad loc._

[89] _Od._ viii. 573.

[90] See _Il._ xiii. 354; _Od._ vi. 35, 209, xv. 533.

[91] _Op. cit._ p. 251 n.

[92] _Il._ ix. 63 ff.

[93] _Il._ ii. 362.

[94] F. Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 122.