GENOS
GENOS (
γένος). The word
γένος, connected etymologically with
γένω, γίγνομαι, has reference primarily to
birth; and when applied to mark the connexion between a number of
individuals, may equally denote the closest natural ties of a common family
(
αἷμά τε φαὶ γένος,
Hom. Od. 8.503), or the widest natural ties
of the race or nation (
ἐξ Ἰθακῆς γένος
εἰμί, ib. 15.267). This connotation is still retained in the
word when it is applied to denote certain minor forms of association
existing between citizens in the same Greek state, marked by the common
performance of certain civil and religious duties, and distinct from the
larger and more definitely political forms of association such as the tribe
(
φυλή)--since the latter may, from
their purely political significance, be artificially created, and based on
the arbitrary distinctions of locality or rank. It is true that it is a
common characteristic of Greek civil organisation to take the family as the
typical form of unity, and in the creation of new state divisions to imitate
its most salient characteristics, the common eponymous hero, from which, in
the family or gens, the descent was traced, and the common rites and
sacrifices. But to the Greek mind, a common hero and common religious rites
were the natural out-come of the narrower or the wider family bonds, those
of the
οἰκία or of the
γένος. They might be applied artificially in
such creations as the tribe or deme. But that the Greeks never merged the
one conception into the other is shown by facts of history. Cleisthenes, the
Athenian reformer, while he distributed his new citizens into tribes and
demes, and possibly into phratries, could not enrol them in the existing
γένη (Schömann,
Antiq. 1.364 E. T.). Foreigners obtaining the freedom of the
city were, as we know, though necessarily admitted to a tribe or deme, and
for certain purposes into a phratry, never enrolled in a
γένος ([Dem.]
c. Neaer. p.
1380.104); and even within the Athenian
γένη themselves there was a distinction between the ancient
members of the gentes, the
γεννῆται
(Harpocrat. s. v.
γεννῆται, οἱ ἐξ ἀρχῆς εἰς τὰ
καλούμενα γένη κατανεμηθέντες:
Hesych. sub voce
γεννῆται) and the
ὀργεῶνες, those standing without this circle, who shared
only in some of the sacred rites of the gens (Suid., Phot. s. v.
ὀργεῶνες). This distinction could only have
originated with the sense that these ancient members of the gens were
connected through true family ties; and if we knew as much about the gentes
of the Greek world generally as about those of Attica, we should probably
find the same distinction between their members: between those, that is, who
had a belief that they were ultimately related and those who had no ground
for such a belief: not merely between those who shared in an original
distribution of the members of the state and those who shared later in such
a distribution. If even we accept the statement of Pollux (8.111) that the
Athenian
γεννῆται were in no way related
(
οἱ μετέχοντες τοῦ γένους, γεννῆται καὶ
ὁμογάλακτες, γένει μὲν οὐ προσήκοντες, ἐκ δὲ τῆς συνόδου
οὕτω προσαγοεευόμενοι), which is merely the statement of a
fact which he or his authorities believed, and does not necessarily
represent the belief of the
γεννῆται
themselves, yet the bonds which united the gens, the transmitted sacred
rites and the eponymous hero, had to the Greek mind the force of true family
bonds. The hero or god of the gens became the mythical ancestor of the gens,
as we see in the case of Hecataeus of Miletus, whose sixteenth ancestor was
a god (
Hdt. 2.143), the god no doubt of the
γένος to which he belonged. Again, to
get at the
origines (
τὰ
ἀνέκαθεν) of a man, we have only to point to the god
worshipped by his gens, as Herodotus points to the worship of the Carian
Zeus by the (
συγγενεῖς of Isagoras the
Athenian, as a sign of his descent (
Hdt. 5.66);
while, in this passage of Herodotus, the word
συγγενεῖς, which ordinarily meant “kinsmen” in
Greece, is used as precisely equivalent to
γεννῆται, and is distinguished from his
οἰκία, the circle of his more immediate relations (for a
similar use, cf. Isae.
Or. 7). Peculiar rites in a Greek gens
were similarly taken as a mark of some ultimate racial connexion between its
members. Thus the Gephyraei at Athens, the race to which Harmodius and
[p. 1.904]Aristogeiton belonged, perpetuated the tradition
of.their common Phoenician descent by their peculiar .sanctuaries and rites
in which no other Athenian shared (
Hdt. 5.57 and
61); while the Athenians, accepting this race token, excluded the Gephyraei
from certain minor privileges (
Hdt. 5.61;
Thuc. 6.56,
1, Arnold's
note); no doubt from those religious privileges which were the mark of pure
Ionian descent. The mythical head of the gens, the eponymous god or hero,
who created the common race, and with it the transmitted priesthoods and the
common rites, is known to us mainly in connexion with the greater
γένη, those that claimed connexion with some
superhuman being whose power was recognised by the whole state, or even by
the whole Greek world; but it cannot be doubted that the same would be true
of every
γένος in Attica, and probably in
Greece, and that the humbler gentes had their common rites, and their
ancestral god or hero, as well as the more celebrated (Grote,
Hist.
of Greece, pt. ii. ch. x.). The distinctive marks of a gens
were, then, this common mythical ancestry, the common rites and common
assemblies (
σύνοδοι, Pollux,
l.c.) of its members. The reason why religious
community always remained in Greece the main test of membership of a gens
was that the common gentile name, which in Rome was the original test of
gentilitas [
GENS], was not borne
along with the individual name, by the Greeks. The bond of union between the
γεννῆται was thus almost exclusively
the common religious ancestry, and it is to this source that the other
characteristics which distinguished the more prominent gentes in Greece may
be traced. Community of religious ancestry gave rise to community of
worship, and the importance of the ancestry and worship determined.the
importance of the gens. Thus the. position .of the kings at Sparta in
historical times depended largely on their sole connexion with Zeus through
Heracles his son (
Hdt. 6.5.6); and through this
connexion they were. regarded as the link which bound the whole state to the
king of heaven (
Thuc. 5.16,
2,
Διὸς υἱοῦ ἡμιθέου τὸ
σπέρμα). Tence, too, the importance of some of the greater Attic
gentes; the Butadae, or the true Butadae (
Ἐτεοβουτάδαι) as they called themselves, after Cleisthenes
had applied their name to the deme in which the greater part of. their gens,
was resident, who, from their hereditary connexion with the worship of
Athene Polias and Poseidon Erechtheus, furnished the holders of two of the
greatest priesthoods of Athens (Aeschin.
de Fals. Leg.
§ 147; Suid. s. v.
Ἐτεοβουτάδαι:
Etym. Mag. s. v. id.). Community of worship. might
further lead, not merely to the transmission of important priesthoods, but,
to the inheritance of certain peculiar duties and privileges which the
founder of the gens had learnt from his patron, deity. Thus the Eumolpidae
and Ceryces at Athens were the sole exponents:of the mystic ritual of the
Eleusinian Demeter (Dem.
c. Androt. p. 601.27; Thuc. viii,
53, 2). The Asclepiadae of Cos with their transmitted medical skill (Steph.
Byz. s. v.
Κῶς), the Homeridae of Chios
with the gift of poetry (Harpocrat. s. v.
Ὁμηρίδαι), and the Iamidae and Tellidae of Elis with that of
prophecy (
Hdt. 5.44;
9.33 and 37), are all instances of similar transmitted gifts
associated with transmitted cults. Some of these. gentes,. such as the
Asclepiadae and Homeridae, may have developed, into schools, and lost, to.
some extent, the notion . of common parentage. But in. Sparta, where such
peculiarly endowed gentes are numerous, the conceptions of hereditary
privilege and actual descent were indissolubly connected. The Talthybiadae
at Sparta, the state--heralds, were all
ἀπόγονοι
Ταλθυβίου (
Hdt. 7.134); and this
was also the case. with the hereditary flute-players (
αὐληταί
and cooks (
μάγειροι), who handed down their profession from father to son
(
κατὰ τὰ πάτρια τελέουσι,
Hdt. 6.60). This was almost a caste system,
although marriage without the gens was apparently not forbidden. The pure
caste system: is met with in Greece in the case of a genuine
δυναστεία, where the acquisition of supreme
power by the gens was accompanied by a rule that all the marriages of its
members should be made within it, as in the case of the Bacchiadae, the
ruling gens at Corinth (
Hdt. 5.92,
ἐδίδοσαν δὲ καὶ ἤγουτο ἐξ ἀλλήλων). In
these instances community of blood-relationship and ancestry was very
strongly marked. But such cases were exceptional in Greece. As a rule the
chief token of descent was community in those peculiar sacred rights which
had been connected from time immemorial with the life of the gens, dated
back to its foundation, and were associated in idea with its mythical
founders The gens cannot be regarded, as it certainly never regarded itself,
as the arbitrary formation of a legislator in founding his state. The
statement of Pollux that the
γεννῆται at
Athens were not necessarily related does not conflict with the supposed
natural origin of the-gens for in Greece, as in Rome, and in early societies
generally, there are artificial modes of recruiting a gens, such as that by
adoption (Maine,
Ancient Law, pp. 130, 131); and by this
means even the descendants of newly-created citizens might be admitted. into
an Athenian gens, if they were already connected with it through marriage
(Schömann,
Antiq. i. pp. 364, 365); while even where
blood-relationship did exist between the different
οἰκίαι, it would not be clearly marked in Greece through
the lapse of the common gentile name. Greek speculation, however, which
aimed at analysing the complex fact of the state into its simpler component
elements, recognised in the
γένος a
development of the common origin which created the
οἰκία or original unit. Aristotle (
Aristot. Pol. 1.2, 5) traces the
development of the
πόλις from the house
through the village (
κώμη). That the ideas
of the
κώμη and the
γένος are here identical is shown by the use of the word
ὁμογάλακτες, which is equivalent to
γεννῆτας (Pollux, 8.111), and includes
the
παίδων παῖδες, and all collateral
descendants, to describe the members of the
κώμη. This
κώμη or
γένος is the widest natural unity, the extension
of the family to its furthest limits (
κατὰ γύσιν
ἔοικεν ἡ κώμη ἀποικία οἰκίας εἶναι, Arist.
l.c.: cf.
Cic. de
Off. 1.1. 7). This is a valuable statement, as
throwing light upon the Greek conception of the gens--that is, that there
was a closer unity of natural relations to be found within it than in the
state; but since the method! pursued by Aristotle is analytic and not
historical, it throws no light on the real historical development of the
gens into the
πόλις,
[p. 1.905]which is a process that cannot be restored by
conjecture.
Of the political significance of the
γένη of
Greece as a whole we can say very little. It is only in the case of the
Athenian
γένη that we have any full
description of their relations to the other divisions of the state, and of
the rights and duties of the gens. But in Greek states generally politically
privileged
γένη are of frequent occurrence.
When such exist, the government is to a greater or less degree a
δυναστεία. This was the case at Corinth under
the Bacchiadae; at Sparta as regards the two kings, and possibly as regards
the board of
γέροντες, according to one
interpretation of a passage in Aristotle (
Aristot. Pol. 5.6, 11; but see Jowett
in
loc.); in Crete as regards the election of the Cosmi, who were chosen
from certain privileged
γένη (Arist.
Pol. 2.10, 10); and in Thessaly, the normal
government of which was a
δυναστεία of
certain, families, such as the Aleuadae (
Thuc.
4.78,
3; Herod, 7.6; Plat.
Meno, p. 70 B). These are all instances of privileged gentes,
to which superiority of birth or wealth had given superiority of power. In
none of these cases is the gens taken directly as the basis of government.
Even in Sparta, where the
γέροντες, it is
supposed, were chosen from certain prominent. families in the state (I.
Müller,
Handb. 4.1, p. 82), the gens would have only
an accidental political significance. That the
γέροντες were connected with the thirty
ὠβαὶ seems shown by the Rhetra of Lycurgus
quoted by Plutarch (
Plut. Lyc. 6). Herodotus,
who does not mention the obe, says that Lycurgus divided the people into
τριακάδες (
Hdt.
1.65). At Athens
τριακάδες
meant, either the
γένος, each
φυλὴ being divided, into thirty of these
(Pollux, 8.111), or a similar fractional subdivision of the deme (Boeckh,
C. I. n. 101, p. 140). The obes at Sparta, represent
divisions of the five local phylae (
C. I. G. 1272, 1274). It
is probable that the
τριακάδες represented
ultimate divisions of the people, like the
γένη of Attica; but it is difficult to see how such generic
divisions could have borne any relation to the local division of the obe.
The significance of the gens at Sparta is quite. unknown, as. also the
meaning of the twenty-seven phratries, which we are told existed there
(
Athen. 4.141).
In the accounts of the Athenian as in those of the Roman gentes, we find a
symmetrical division and distribution of the gentes into the larger units of
the state, in Athens into the phratry or trittys and the tribe. Such
a.distribution could hardly have been realised in fact, when we consider the
nature of the gens; while w.e are never told of any. such original
distribution by an early lawgiver, nor were they interfered with by later
reformers, such as Cleisthenes. They are said to have been connected with
the four Ionian tribes of Attica (Arist. ap. Schol.
Plat.
Axioch. p. 465; Pollux, 8.111), each of these tribes being
divided into three phratries, and each phratry into thirty gentes. That.
they were ever connected with the trittys, as is stated in one of the above
accounts (Arist.
l.c.), is improbable. The trittys
was a subdivision of the tribe for political, as the phratry for social and
religious, purposes; it was probably local, and its lowest subdivision was
the smallest political unit, the naucrary (Schimann on Grote, p. 14). The
trittys disappears with the political reform of Cleisthenes . the phratries
and gentes, as social units, still remained intact, for it is not probable
that Cleisthenes increased the numbers of the phratries (Schömann,
Antiq. of Greece, i. p. 363; cf. I. Müller,
Handb. 4.1, p. 144). The gens and the phratry belong to
the same category of state divisions; they.are divisions whose rights. and
duties are those of private law. While the gens is: a.community, the members
of which recognised a common ancestor and cultus, the. phratry was an
association of several such gentes recognising that cultus--the worship of
Apollo Patroos and Zeus Herkeios--which was common to all the gentes, and
the participation in which was a certain sign of citizenship (Phot. s. v.
Ἕρκειος Ζεύς: μετῆν δὲ τῆς πολιτείας
οἷς εἴη Ζεὺς Ἕρκειος: Harpocrat., Suid., s. v.
id.; Harpocrat. s. v.
Ἀπόλλων Πατρῷος: Dem.
c. Eubul. p.
1315.54), as is shown by the question that was required to be answered as
the
δοκιμασία of the Archons,
εἰ Ἀπόλλων ἐστιν αὐτοῖς καὶ Ζεὺς
Ἕρκιος: (Pollux, 8.85.) It would seem then that every citizen,
whether born in or admitted. to the citizenship, belonged to a phratry in so
far as he shared in the worship of these gods, and he no doubt had his name
enrolled as
a: participator in a phratry. But
probably the created citizen (
δημοποίητος)
did not possess those rights of the phratry which depended on the fiction of
relationship,--the right, for instance,. of pursuing the murderer of one's
φράτωρ (Dem.
c. Macart.
p. 1069.57), and this is what Aristophanes means by saying that the. new
citizens had no phrators or only barbarous ones (
Aristoph. Frogs 419;
Aves, 765;--Niebuhr,
Hist. of Rome, vol. i. p.
312). An admitted citizen, then, was a member of the phratry so far as he
shared in the two universal cults, but was not, strictly speaking, a
φράτωρ: while a natural citizen could
name three degrees of relationship, as being member of a gens and of a
phratry. He had first
συγγενεῖς, kinsmen
where the blood-descent could be proved;
γεννῆται, where the common descent was believed, but could not
be proved; and
φράτορες, where the
relationship was merely that of religious unity, carrying with it certain
natural rights and obligations between the members called by this name (Dem.
in Eubul. p. 1306.24). The
συγγενεῖς as such, in the later sense of the word, had no
form of association: it was a distinction within the gens, the only outward
form of familyú unity. Thus the gens had a family register (
γραμματεῖον) in which the names of the children
of the members were enrolled; the father of the child taking an oath that it
had been be--gotten in union with an Athenian wife duly wedded to him. The
reception into the gens was performed at the same time as the reception into
the phratry, on the Cureotis, the third day of the Apaturia; and the
registers of the phratry and of the gens were apparently identical. The
meeting at the Apaturia was properly a meeting for the reception of
(
φράτορες: but if a child admitted into
the phratry satisfied all the conditions of being a member of the gens, he
became, by this reception, a
γεννήτης, and
hence a second register for the gens was not required. Yet if we suppose, as
we must, that citizens not born so were admitted for religious purposes
[p. 1.906]into the phratry, there must have been members on
the phratric register that were not members of a gens: and hence the
φρατερικὸν γραμματεῖον and
κοινὸν γραμματεῖον are identical (
C. I.
A. 2.841 b; Isae.
Or. 7
[
Apollod.], § 13,
ἐμὲ
ἐποίησατο υἱὸν ζῶν αὐτὸς καὶ εἰς τοὺς γεννήτας καὶ εἰς
τοὺς φράτορας ἐνέγραψε), for the registration signified at
the least possession of full citizen rights, although it might signify the
possession of full gentile rights. The oath mentioned above as necessary for
admission to the gens was the oath for admission into the phratry (Isae.
7.16,
ἦ μὴν ἐξ ἀστῆς καὶ ἐγγυητῆς γυναικὸς
εἰσάγειν: Dem.
in Eubul. p. 1315.54,
ὁ πατὴρ ὀμόσας τὸν νόμιμον τοῖς φράτορσιν ὅρκον
ἀστὸν ἐξ ἀστῆς ἐγγυητῆς αὑτῷ γεγενημένον εἶναι),
and the same ceremonies, the sacrifice and the voting of the phrators
applied to both alike, since admission to the phratry necessarily implied
admission to the gens, and rejection from the former rejection from the
latter; those rejected by the phrators, and by that act declared
νόθοι, were of necessity excluded from the gens.
Similarly all the duties that we read of as belonging to the phrators must
have applied
à fortiori to the gennetes:
the duty, for instance, of taking vengeance on a murderer, which attached to
the phrators of the murdered man (Draco,
fragm. ed.
Denkenbürger, n. 45; Dem.
c. Macart. p. 1069.57),
must have belonged in the first place to the
ἀγχιστεῖς, in the next to the
γεννῆται. As the (
φρατρίαρχος stood at the head of the phratry, so at the head of
the gens stood the
ἄρχων τοῦ γένους, who
was at the same time high priest of the gens (
C. I. A. 1276,
ἄρχων τοῦ γένους: ib. 1278,
ἀρχιερεὺς καὶ γενε-[άρχης]). During the
democracy, and probably at an earlier period, there was the distinction
noticed above between
γεννῆται and
ὁμογάλακτες, true members of the gens, and
ὀργεῶνες, members of the cult. Every
phrator was either one or the other of these (Phot. s. v.
ὀργεῶνες: Suid. s. v.
id.
τοὺς δὲ φράτορας ἐπάναγκες δέχεσθαι καὶ τοὺς
ὀργεῶνας καὶ τοὺς ὁμογάλακτας). Every phrator would be
an
ὀργεὼν so far as he shared in the rites
of Apollo Patroos and Zeus Herkeios; whether he could share in other sacred
rites of a particular gens, without having the family rights of the gens, is
doubtful. (
Dig. 47,
22,
where
ἱερῶν ὀργίων γεννῆται--for
ἢ ναῦται, Nieb.--may imply membership
of the gens so far as the rites are concerned.) The true
γεννῆται, we are told, were the original members
of the gens (Harpocrat. s. v.
γεννῆται,
supra). It is a possible supposition that the
Eupatrids were the original
γεννῆται, as
the patricians were the original
gentiles of
Rome, and that membership of the gens to the other
ἔθνη of the state merely consisted in participation in its
rites. In any case it was the nucleus of original full citizens of Athens
that constituted the gennetes; and it is probable that at Athens, as at
Rome, we see an expansion of the gens ; and that consequently there would
have been
ὀργεῶνες participating in the
rites of particular gentes, and perhaps also in the
λέσχαι [
LESCHE],
besides those participating in the two great cults which were proof of
membership of a phratry. Within the circle of the
γεννῆται, who regarded themselves as connected by blood, we
have the inner circle of the
ἀγχιστεῖς,
who were obviously so connected. The
ἀγχιστεία marked the limits of direct inheritance in cases of
intestacy, and extended to the children of cousins
ἀνεψιῶν παῖδες (Dem.
c. Macart. p.
1058.27); within this circle the Agnates took precedence over the Cognates.
This is a mark of the patriarchal organisation of the Athenian gens, at
least in historical times, as recognised by Solon in his laws of inheritance
(
Plut. Sol. 21: for their development,
cf. Isae. p. 85; McLellan,
Studies in Ancient Hist. p. 209).
A token of the same system is the survival of the
ἄρχων τοῦ γένους as a factor in the Greek gens; and as
the Greek theorists regarded the father as the king of the family, so they
regarded the eldest father as the natural head of the gens (Arist.
Pol. 1.2, 6,
πᾶσα γὰρ
οἰκία βασιλεύεται ὑπὸ τοῦ πρεσβυτάτου, ὥστε καὶ αἱ
ἀποικίαι--i. e. the
κώμη or
γένοσ--διὰ τὴν συγγένειαν): and it
is shown further by the fact that the ideal
patria
potestas in which the Roman gens culminated, was represented
in the Athenian and in the Greek gens throughout by the eponymous hero. (On
the proportions of eponymi to eponymae in the earliest Greek societies,
v. McLellan,
id. p.
229.) On the other hand, descent through the mother has been thought to be
implied in the curious law of Athens that half-brothers and sisters by the
same father might marry, but not those by the same mother (
ἐξεῖναι γαμεῖν τὰς ἐκ πατέρων ἀδελφάς,
Leg. Attic. 6.1,
ή: McLellan,
id. p. 209). But the object of this law was
apparently merely to keep together the property of the family. The necessity
existed in the case of a common father, whose property would be divided; in
the case of a common mother, where the property would be that of her two
husbands, it did not exist; it tended then to keep the property within the
father's gens, and thus bears out the theory of descent from the father.
Athenian law had many other regulations for the purpose of keeping property
together chiefly through the marriage of near relations (Schömann,
Antiq. i. p. 356), and was equally careful in preserving
the existence of the family (
οἰκία);
chiefly through the re-establishment by one of the sons of a married heiress
of her father's house (Schömann, l.c.;
Att. Proc. p.
469; Dem.
c. Macart. arg.). By this means the property and
the
ἱερὰ were kept within the gens: and
outside the circle of
ἀγχιστεῖς the
γεννῆται had the inheritance in the
last resort, like the gentiles at Rome (Schömann,
Antiq. 1.364).
[Grote,
History of Greece, Part ii. ch. x.; Niebuhr,
History of Rome, vol. i. p. 305 ff.; Philippi,
Beitrag zur Gesch. des Attisch. Bürgerrechts,
pp. 205-227; Iwan Muller,
Handb. 4.1, pp. 144, 145; Gilbert,
Staatsalterthümer, i. pp. 199-202, 302 if.;
Schömann,
Antiquities of Greece, i. pp. 357-365;
Schömann on Grote,
ad init. (on the
early Attic Tribes). On the early family,
v. Maine,
Ancient Law, pp. 122, 123, 133, 134, 147-150; and
McLellan,
Studies in Ancient History, p. 195
sq. (Kinship in Ancient Greece).]
[
A.H.G]