Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/62

(prophets and priests) and one lay member, the registrar. But in another case (Ramses IX) the lay element preponderated.

Which last statement implies a step toward differentiation of the secular from the sacred in local administration.

To the circumstance that the Greek States did not become fully united has already been ascribed the fact that the Greek priesthood never became a hierarchy. Says Thirlwall—"the Greek priests never formed one organized body … even within the same State they were not incorporated." Hence the normal development of sundry professions is less distinctly to be traced. Nevertheless the relation between the priestly and the judicial functions is visible in a rudimentary, if not in a developed, form. Among the Greeks, as among the Hebrews, it was the habit in cases of doubt to "inquire of the Lord"; and the oracular utterance embodying the will of a god was made by a priest or priestess. Moreover, the circumstance that Greek laws were called themistes or utterances of the goddess Themis, as the mouthpiece of Zeus, shows that among the early Greeks, as among other peoples, a law and a divine fiat were the same thing. That systems of law were regarded as of supernatural origin, is also evidenced by the code of Lycurgus. Says Hase:—"The origin of his code was religious. A declaration of the Delphic god contains the fundamental principles of the measures by which he reconciled the rival claims" [of the Spartans]. That the non-development of a legal class out of a priestly class followed from the lack of development of the priestly class itself, seems in some measure implied by the following extract from Thirlwall:—

"The priestly office in itself involved no civil exemptions or disabilities, and was not thought to unfit the person who filled it for discharging the duties of a senator, a judge, or a warrior. … But the care of a temple often required the continual residence and presence of its ministers."

Possibly the rise of priest-lawyers, impeded by this local fixity and by want of co-operative organization among priests, may have been also impeded by the independence of the Greek nature; which, unlike Oriental natures, did not readily submit to the extension of sacerdotal control over civil affairs.

How priestly and legal functions were mingled among the early Romans is shown by the two following extracts from Duruy:—

The patricians "held the priesthood and the auspices; they were priests, augurs, and judges, and they carefully hid from the eyes of the people the mysterious formulae of public worship and of jurisprudence." The "servile attachment to legal forms [which characterized the early Romans] came from the religious character of the law and from the belief imposed by the doctrine of augury, that the least inadvertence in the accomplishment of rites was sufficient to alienate the goodwill of the gods."

It seems probable, indeed, that legal procedure consisted in part of ceremonies originally devotional, by which the god Numa was