158 THE CITY. BOOK III. This new circle also had its religion ; in each tribe there were an altar and a protecting divinity. The god of the tribe was generally of the isanio nature as that of the phratry, or that of the family. It was a man deified, a hero. From him the tribe took its name. The Greeks called him the eponymous hero. He had his annual festal day. The principal part of the religious ceremony was a repast, of which the entire tribe partook.' The tribe, like the phratry, held assemblies and passed decrees, to which all the members were obliged to submit. It had a chief, inJwnw5, <jDwAoff«ffti£tij.* From what remains to us of the tribe we see that, oiiginally,, it was constituted to be an independent society, and as if there had been no other social power above it.
- Demosthenes, in Theocrinem. ^schines, III. 27. Isaeus,
VII. 36. Pausaryas, I. 38. Schol., in Demosih., 702. In the history of the ancients a distinction must be made between the religious tribes and the local tribes. We speak here only of the first : the second came long afterwards. There were tribes everywhere in Greece. Iliad, II. oij2, GGS; Odyssey, XIS.. 177; Herodotus, IV. IGl. ' -2Eschines, III. 30,31. Aristotle, IVa^r, cited by Photius, V. Navx^aQta. Pollux, VIII. 111. Boeckh, Corp. Inscr., 82, 85, 108. Few traces remain of the political and religious organiza- tion of the three' primitive tribes of Rome. These tribes were too considerable bodies for the citj' not to attempt to weaken them and take away their independence. The plebeians, more* over, labored to abolish them.
