Greeks, as well as Pelasgians and other peoples of the same 
tribal origin, were constituted since prehistoric times in the same 
organic series as the Americans: gens, phratry, tribe, confederacy 
of tribes. The phratry might be missing, as among the Dorians; 
the confederacy of tribes might not yet be developed everywhere, 
but in every case the gens was the unit. At the time the Greeks 
entered history, they were on the threshold of civilisation. Almost 
two entire great periods of development lie between the Greeks 
and the above-mentioned American tribes, the Greeks of the 
Heroic Age being by this much ahead of the Iroquois. For this 
reason the Grecian gens no longer bore the archaic character of 

the Iroquois gens; the stamp of group marriage* was becoming 
considerably blurred. Mother right had given way to father right; 
thereby rising private wealth made its first breach in the gentile 
constitution. A second breach naturally followed the first: after the 
introduction of father right, the fortune of a wealthy heiress 
would, by virtue of her marriage, fall to her husband, that is to 
say, to another gens; and so the foundation of all gentile law was 
broken, and in such cases the girl was not only permitted, but 
obliged to marry within the gens, in order that the latter might 
retain the fortune. 

According to Grote’s history of Greece,” the Athenian gens in 
particular was held together by: 

1. Common religious. ceremonies, and exclusive right of the 
priesthood in honour of a definite god, supposed to be the 
forefather of the gens, and characterised in this capacity by a 
special surname. 

2. A common burial place (cf. Demosthenes’ Eubulides 

3. Mutual rights of inheritance. 

4. Reciprocal obligation to afford help, defence and support 
against the use of force. 

5. Mutual right and obligation to intermarry within the gens in 
certain cases, especially for orphaned daughters or heiresses. 

6. Possession, in some cases at least, of common property, and 
of an archon (magistrate) and treasurer of its own. 

The phratry, binding together several gentes, was less intimate, 
but here too we find mutual rights and duties of similar character, 
especially a communion of particular religious rites and the right 
of prosecution in the event of a phrator being slain. Again, all 
the phratries of a tribe performed periodically certain common 
sacred ceremonies under the presidency of a_ phylobasileus 
(tribal magistrate), selected from among the nobles (eupatrides). 

Thus Grote. And Marx adds: “In the Grecian gens the savage 
(for example, the Iroquois) is unmistakably discerned.”* He 
becomes still more unmistakable when we investigate somewhat 
further. 

For the Grecian gens has also the following attributes: 

7. Descent according to father right. 

8. Prohibition of intermarriage within the gens except in the 
case of heiresses. This exception, and its formulation as an 

injunction, proves the validity of the old rule. This follows also 
from the universally accepted rule that when a woman married 
she renounced the religious rites of her gens and acquired those 
of her husband, in whose phratry she was enrolled. This, and a 
famous passage in Dicaearchus,* go to prove that marriage outside 
the gens was the rule. Becker in Charikles directly assumes that. 
nobody was permitted to marry in his or her own gens.” 

9. The right of adoption into the gens; it was practised by 
adoption into the family, but with public formalities, and only in 
exceptional cases. 

10. The right to elect and depose the chiefs. We know that 
every gens had its archon; but nowhere is it stated that this office 
was hereditary in certain families. Until the end of barbarism, the 
probability is always against strict heredity, which would be totally 
incompatible with conditions where rich and poor had absolutely 
equal rights in the gens. 

Not only Grote, but also Niebuhr, Mommsen and all other 
previous historians of classical antiquity, failed with the gens. 
Although they correctly noted many of its distinguishing features, 
they always regarded it as a group of families and thus made it 
impossible for themselves to understand the nature and origin of 
the gens. Under the gentile constitution, the family was never a 
unit of organisation, nor could it be, for man and wife necessarily 
belonged to two different gentes. The gens as a whole belonged to 
the phratry, the phratry to the tribe; but in the case of the family, 
half of it belonged to the gens of the husband and half to that of 
the wife. The state, too, does not recognise the family in public 
law; to this day it exists only in civil law. Nevertheless, all our 
historiography so far takes as its point of departure the absurd 
assumption, which became inviolable particularly in the eighteenth 
century, that the monogamian individual family, which is scarcely 
older than civilisation, is the nucleus around which society and the 
state gradually crystallised. 

“Mr. Grote will also please note,” adds Marx,’ “that although 
the Greeks traced their gentes to mythology, the gentes are older 
than mythology with its gods and demigods, which they themselves 
had created.” ¢ 

Grote is quoted with preference by Morgan as a respected 

witness beyond suspicion. He further relates that every Athenian 
gens had a name derived from its supposed forefather; that 
before Solon’s time as a general rule, and afterwards if a man died 
intestate, his gentiles (gennétes) inherited his property; and that if a 
man was murdered, first his relatives, next his gentiles, and finally 
the phrators of the slain had the right and duty to prosecute the 
criminal in the courts: 

“All that we hear of the most ancient Athenian laws is based upon the gentile 
and phratric divisions.” @ 

The descent of the gentes from common ancestors has been a 
brain-racking puzzle to the “school-taught Philistines” (Marx).° 
Naturally, since they claim that these ancestors are purely 
mythical, they are at a loss to explain how the gentes developed 
out of separate and distinct, originally totally unrelated families; 
yet they must accomplish this somehow, if only to explain the 
existence of the gentes. So they circle round in a whirlpool of 
words and do not get beyond the phrase: the genealogy is indeed 
mythical, but the gens is real. And finally, Grote says—the 
bracketed remarks being by Marx—-: 

“We hear of this genealogy but rarely, because it is only brought before the 
public in certain cases pre-eminent and venerable. But the humbler gentes had 
their common rites” (rather peculiar, Mr. Grote!) “and common superhuman 
ancestor and genealogy, as well as the more celebrated” (how very strange this on 
the part of humbler gentes!); “the scheme and ideal (my dear Sir! Not ideal, but 
carnal— germanice© fleischlich!) basis was the same in all.”4 

Marx sums up Morgan’s reply to this as follows: “The system of 
consanguinity which pertained to the gens in its archaic form— 
and which the Greeks once possessed like other mortals— 
preserved a knowledge of the relationships of all the members of a 
gens to each other. They learned this for them decisively 
important fact by practice from early childhood. This fell into 
desuetude with the rise of the monogamian family. The gentile 
name created a pedigree beside which that of the individual family 
was insignificant. This name was now to preserve the fact of the 
common descent of those who bore it; but the lineage of the gens 
went so far back that its members could no longer prove the actual 
relationship existing between them, except in a limited number of 

cases through recent common ancestors. The name itself was the 
evidence of a common descent, and conclusive proof, except in 
cases of adoption. The actual denial of all kinship between gentiles 
a la Grote* and Niebuhr, which transforms the gens into a purely 
fictitious, fanciful creation of the brain, is, on the other hand, 
worthy of ‘ideal’ scientists, that is, of cloistered bookworms. 
Because the concatenation of the generations, especially with the 
incipience of monogamy, is removed into the distance, and the 
reality of the past seems reflected in mythological fantasy, the 
good old Philistines concluded, and still conclude, that the fancied 
genealogy created real gentes!” '” 

As among the Americans, the phratry was a mother gens, split 
up into several daughter gentes, and uniting them, often tracing 
them all to a common ancestor. Thus, according to Grote, 

“all the contemporary members of the phratry of Hekataeus had a common 
god for their ancestor at the sixteenth degree”’.> 

Hence, all the gentes of this phratry were literally brother 
gentes. The phratry still occurs in Homer as a military unit in that 
famous passage where Nestor advises Agamemnon: Draw up 
people by tribes and by phratries so that phratry may support 
phratry, and tribe tribe.“ Moreover, the phratry has the right and 
the duty to prosecute the murderer of a phrator, indicating that at 
an earlier stage it had the duty of blood revenge. Furthermore, it 
has common shrines and festivals; for the development of all 
Greek mythology from the traditional old Aryan cult of nature 
was essentially due to the gentes and phratries and took place 
within them. The phratry also had a chief (phratriarchos) and, 
according to de Coulanges, assemblies and binding decisions, a 
tribunal and an administration.* Even the state of a later period, 
while ignoring the gens, left certain public functions to the 
phratry. 

A number of kindred phratries constituted a tribe. In Attica 
there were four tribes of three phratries each, each phratry 
consisting of thirty gentes. Such a meticulous demarcation of the 
groups presupposes a conscious and planned interference with the 
naturally evolved order of things. On how, when and why this 
happened Grecian history keeps silent, for the Greeks themselves 

preserved memories reaching back no further than the Heroic 
Age. 

Closely packed in a comparatively small territory as the Greeks 
were, their dialectal differences were less developed than those in 
the extensive American forests. Nevertheless, even here we find 
only tribes of the same main dialect united in a larger whole; and 
even little Attica had its own dialect, which was later to become 
dominant as the universal language of prose. 

In the epics of Homer we mostly find the Grecian tribes already 
combined into small peoples, within which, however, the gentes, 
phratries and tribes still retained their full independence. They 
already lived in walled cities. The population increased with the 
growth of the herds, with field agriculture and the beginnings of 
the handicrafts. With this came increased differences in wealth, 
which gave rise to an aristocratic element within the old naturally 
evolved democracy. The separate small peoples engaged in 
constant warfare for the possession of the best land and also for 
the sake of loot. The enslavement of prisoners of war was already 
a recognised institution. 

The constitution of these tribes and small peoples was as 
follows: 

1. The permanent authority was the council (boulé), originally 
composed, most likely, of the chiefs of the gentes, but later on, 
when their number became too large, of a selection, which created 
the opportunity to develop and strengthen the aristocratic 
element. Dionysius definitely speaks of the council of the Heroic 
Age as being composed of notables (kratistoz).* The council had the 
final decision in important matters. In Aeschylus, the council of 
Thebes passes a decision definitive in the given case that the body of 
Eteocles be buried with full honours, and the body of Polynices be 
thrown out to be devoured by the dogs.” Later, with the rise of the 
state, this council was transformed into a senate. 

2. The popular assembly (agora). Among the Iroquois we saw that 
the people, men and women, stood in a circle around the council 
meetings, taking an orderly part in the discussions and thus 
influencing its decisions. Among the Homeric Greeks, this 
Umstand, to use an old German legal expression, had already 
developed into a plenary assembly of the people, as was also the 
case with the ancient Germans. The assembly was convened by the 

council to decide important matters; every man had the right to 
speak. Decisions were taken by a show of hands (Aeschylus in The 
Suppliants), or by acclamation. They were sovereign and final, for, 
as Schoemann says in his Griechische Alterthtimer [Vol. I, p. 27], 

“whenever a matter is discussed that requires the co-operation of the people for 
its execution, Homer gives us no indication of any means by which the people 
could be forced into it against their will”. 

At this time, when every adult male member of the tribe was a 
warrior, there was as yet no public authority separated from the 
people that could have been set against it. Naturally evolved 
democracy was still in full bloom, and this must remain the point 
of departure in judging the power and status of the council and of 
the basileus. 

3. The military commander (basileus). On this point, Marx makes 
the following comment: “The European savants, most of them 
born servants of princes, represent the basileus as a monarch in 
the modern sense. The Yankee republican Morgan objects to this. 
_ Very ironically, but, truthfully, he says of the oily Gladstone and 
his Juventus Mundi: 

““Mr. Gladstone, who presents to his readers the Grecian chiefs of the Heroic 
Age as kings and princes, with the superadded qualities of gentlemen, is forced to 
admit that on the whole we seem to have the custom or law of primogeniture 
sufficiently, but not oversharply defined.” 4 

As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone himself must realise that such 
a contingent system of primogeniture, sufficiently but not over- 
sharply defined, is as good as none at all. 

What the position as regards heredity was in the case of the 
offices of chiefs among the Iroquois and other Indians we have 
already seen. All officials were elected, mostly within the gens, and 
were, to that extent, hereditary in the gens. Gradually, vacancies 
came to be filled preferably by the next gentile relative—the 
brother or the sister's son—unless good reasons existed for 
‘passing him over. The fact that in Greece, under father right, the 
office of basileus was generally transmitted to the son, or one of 
the sons, only indicates that the probability of succession by public 
election was in favour of the sons; but it by no means implies 
legally binding succession without public election. What we have 
here, among the Iroquois and Greeks, are the first rudiments of 
special aristocratic families within the gentes and, among the 
Greeks, also the first rudiments of a future hereditary chieftain- 

ship or monarchy. Hence it is to be supposed that among the 
Greeks the basileus was either elected by the people or, at least, 
had to be confirmed by its recognised organs—the council or the 
agora—as was the case with the Roman “king” (rex). 

In the Iliad the ruler of men, Agamemnon, appears, not as the 
supreme king of the Greeks, but as supreme commander of a 
federal army before a besieged city. And when dissension broke 
out among the Greeks, it is to this quality of his that Odysseus 
points in the famous passage: the rule of many is not a good 
thing; let us have one commander, etc. (to which the popular 
verse about the sceptre was added later).* “Odysseus is not here 
lecturing on the form of government, but is demanding obedience 
to the supreme commander of the army in the field. For the 
Greeks, who appear before Troy only as an army, the proceedings 
in the agora are sufficiently democratic. When speaking of gifts, 
that is, the division of the spoils, Achilles never makes Agamem- 
non or some other basileus the divider, but always the ‘sons of the 
Achaeans’, i.e. the people. The attributes ‘begotten of Zeus’, 
‘nourished by Zeus’, do not prove anything because every gens is 
descended from some god, and the gens of the tribal chief from a 
‘prominent’ god, in this case Zeus. Even personally unfree, such as 
the swineherd Eumaeus and others, are ‘divine’ (diot or theiot), 
_ and this in the Odyssey, and hence in a much later period than the 
Iliad. Likewise in the Odyssey, we find the name of heros given to 
the herald Mulios as well as to the blind bard Demodocus.” In 
short, the word basileia, which the Greek writers apply to Homer’s 
so-called kingship (because military leadership is its chief distin- 
guishing mark), with the council and popular assembly alongside of 
it, means merely—military democracy.” (Marx.)‘ 

Besides military functions, the basileus also had priestly and 
judicial functions; the latter were not clearly specified, but the 
former he exercised in his capacity of supreme representative of 
the tribe, or of the confederacy of tribes. There is no reference 
anywhere to civil, administrative functions; but it seems that he 
was ex officio a member of the council. Etymologically, it is quite 
correct to translate basileus as Konig (king), because Kénig (kuning) 

is derived from kuni, ktinne, and signifies chief of a gens. But the 
ancient Greek basileus in no way corresponds to the modern 
meaning of the word Kénig. Thucydides expressly refers to the old 
basileia as patriké, that is, derived from gentes, and states that it 
had specified, hence restricted, functions.* And Aristotle says 
that the basileia of the Heroic Age was a leadership over freemen, 
and that the basileus was a military chief, judge and high priest.° 
Hence, the basileus had no governmental power in the later 
sense.* 

Thus, in the Grecian constitution of the Heroic Age, we still 
find the old gentile system full of vigour; but we also see the 
beginning of its decay: father right and the inheritance of 
property by the children, which favoured the accumulation of 
wealth in the family and gave the latter power as against the gens; 
differentiation in wealth affecting in turn the social constitution by 
creating the first rudiments of a hereditary nobility and monarchy; 
slavery, first limited to prisoners of war, but already opening up 
the prospect of the enslavement of fellow members of the tribe 
and even of the gens; the degeneration of the old intertribal 
warfare into systematic robbery on land and sea for the purpose 
of capturing cattle, slaves and treasure, into a regular source of 
income. In short, wealth is praised and respected as the highest 
treasure, and the old gentile systems are abused in order to 
justify forcible robbery of wealth. Only one thing was missing: an 
institution that would not only safeguard the newly acquired 
wealth of individuals against the communistic traditions of the 
gentile system, would not only sanctify private property, formerly 
held in such low esteem, and pronounce this sanctification the 
supreme purpose of every human society, but would also stamp 
the successively developing new forms of acquiring property, and 
consequently, of constantly accelerating the increase in wealth, 

* Like the Grecian basileus, the Aztec military chief has been wrongly presented 
as a prince in the modern sense. Morgan was the first to subject to historical 
criticism the reports of the Spaniards, who at first misunderstood and exaggerated, 
and later deliberately misrepresented things; he showed that the Mexicans were in 
the middle stage of barbarism, but on a higher plane than the New Mexican Pueblo 
Indians,!°6 and that their constitution, so far as the garbled accounts enable us to 
judge, corresponded to the following: a confederacy of three tribes, which had 
made a number of others tributary, and which was governed by a Federal Council 
and a federal military chief, whom the Spaniards had made into an “emperor”. 

with the seal of general public recognition; an institution that 
would perpetuate, not only the arising class division of society, but 
also the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-possessing 
classes and the rule of the former over the latter. 

And this institution arrived. The state was invented.