著者

伊藤 貞夫

出版者

公益財団法人 史学会

雑誌

史学雑誌 (ISSN:00182478)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.106, no.11, pp.1901-1949, 1997

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The innovative works of two French scholars, F. Bourriot's Recherches sur la nature du genos and D. Roussel's Tribu et cite, which were both published in 1976, criticized radically the common view that polis society was based on a tribal system and have been supported by many Greek historians since they were appreciated by M.I. Finley in his notable book, Politics in the Ancient World. However, the author feels that their theories are not well founded, and that especially Bourriot's argument emphasizing the religious function of Athenian gene meets with definite invincible difficulties. First, regarding his interpretation of Philochoros' fragment (FGH 328 F35a), Bourriot's interesting reference to homogalaktai in Arist. Pol. 1252b is unsuccessful. The inhabitants of a village, called homogalaktai in that passage, must have been considered by Aristotle to be members of a local lineage in the anthropological sense rather than such joint owners of a pasturage, as Bourriot infers. Homogalaktai in Philochoros' fragment is probably an obsolescent term of the members of an aristocratic group in an Athenian phratry, while orgeones appear to imply upper commoners who stood together against homogalaktai as worshippers to their own god or hero in the course of the democratization of a phratry and also succeeded in organizing lower commoners in the classical period. Secondly, the positive part of Bourriot's theory that gene were originally sacerdotal families is also unpersuasive, because the author cannot cite sufficient evidence giving us both the technical term genos and the proper noun of a sacerdotal group. There are only too sporadic examples (Athen.234f.; Pindar. Olymp. VI71; Hdt. IX33; Demosth. LIX 117). Aesch. III 18, as well as Arist. Ath. Pol.57.2, does not necessarily establish that the term genos originally implied just the sacerdotal family, though in Aesch. III 18 the term happens to be used to represent a sacerdotal family. In Ath. P0l. 57.2 gene appear to be the aristocratic clans which often served as priests in their own phratries, in contrast with the sacerdotal families monopolizing the important priesthoods of communal temples. Thirdly, Bourriot's other insistence that aristocratic families were not called gene, but oikiai, is also not supported by sufficient evidence. From the archaic to the Roman imperial period, ancient authors appear to have usually used only proper nouns when referring to individual aristocratic families. The description of Bacchiadai (Hdt. V 92β; Diod. VII 9; Paus. II 4) sets a good example. It is also important that the above-mentioned dources concerned with Bacchiadai show the cooperative power and spirit of an aristo-cratic clan. As for Roussel's theory that ethne had no tfaces of a tribal system, there is definite epigraphical evidence against it. In an eastern Locrian inscription we find two kinds of primordial community, damos and koinan (ML 20 11. 3-4), besides polis as a constitutional unit of that ethnos (ibid. 11. 19-28). In comparison with an inscription of Elis, another ethnos which includes damos as a social organization (e.g. Buck 62 1.9), the Locrian koinan proves to be equivalent to the Elean patria (Buck 61 1.1), a kind of tribal group. Though the works of Bourriot and Roussel are significant contributions to the study of ancient Greek society, the original arguments of those scholars cannot nevertheless replace the view that phratriai and gene date back to the Dark Age and that gene were aristocratic groups ruling individual phratriai.