fact that the rulers of the Egyptian XIIth dynasty, with whom the late period of the Culture ended, had their sons crowned during their own lifetime.[1] The inward relationship between these three dynastic ideas is yet another proof that Being in these three Cultures was akin.
It requires a close insight into the political form-language of the Classical world to perceive that here also the course of things was exactly the same, and that it comprised not only the transition from feudal union to class-State, but even the dynastic principle as well. Classical being, indeed, said no to everything that might draw it into distances either of space or of time, and even in the fact-world of history ringed itself with creations that had something of the defensive in them. But all this narrowing and curtailing presupposes the thing against which it is striving to maintain itself. The Dionysiac squandering, and the Orphic negation, of the Classical body contained in the very form of their protest the Apollinian ideal of perfect bodily being.
Individual rulership and the will to transmit to heirs were unmistakably taken for granted in the oldest kingship.[2] But they had become questionable even by 800, as the rôle of Telemachus in the older parts of the Odyssey indicates. The royal title was frequently borne by great vassals and the most conspicuous of the nobles. In Sparta and in Lycia there were two of them, and in the Phæacian city of the epic and in many actual cities there were more. Next comes the splitting-off of offices from dignities. Lastly, the kingship itself becomes an office which the nobility confers (though at first, perhaps, only upon members of the old royal family); thus in Sparta the Ephors, as representing the First Estate, were in no wise limited in their choice by rule; and in Corinth from about 750 the royal clan of the Bacchiadæ abolished hereditary succession, and on each occasion set up a prytaneus with royal rank from within their own body. The great offices, which likewise were hereditary at first, came to be for one life only, then were limited to a term, and lastly became annual, and, further, were so arranged that there were more holders than offices, and the leadership was exercised by each in turn — the custom which, as is well known, led to the disaster of Cannæ. These annual offices, from the Etruscan annual dictature[3] to the Doric ephorate (which is found in Heraclea and Messene as well as Sparta) are firmly bound up with the essence of the Polis, and they reach their full structure about 650. Exactly at the corresponding date of the Western class-State (end of the fifteenth century), the hereditary power of dynasties was being secured by the Emperor Maximilian and his
- ↑ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., I, § 281.
- ↑ G. Busolt, Griech. Staatskunde (1920), pp. 319, et. seq. U. von Wilamowitz (Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen, 1910, p. 53), in disputing the existence of the patriarchal kingdom, misunderstands the immense difference between the conditions of the eighth century, indicated in the Odyssey, and those of the tenth.
- ↑ A. Rosenberg, Der Staat der alten Italiker (1913), pp. 75, et seq.
