LhOENDS OF THE ATTIC DEMES AND GENTES. 193 dfirnes or cantons, and included, besides, various religious clans or hereditary sects (if the expression may be permitted) ; that is, a multitude of persons not necessarily living together in the same locality, but bound together by an hereditary communion of sacred rites, and claiming privileges, as well as performing obli- gations, founded upon the traditional authority of divine persons for whom they had a common veneration. Even down to the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, the demota of the various Attic demes, though long since embodied in the larger political union of Attica, and having no wish for separation, still retained the recollection of their original political autonomy. They lived in their own separate localities, resorted habitually to their own temples, and visited Athens only occasionally for private or po- litical business, or for the great public festivals. Each of these aggregates, political as well as religious, had its own eponymous god or hero, with a genealogy more or less extended, and a train of mythical incidents more or less copious, attached to his name, according to the fancy of the local exegetes and poets. The eponymous heroes Marathon, Dekelus, Kolonus, or Phlius, had sach their own title to worship, and their own position as themes of legendary narrative, independent of Erechtheus, or Poseidon, or Athene, the patrons of the acropolis common to all of them. But neither the archaeology of Attica, nor that of its various component fractions, was much dwelt upon by the ancient epic poets of Greece. Theseus is noticed both in the Iliad and Odyssey as having carried off from Krete Ariadne, the daugh- ter of Minos thus commencing that connection between the Kretan and Athenian legends which we afterwards find so large- ly amplified and the sons of Theseus take part in the Trojan war. 1 The chief collectors and narrators of the Attic mythes were, the prose logographers, authors of the many compositions called Atthides, or works on Attic archaeology. These writers Hellanikus, the contemporary of Herodotus, is the earliest com- poser of an Atthis expressly named, though Pherekydes also touched upon the Attic fables these writers, I say, interwove into one chronological series the legends which either greatly oc- cupied their own fancy, or commanded the most general reverence 1 ^Ethra, mother of Theseus, is also mentioned (Homer, Iliad, iii. 144). VOL. i. 9 13oc.
