CHAPTER IV. THE GRECIAN GENS.

The public meeting (agora). We saw how the Iroquois, men and women, attended the council meetings, taking an orderly part in the discussions and influencing them. Among the Homeric Greeks, this attendance had developed to a complete public meeting. This was also the case with the Germans of the archaic period. The meeting was called by the council. Every man could demand the word. The final vote was taken by hand raising (Aeschylos in "The Suppliants," 607), or by acclamation. The decision of the meeting was supreme and final. "Whenever a matter is discussed," says Schoemann in "Antiquities of Greece," "which requires the participation of the people for its execution, Homer does not indicate any means by which the people could be forced to it against their will." It is evident that at a time when every able-bodied member of the tribe was a warrior, there existed as yet no public power apart from the people that might have been used against them. The primordial democracy was still in full force, and by this standard the influence and position of the council and of the basileus must be judged.

The military chief (basileus). Marx makes the following comment: "The European scientists, mostly 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.' As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone himself must have perceived that a primogeniture resting on a clause of 'sufficient but not oversharp' definition is as bad as none at all."

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