t the dawn of their history, I should be
satisfied to quote a few verses from the _Odyssee_ of Homer:

[Greek: toisin d out agorai boulephoroi oute themistes.
* * * themisteuei de ekastos
paidon ed alochon, oud allelon alegousin.]

"They have neither assemblies for consultation nor _themistes_, but
every one exercises jurisdiction over his wives and his children, and
they pay no regard to one another." These lines are applied to the
Cyclops, and it may not perhaps be an altogether fanciful idea when I
suggest that the Cyclops is Homer's type of an alien and less advanced
civilisation; for the almost physical loathing which a primitive
community feels for men of widely different manners from its own
usually expresses itself by describing them as monsters, such as
giants, or even (which is almost always the case in Oriental
mythology) as demons. However that may be, the verses condense in
themselves the sum of the hints which are given us by legal
antiquities. Men are first seen distributed in perfectly insulated
groups, held together by obedience to the parent. Law is the parent's
word, but it is not yet in the condition of those _themistes_ which
were analysed in the first chapter of this work. When we go forward to
the state of society in which these early legal conceptions show
themselves as formed, we find that they still partake of the mystery
and spontaneity which must have seemed to characterise a despotic
father's commands, but that at the same time, inasmuch as they proceed
from a sovereign, they presuppose a union of family groups in some
wider organisation. The next question is, what is the nature of this
union and the degree of intimacy which it involves? It is just here
that archaic law renders us one of the greatest of its services and
fills up a gap which otherwise could only have been bridged by
conjecture. It is full, in all its provinces, of the clearest
indications that society in primitive times was not what it is assumed
to be at present, a collection of _individuals_. In fact, and in the
view of the men who composed it, it was _an aggregation of families_.
The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the _unit_
of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society the
Individual. We must be prepared to find in ancient law all the
consequences of this difference. It is so framed as to be adjusted to
a system of small independent c