will of its own creators, which, in all the brutality of its youth, 
exposed the Athenians to its rule. 

What was to be done? The old gentile organisation had not only 
proved impotent against the triumphant march of money; it was 
also absolutely incapable of even providing a place within its 
framework for such things as money, creditors, debtors and the 
forcible collection of debts. But the new social power was there, 
and neither pious wishes nor a longing for the return of the good 
old times could drive money and usury out of existence. 
Moreover, a number of other, minor breaches had been made in 
the gentile constitution. The indiscriminate mingling of the 
gentiles and phrators throughout the whole of Attica, and 
especially in the city of Athens itself, had increased from 
generation to generation, in spite of the fact that an Athenian, 
while allowed to sell plots of land out of his gens, was still 
prohibited from thus selling his dwelling. The division of labour 
between the different branches of production—agriculture, hand- 
icrafts, numerous skills within the various crafts, trade, navigation, 
etc.—had developed more and more fully with the progress of 
industry and commerce. The population was now divided accord- 
ing to occupation into rather well-established groups, each of 
which had a number of new, common interests that found no 
place in the gens or phratry and, therefore, necessitated the 
creation of new offices to attend to them. The number of slaves 
had increased considerably and must have far exceeded that of the 
free Athenians even then. The gentile constitution originally knew 
no slavery and, therefore, no means of holding this mass of 
bondsmen in check. And finally, commerce had attracted a great 
many outsiders to Athens who settled there because it was easier 
to make money there, and according to the old constitution these 
outsiders enjoyed neither rights nor the protection of the law. In 
spite of traditional toleration, they remained a disturbingly alien 
element among the people. 

In short, the gentile constitution was coming to an end. Society 
was outgrowing it by the day; it was powerless to allay or check 
even the worst evils that were arising under its very eyes. In the 
meantime, however, the state had developed. The new groups 
formed by division of labour, first between town and country, then 
between the various branches of urban industry, had created new 
organs to protect their interests. Public offices of every description 

had been instituted. And then the young state needed, above all, 
its own fighting forces, which among the seafaring Athenians 
could at first be only naval forces, to be used for occasional minor 
wars and to protect merchant vessels. At some uncertain time 
before Solon, the naucraries were instituted, small territorial 
districts, twelve in each tribe. Every naucrary had to supply, equip 
and man a war vessel and, in addition, provided two horsemen. 
This arrangement was a twofold attack on the gentile constitution. 
First, it created a public power which was no longer simply 
identical with the armed people in their totality; secondly, for the 
first time it divided the people for public purposes, not according 
to kinship groups, but according to common domicile. We shall see 
what this signified. 

As the gentile constitution could not come to the assistance of 
the exploited people, they could look only to the emerging state. 
And the state brought help in the form of the constitution of 
Solon, while at the same time strengthening itself anew at the 
expense of the old constitution. Solon—the manner in which his 
reform of 594 B.C. was carried out does not concern us 
here—started the series of so-called political revolutions by an 
encroachment on property. All revolutions to date have been 
revolutions for the protection of one kind of property against 
another kind of property. They cannot protect one kind without 
violating another. In the Great French Revolution feudal property 
was Sacrificed in order to save bourgeois property; in Solon’s 
revolution, creditors’ property had to suffer for the benefit of 
debtors’ property. The debts were simply annulled. We are not 
acquainted with the exact details, but Solon boasts in his poems 
that he removed the mortgage posts from the encumbered lands 
and enabled all who had been sold or had fled abroad because of 
debt to return home. This could have been done only by openly 
violating property rights. And indeed, the object of all so-called 
political revolutions, from first to last, was to protect one kind of 
property by confiscating—also called stealing— another kind of 
property. This is so true that for 2,500 years it has been possible 
to maintain private property only by violating property rights. 

But now a way had to be found to prevent such re-enslavement 
of the free Athenians. This was first achieved by general 
measures; for example, the prohibition of contracts which involved 
the mortgaging of the debtor’s person. Furthermore, a maximum 
was fixed for the amount of landed property any one individual 
could own, in order to put some curb, at least, on the voracious 
craving of the nobility for the peasants’ land. Then followed 

constitutional amendments, of which the most important for us 
are the following: 

The council was increased to four hundred members, one 
hundred from each tribe. Here, then, the tribe was still the basis. 
But this was the only side of the old constitution that was 
incorporated in the new body politic. For the rest, Solon divided 
the citizens into four classes, according to the amount of land 
owned and its yield. Five hundred, three hundred and one 
hundred and fifty medimni of grain (1 medimnus=appr. 41 litres) 
were the minimum yields for the first three classes; whoever had 
less land or none at all belonged to the fourth class. Only 
members of the first three classes could hold office; the highest 
offices were filled exclusively by the first class. The fourth class 
had only the right to speak and vote in the popular assembly. But 
it was here that all officials were elected, here that they had to give 
account of their actions, here that all the laws were made, and 
here that the fourth class was in the majority. The aristocratic 
privileges were partly renewed in the form of privileges of wealth, 
but the people retained the decisive power. The four classes also 
formed the basis for the reorganisation of the fighting forces. The 
first two classes furnished the cavalry; the third had to serve as 
heavy infantry; the fourth served as light infantry, without 
armour, or in the navy, in which case they probably were paid. 

Thus, an entirely new element was introduced into the 
constitution: private ownership. The rights and duties of the 
citizens of the state were graded according to the amount of land 
they owned; and as the propertied classes gained influence the old 
consanguine groups were displaced. The gentile constitution 
suffered another defeat. 

The gradation of political rights according to property, however, 
was not an indispensable institution for the state. Important as it 
may have been in the constitutional history of states, nevertheless, 
a good many states, and the most developed at that, did with- 
out it. Even in Athens it played only a transient role. From the 
time of Aristides, all offices were open to all the citizens.’”’ 

During the next eighty years Athenian society gradually found 
its way to the path along which it continued to develop in 
subsequent centuries. Usurious land operations, rampant in the 
pre-Solon period, were checked, as was the excessive concentration 
of landed property. Commerce and the arts and crafts conducted 
on an ever-increasing scale with slave labour became the predom- 
inant branches of industry. People became more enlightened. 
Instead of exploiting their own fellow-citizens in the old brutal 

manner, the Athenians now exploited mainly the slaves and 
non-Athenian clients. Movable property, wealth in money, slaves 
and ships, increased more and more; but instead of being simply a 
means for acquiring landed property, as in the initial, bigoted 
period, they became an end in themselves. This, on the one hand, 
gave rise to the successful competition of the new, wealthy 
industrial and commercial class against the old power of the 
nobility, but, on the other hand, it deprived the remnants of the 
old gentile constitution of their last foothold. The gentes, phratries 
and tribes, whose members were now scattered all over Attica and 
lived completely intermingled, thus became quite unsuitable for 
political bodies. A large number of Athenian citizens did not 
belong to any gens; they were immigrants who had been adopted 
into citizenship sure enough but not into any of the old bodies of 
consanguinei. Besides, there was a steadily increasing number of 
foreign immigrants who only enjoyed protection.’” 

Meanwhile, the struggles of the parties proceeded. The nobility 
tried to regain its former privileges and for a short time got the 
upper hand again, until the revolution of Cleisthenes (509 B.C.) 
brought about its ultimate downfall; and with it fell the last 
remnants of the gentile constitution.’ 

In his new constitution, Cleisthenes ignored the four old tribes 
based on the gentes and phratries. Their place was taken by an 
entirely new organisation based exclusively on the division of the 
citizens according to place of abode, already attempted in the 
naucraries. Not membership of a body of consanguinei, but place 
of abode was now the deciding factor. Not people, but territory 
was now divided; politically, the inhabitants became mere adjuncts 
of the territory. 

The whole of Attica was divided into one hundred self- 
governing districts, or demes. The citizens of a deme (demots) 
elected their head (demarch), a treasurer and thirty judges with 
jurisdiction in minor cases. They also received their own temple 
and a tutelary god, or heros, whose priests they elected. The 
supreme power in the deme was the assembly of the demots. This, 
as Morgan correctly remarks, is the prototype of the self- 
governing American township.* The modern state in its highest 
form ends with the very unit with which the rising state in Athens 
began. 

Ten of these units (demes) formed a tribe, which, however, as 
distinct from the old kinship tribe, was now called a territorial 

tribe. The territorial tribe was not only a self-governing political 
body, but also a military body. It elected a phylarch or tribal head, 
who commanded the cavalry, a taxiarch, who commanded the 
infantry, and a strategos, who was in command of the entire 
contingent levied in the tribal territory. Furthermore, it furnished 
five war vessels with crews and commander; and it received an 
Attic heros, by whose name it was called, as its patron saint. Finally, 
it elected fifty councillors to the council of Athens. 

The consummation was the Athenian state, governed by a 
council of five hundred—elected by the ten tribes—and, in the 
last instance, by the popular assembly, which every Athenian 
citizen could attend and vote in. Moreover, archons and other 
officials attended to the different departments of administration 
and the courts. In Athens there was no official possessing supreme 
executive authority. 

By this new constitution, and by the admission of a very large 
number of wards, partly immigrants and partly freed slaves, the 
organs of the gentile constitution were ousted from public affairs. 
They sank to the position of private societies and_ religious 
associations. But their moral influence, the traditional concep- 
tions and views of the old gentile period, were passed on for a 
long time and expired only gradually. This manifested itself in 
another state institution. 

We have seen that an essential feature of the state is a public 
power distinct from the mass of the people. At that time Athens 
possessed only a militia and a navy manned directly by the people. 
These afforded protection against external enemies and held in 
check the slaves who at that time already constituted the great 
majority of the population. For the citizens, this public power at 
first existed only in the shape of the police force, which is as old as 
the state, and that is why the naive Frenchmen of the eighteenth 
century spoke, not of civilised, but of policed nations (nations 
policées). Thus, simultaneously with their state, the Athenians 
established a police force, a veritable gendarmerie of bowmen on 
foot and horseback— Landjager, as they say in South Germany and 
Switzerland. But this gendarmerie consisted—of slaves. The free 
Athenian regarded this dirty work as being so degrading that he 
preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than perform 
such ignominious acts himself. This was still an expression of the 
old gentile mentality. The state could not exist without a police 
force, but it was still young and did not yet command sufficient 
moral respect to give prestige to an occupation that was bound to 
appear infamous to the old gentiles. 

How well this state, now complete in its main features, suited 
the new social condition of the Athenians was apparent from the 
rapid flourishing of wealth, commerce and industry. The class 
antagonism on which the social and political institutions rested was 
no longer that between the nobles and the common people, but 
that between slaves and freemen, wards and citizens. When Athens 
was in its ‘heyday the total number of free Athenian citizens, 
women and children included, amounted to about 90,000; the 
slaves of both sexes numbered 365,000, and the wards— 
immigrants and freed men—45,000. Thus, for every adult male 
citizen there were at least eighteen slaves and more than two 
wards. The large number of slaves is explained by the fact that 
many of them worked together in manufactories, large rooms, 
under overseers. But with the development of commerce and 
industry came the accumulation and concentration of wealth in 
few hands; the mass of the free citizens were impoverished and 
had to choose between competing with slave labour by going into 
handicrafts themselves, which was considered ignoble and base and, 
moreover, promised little success—and complete pauperisation. 
Under the prevailing circumstances what inevitably happened was 
the latter, and, being in the majority, they dragged the whole 
Athenian state down with them. It was not democracy that caused 
the downfall of Athens, as the European schoolmasters who fawn 
upon royalty would have us believe, but slavery, which brought the 
labour of the free citizen into contempt. 

The emergence of the state among the Athenians represents a 
very typical model of state building in general; because, on the 
one hand, it took place in an entirely pure form, without the 
interference of violence, external or internal (the short period of 
usurpation by Pisistratus left no trace behind it'); because, on the 
other hand, it gave rise to a highly developed form of state, the 
democratic republic, directly from gentile society; and _ lastly, 
because we are sufficiently acquainted with all the essential details. 

VI 
THE GENS AND THE STATE IN ROME 

According to the legend about the foundation of Rome, the first 
settlement was undertaken by a number of Latin gentes (one 
hundred, the legend says) united into one tribe. A Sabellian tribe, 
also said to consist of one hundred gentes, soon followed, and 
finally a third tribe of various elements, again allegedly of one 

hundred gentes, joined them. The whole story reveals at the very 
first glance that there was hardly anything naturally evolved 
except the gens, and that the gens itself, in some cases, was only 
an offshoot of a mother gens still existing in the old habitat. The 
tribes bear the mark of having been artificially constituted; 
nevertheless, they consisted mostly of kindred elements and were 
formed on the model of the old, naturally grown, not artificially 
constituted, tribe; and it is not impossible that an actual old tribe 
formed the nucleus of each of these three tribes. The middle link, 
the phratry, contained ten gentes and was called the curia. Hence, 
there were thirty of them. 

That the Roman gens was an institution identical with the 
Grecian gens is a recognised fact; if the Grecian gens was a more 
advanced form of the social unit the primitive form of which is 
presented by the American Redskins, then the same, naturally, 
holds good for the Roman gens. Hence, we can be briefer in its 
treatment. 

At least during the earliest times of the city, the Roman gens 
had the following constitution: 

1. Mutual right of inheritance of the gentiles; the property 
remained in the gens. Since father right was already in force in 
the Roman gens, as it was in the Grecian gens, the offspring of 
female lineage were excluded. According to the law of the Twelve 
Tables, the oldest written Roman law known to us,'’! the natural 
children had the first title to the estate; in case no natural children 
existed, the agnates (kin of male lineage) took their place; and in 
their absence came the gentiles. In all cases the property remained 
in the gens. Here we observe the gradual infiltration into gentile 
practice of new legal provisions born of increased wealth and 
monogamy: the originally equal right of inheritance of the gentiles 
was first limited in practice to the agnates— probably at an early 
stage, aS mentioned above—and eventually to the children and 
their offspring in the male line. Of course, in the Twelve Tables 
this appears in reverse order. 

2. Possession of a common burial place. The patrician gens 
Claudia, on immigrating to Rome from Regili, was allocated a plot, 
and also a common burial place in the city. Even under Augustus, 
the head of Varus, who had fallen in the Teutoburg Forest,'!? was 
brought to Rome and interred in the gentilitius tumulus*; hence, 
the gens (Quinctilia) still had a separate burial mound.” 

3. Common religious celebrations. These, the sacra gentilitia, are 
well known. 

4. Obligation not to marry within the gens. In Rome this does 
not appear to have ever become a written law, but the custom 
remained. Of the innumerable names of Roman married couples 
that have come down to our day there is not a single case where 
husband and wife have the same gentile name. The law of 
inheritance also proves this rule. A woman by her marriage 
forfeited her agnatic rights, left her gens, and neither she nor her 
children could inherit from her father, or his brothers, for 
otherwise the father’s gens would lose part of the inheritance. This 
rule has a meaning only on the assumption that the woman was 
not permitted to marry a member of her own gens. 

5. Possession of land in common. In primeval times this always 
existed since the tribal territory was first divided. Among the 
Latin tribes we find the land partly in the possession of the tribe, 
partly of the gens, and partly of households that at that time 
hardly* represented single families. Romulus is credited with 
having been the first to assign land to individuals, about a hectare 
(two jugera) to each. Nevertheless, even later we still find land in 
the hands of the gentes, not to mention state lands, around which 
turned the whole internal history of the republic. 

6. Obligation of gentiles to protect and assist one another. 
Written history records only paltry remnants of this; from the 
outset the Roman state manifested such superior power that the 
right to redress injury was transferred to it. When Appius 
Claudius was arrested, his whole gens, even his personal enemies, 
went into mourning. At the time of the second Punic War'” the 
gentes united to ransom their fellow gentiles who were in 
captivity; the senate forbade them to do this.