4. The Greek Gens¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: Chapter 4 – The Greek Gens
This chapter traces the Greek gentile constitution at the threshold of civilisation, arguing that the Greek gens, though more developed than its Iroquois counterpart, retained the same fundamental structure and reveals the earliest cracks in gentile society caused by private wealth. The Greeks entered history with the same organic series as the Americans—gens, phratry, tribe, confederacy—but two entire great periods of development separated them from the Iroquois. The archaic gens had been transformed: mother right had given way to father right, and increasing private wealth had made its first breach in the gentile constitution. A second breach followed: heiresses were now compelled to marry within their own gens to prevent property passing to another gens through marriage, violating the older prohibition on intra-gentile marriage.
Drawing on Grote’s History of Greece, the chapter enumerates the binding institutions of the Athenian gens: common religious rites with exclusive priesthood honouring a supposed ancestral father; a common burial place; mutual rights of inheritance; mutual obligations of help and protection; and the mutual right and obligation to marry within the gens for orphan girls and heiresses. Several gentes formed a phratry, with similar but looser ties, and all phratries of a tribe held common religious festivals officiated by an elected leader from the nobility. Marx’s interpolation insists that “the savage (for example, Iroquois) shows through unmistakably” in the Greek gens.
The chapter polemicises sharply against Grote, Niebuhr, Mommsen, and other classical historians who mistook the gens for a group of families, thereby rendering its nature and origin incomprehensible. Under the gentile constitution, the family was never an organisational unit, since husband and wife necessarily belonged to different gentes. The chapter dismisses as absurd the eighteenth-century assumption that the monogamous single family—hardly older than civilisation—was the core around which society crystallised. Marx mocks the “pedantic philistines” who, unable to prove common descent from a mythical ancestor, concluded that the imaginary pedigree created the real gentes, when in fact the gentile name itself was conclusive proof of common descent.
The phratry is shown as a mother gens that had split into daughter gentes, still tracing descent to a common ancestral father, and appearing in Homer as a military unit. The tribe in Attica exhibited a “rounded symmetry of groups”—four tribes, each of three phratries, each phratry of thirty gentes—which presupposes conscious interference with the naturally developed order, though Greek history is silent on when or why this occurred.
The constitution of the heroic age is examined through three institutions: the council (boulè), originally composed of all gentile chiefs but later a selection strengthening the aristocratic element; the assembly of the people (agora), where every man could speak and decisions were supreme, reflecting a primitive democracy with no public power separate from the people; and the basileus (military leader). Marx’s commentary is scathing: “European scholars, born lackeys most of them, make the basileus into a monarch in the modern sense.” Against Gladstone’s claim of a “sufficiently but not oversharply defined” law of primogeniture, the chapter insists the office was elective, with only probabilities favouring succession by a son. The basileus was military leader, priest, and judge, but held no civil administrative powers; the term basileia meant only “military democracy.”
The chapter concludes by showing the Greek gentile order still a living force but already disintegrating: father right and inheritance within the family made the family a power against the gens; inequality of wealth produced rudiments of hereditary nobility and monarchy; slavery of prisoners prepared the enslavement of fellow tribesmen; and wars degenerated into systematic pillage. Only one thing was wanting: an institution to sanctify private property, perpetuate class cleavage, and secure the exploitation of the non-possessing. “And this institution came. The state was invented.”