s History of
Greece, "is not a lawmaker, but a judge." He is provided with
Themistes, but, consistently with the belief in their emanation from
above, they cannot be supposed to be connected by any thread of
principle; they are separate, isolated judgments.

Even in the Homeric poems, we can see that these ideas are transient.
Parities of circumstance were probably commoner in the simple
mechanism of ancient society than they are now, and in the succession
of similar cases awards are likely to follow and resemble each other.
Here we have the germ or rudiment of a Custom, a conception posterior
to that of Themistes or judgments. However strongly we, with our
modern associations, may be inclined to lay down _a priori_ that the
notion of a Custom must precede that of a judicial sentence, and that
a judgment must affirm a Custom or punish its breach, it seems quite
certain that the historical order of the ideas is that in which I have
placed them. The Homeric word for a custom in the embryo is sometimes
"Themis" in the singular--more often "Dike," the meaning of which
visibly fluctuates between a "judgment" and a "custom" or "usage."
[Greek: Nomos], a Law, so great and famous a term in the political
vocabulary of the later Greek society, does not occur in Homer.

This notion of a divine agency, suggesting the Themistes, and itself
impersonated in Themis, must be kept apart from other primitive
beliefs with which a superficial inquirer might confound it. The
conception of the Deity dictating an entire code or body of law, as in
the case of the Hindoo laws of Menu, seems to belong to a range of
ideas more recent and more advanced. "Themis" and "Themistes" are
much less remotely linked with that persuasion which clung so long and
so tenaciously to the human mind, of a divine influence underlying and
supporting every relation of life, every social institution. In early
law, and amid the rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this
belief meet us on all sides. A supernatural presidency is supposed to
consecrate and keep together all the cardinal institutions of those
times, the State, the Race, and the Family. Men, grouped together in
the different relations which those institutions imply, are bound to
celebrate periodically common rites and to offer common sacrifices;
and every now and then the same duty is even more significantly
recognised in the purifications and expiations which they perform, and
which appear intended