great families therefore developed, not separately in their counties, as in Egypt, China, and the West, but in the closest touch with the city, where they obtained possession of the rights of the King, one after the other, until nothing was left to the ruling house but that which could not be touched because of the gods — namely, the title attaching to its sacrificial function (hence the rex sacrorum). In the later parts of the Homeric epic (c. 800) it is the nobles who invite the king to take his seat, and even unseat him. The Odyssey really knows the kingship only as part of the saga — the actual Ithaca that it shows us is a city dominated by oligarchs.[1] The Spartiates, like the Roman partriciate of the Comitia Curiata, are the product of a feudal relation.[2] In the phiditiæ[3] there are evident remains of the old open table of the noble, but the power of the king has sunk to the shadowy dignity of the rex sacrorum of Rome, or the "kings" of Sparta, who were liable to be imprisoned or removed at any time by the Ephors. The essential similarity of these conditions forces us to presume that in Rome the Tarquinian Tyrannis of 500 was preceded by a period of oligarchical dominance, and this view is supported by the unquestionably genuine tradition of the Interrex, a person appointed by the council of the nobles (the Senate) from amongst its own members to act until it should please them to elect a king again.
Here, as elsewhere, there comes a time in which feudalism is falling into decay, but the coming State is not yet completed, the nation not yet "in form." This is the fearful crisis that emerges everywhere in the shape of the Interregnum, and forms the boundary between the feudal union and the class-State. In Egypt feudalism was fully developed by about the middle of the Vth Dynasty. The Pharaoh Asosi gave away his domains literally piece by piece to the vassals, and, further, the rich fiefs of the priesthood were (exactly as in the West) free of taxation and gradually became the permanent property ("mortmain," as we should say) of the great temples.[4] With the Vth Dynasty (c. 2530 B.C.) the "Hohenstaufen" age comes to an end. Under the shadow-kingship of the short-lived VIth Dynasty the princes (rpati) and counts (hetio) become independent; the high offices are all hereditary and the tomb-inscriptions show us more and more proud stress upon ancient lineage. That which later Egyptian historians have hidden under the reputed VIIth and VIIIth dynasties[5] is really half a century of anarchy and lawless conflicts between princes for each other's domains or for the Pharaoh-title. In China, even I-Wang (934-909) was obliged by his vassals to give out all conquered lands, and to do so to sub-tenants
3 Men's messes. See the article 2ucr<uria in Smith's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. — Tr.
- ↑ Beloch, Griechiscbe Geschichte, I, 1, pp. 214, et seq.
- ↑ The Spartiates mustered in the best period of the sixth century some 4000 warriors, out of a total population of nearly 300,000, including Periœci and Helots (Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., III, § 264). The Roman families must at that time have been of about the same strength relatively to the clientela and the Latins.
- ↑ 3
- ↑ Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des Alt., I, § 264.
- ↑ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., I, § 267, et seq.
