first.

In the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars we hear of
hetairies within the two political parties, oligarchic and democratic;
Themistocles is said (Plut. _Aristides_, 2) to have belonged to one,
Pericles' supporters seem to have been thus organized (Plut. Per. 7 and
13), and Cimon had a hundred _hetairoi_ devoted to him (Plut. _Cim._
17). These associations were used, like the _collegia sodalicia_ at Rome
(see below), for securing certain results at elections and in the
law-courts (Thuc. viii. 54), and were not regarded as harmful or
illegal. But the bitterness of party struggles in Greece during the
Peloponnesian War changed them in many states into political engines
dangerous to the constitution, and especially to democratic
institutions; Aristotle mentions (_Politics_, p. 1310a) a secret oath
taken by the members of oligarchic clubs, containing the promise, "I
will be an enemy to the people, and will devise all the harm I can
against them." At Athens in 413 b.c. the conspiracy against the
democracy was engineered by means of these clubs, which existed not only
there but in the other cities of the empire (Thuc. viii. 48 and 54), and
had now become secret conspiracies ([Greek: synomosiai]) of a wholly
unconstitutional kind. On this subject see Grote, _Hist. of Greece_, v.
360; A.H.J. Greenidge, _Handbook of Greek Constitutional History_, 208
foll.

Passing over the clubs for trade or plunder mentioned in Solon's law, of
which we have no detailed knowledge, we come to the religious
associations. These were known by several names, especially _thiasi_,
_eranoi_ and _orgeones_, and it is not possible to distinguish these
from each other in historical times, though they may have had different
origins. They had the common object of sacrifice to a particular deity;
the _thiasi_ and _orgeones_ seem to be connected more especially with
foreign deities whose rites were of an orgiastic character. The
organization of these societies is the subject of an excellent treatise
by Paul Foucart (_Les Associations religieuses chez les Grecs_, Paris,
1873), still indispensable, from which the following particulars are
chiefly drawn. For the greater part of them the evidence consists of
inscriptions from various parts of Greece, many of which were published
for the first time by Foucart, and will be found at the end of his book.

The first striking point is that the object of all these associations is
to maintain the