ABSTRACT
Having examined the political system developed by the Dorian aristocracies of Crete and the legal apparatus which gave it authoritative sanction, we must now turn our attention to the social institutions of the free citizen class. The free citizens, who formed a minority of the population of each city-state, were a ruling class of landlords from which the governing elite was recruited. They were still, however, organized on a tribal basis at the time of the Gortyn Code. This tribal basis had been modified by the growth of the state apparatus, by the development of private property and the rise of the family as an institution. Nevertheless, many of the characteristic features of social life among the citizens were survivals, in some cases very vigorous survivals, from tribal society adapted to the city-state. The tribe is named in the Gortyn Code and in inscriptions from other cities. So is the clan; and, as we have seen9 the kosmoi continued to be recruited from ruling clans. Women were still enumerated in the tribes, but the phratry, which was known in Crete as the hetaireia, had become an exclusive association of male citizens, denying political rights to women and to all noncitizens. It can be inferred from the Gortyn Code that the hetaireia played a part of political importance in the development of the aristocratic system, as that system progressed from a tribal association based on kinship to a firmly-knit privileged corporation based on narrow political rights of citizenship. But evidence from succeeding centuries shows that, in comparison with the corresponding association of the youth, which was still flourishing in Hellenistic times, the hetaireiai rapidly began to lose their importance once the central authority of the state was firmly established. For their purpose became more and more restricted to the system of communal meals (the syssitia), another principal feature of social life derived from tribalism.
