But it seems that he was ex-officio a member of the council. The translation of basileus by king is etymologically quite correct, because king (Kuning) is derived from Kuni, Künne, and signifies chief of a gens. But the modern meaning of the word king in no way designates the functions of the Grecian basileus. Thucydides expressly refers to the old basileia as patrikê, that is "derived from the gens," and states that it had well defined functions. And Aristotle says that the basileia of heroic times was a leadership of free men and that the basileus was a military chief, a judge and a high priest. Hence the basileus had no governmental power in a modern sense.[1]
In the Grecian constitution of heroic times, then, we still find the old gentilism fully alive, but we also perceive the beginnings of the elements that undermine it; paternal law and inheritance of property by the father's children, favoring accumulation of wealth in the family and giving to the latter a power apart from the gens; influence of the difference of wealth on the constitution by the formation of the first rudiments of hereditary nobility and monarchy; slavery, first limited to prisoners of war, but already paving the way to the enslavement of tribal and gentile associates; degeneration of the old feuds between tribes a regular mode of existing by systematic plundering on
- ↑ Author's note. Just as the Grecian basileus, so the Aztec military chief was misrepresented as a modern prince. Morgan was the first to submit to historical criticism the reports of the Spaniards who first misapprehended and exaggerated, and later on consciously misrepresented the functions of this office. He showed that the Mexicans were in the middle stage of barbarism, but on a higher plane than the New Mexican Pueblo Indians, and that their constitution, so far as the garbled accounts show, corresponded to this stage: a league of three tribes which had made a number of others tributary and was administered by a federal council and a federal chief of war, whom the Spaniards construed into an "emperor."
