From George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1958.
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Lastly, the conditions on which the king or chief enjoyed all these privileges are stated in a famous passage of the Iliad: "Why have the people of Lycia conferred on us the highest honours – pride of place and precedence in food and drink? They regard us as gods, and they have bestowed on us a témenos of rich ploughland. Therefore we must be foremost in the fray, that the people may say, These kings of ours, who feed on our fat herds and quaff our choicest wine, can fight." Royal honours were the gift of the people granted in recognition of military service.
After the democratic revolution, the use of the lot became an integral element in the administration of the Athenian state, and Greek writers are unanimous in regarding it as a distinctive characteristic of a democratic constitution. It may therefore be added to those other elements in ancient democracy which we have already traced back to a tribal origin. The truth is that ancient democracy was essentially the reassertion by the common people of their lost equality.
All the key-words we have been considering – moîra, klęros, láchos, dasmós – reappear in the terminology of the Greek laws of inheritance. The property that a man inherits from his father is his klęros, or in poetry his moîra. In earlier times, the father had divided his property among his sons before he died, and we learn from a passage in the Odyssey that this dasmós had been effected by lot. In Attic law, the property was inherited by the sons; in default of sons, by the daughters; in default of children, by the brothers; in default of any close relative, by the fellow clansmen. Similar rules of priority are prescribed in the Code of Gortyna and in Hebrew Law; and, as Morgan pointed out, we have only to reverse the order to see that they correspond to the gradual restriction of the right of inheritance from the circle of the clan to the individual family, thus marking the transition from collective to private ownership. Even in democratic Athens, this transition had not been completed. The right of testamentary disposition, which is one of the characteristics of mature law, was only recognised in default of legitimate issue. Thus the son’s claim on his father’s property was the last vestige of the time when all property had been
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owned collectively by the clan. And the transition had proceeded so surreptitiously that the regulations governing the disposal of private property were still expressed in terms that had their origin in primitive communism.
It may therefore be concluded that in its application to food, booty and land the idea of Moira reflects the collective distribution of wealth through three successive stages in the evolution of tribal society. Oldest of all was the distribution of food, which goes back to the hunting period. Next came the distribution of chattels and inanimate movables acquired by warfare, which was a development of hunting; and, last, the division of land for the purposes of agriculture.
The use of the lot was, of course, a guarantee of equality. The goods were divided as equally as possible, and then the portions were distributed by a process which, since it lay outside human control, was impartial. And for the same reason it was regarded as magical, as an appeal to the Moirai or spirits of the Lot, who determined each man’s portion. With the growth of private property, the use of the lot became increasingly restricted, and the popular conception of the Moirai was modified accordingly. They became the goddesses who determined for each man his lot in life.
Besides these divisions of wealth, the word moîra was also applied to divisions of function. Here again we find traces of a social order which had vanished from the real world reflected in the idea world of Olympus.
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