ich requires
the participation of the people for its execution, Homer does not
indicate any means by which the people could be forced to it against
their will." It is evident that at a time when every able-bodied member
of the tribe was a warrior, there existed as yet no public power apart
from the people that might have been used against them. The primordial
democracy was still in full force, and by this standard the influence
and position of the council and of the basileus must be judged.

3. The military chief (basileus). Marx makes the following comment: "The
European scientists, mostly born servants of princes, represent the
basileus as a monarch in the modern sense. The Yankee republican Morgan
objects to this. Very ironically but truthfully he says of the oily
Gladstone and his "Juventus Mundi": 'Mr. Gladstone, who presents to his
readers the Grecian chiefs of the heroic age as kings and princes, with
the superadded qualities of gentlemen, is forced to admit that, on the
whole we seem to have the custom or law of primogeniture sufficiently,
but not oversharply defined.' As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone himself
must have perceived that a primogeniture resting on a clause of
'sufficient but not oversharp' definition is as bad as none at all."

We saw how the law of heredity was applied to the offices of sachems and
chiefs among the Iroquois and other Indians. All offices were subject to
the vote of the gentiles and for this reason hereditary in the gens. A
vacancy was filled preferably by the next gentile relative--the brother
or the sister's son--unless good reasons existed for passing him. That
in Greece, under paternal law, the office of basileus was generally
transmitted to the son or one of the sons, indicates only that the
probability of succession by public election was in favor of the sons.
It implies by no means a legal succession without a vote of the people.
We here perceive simply the first rudiments of segregated families of
aristocrats among Iroquois and Greeks, which led to a hereditary
leadership or monarchy in Greece. Hence the facts are in favor of the
opinion that among Greeks the basileus was either elected by the people
or at last was subject to the indorsement of their appointed organs, the
council or agora, as was the case with the Roman king (rex).

In the Iliad the ruler of men, Agamemnon, does not appear as the
supreme king of the Greeks, but as general in chief of a federal army
besie