ABSTRACT
In early Athens every citizen belonged to one of the old four tribes (that is, the pre-Kleisthenic tribes) and to one of the constituent trittyes (‘thirds’) of that tribe. He also belonged to another unit, known as a phratry (phratria, ‘brotherhood’). It is possible, though not certain, that each phratry had a genos (‘clan’) as its nucleus (see note 3 on [109]). At least, not all members of a phratry were also gennetai (members of a genos). The word phrater is related to other Indo-European words for ‘brother’, yet the Greeks adopted different words for a literal brother. So we can picture clans forming themselves and their non-noble dependants into wider associations, to which the word ‘brotherhood’ was applied (inappropriately, in a strict sense). We do not possess any early descriptions of the activities of phratries and clans, but we do have a later inscription [96] which records several attempts in the first half of the fourth century BC to refine procedures for admission to membership of a particular phratry. By that time membership of a phratry was not an essential ingredient of Athenian citizenship; after the reforms of Kleisthenes (Chapter V) people established their citizenship by calling witnesses that they were members of a deme. But it seems that membership of a phratry, with its religious and social functions, was still normal and, as this inscription implies, desired by people. At an earlier stage, according to a fragmentary statement by Philokhoros [97], there was an attempt to make it easier for men who had been approved by more exclusive bodies, such as the genos, to be accepted also as members of a phratry.
