with ordinary classical literature will remember the _Sacra Gentilicia_ which exercised so important an influence on the early Roman law of adoption and of wills. And to this hour the Hindoo Customary Law, in which some of the most curious features of primitive society are stereotyped, makes almost all the rights of persons and all the rules of succession hinge on the due solemnisation of fixed ceremonies at the dead man's funeral, that is, at every point where a breach occurs in the continuity of the family." Thus every king, as history begins, appears in a position which recalls the memory of Adam or of Noah, as the divinely appointed judge, whose office springs out of his fathership. The original consecration, which rested on the government of the race when it begun, is seen not yet to have parted from its scattered members in their tribal or national insulation.[13] It is observed of Homeric Greece that "the people in its orderly arrangement of family or clans, or tribal relationships coming down from the patriarchal form of life, derives its unity from its king, whose power as little springs from the people as that of the father from his children." Thus he possesses this power not in virtue of compact or choice, but simply from Zeus. Οὐ μέν πως πάντες βασιλεύσομεν ἐνθάδ' Ἀχαιοί. οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίν· εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω, εἷς βασιλεὺς, ᾧ δῶκε Κρόνου παῖς ἀγκυλομήτεω σκῆπτροντ' ἠδὲ θέμιστας, ἵνα σφίσιν ἐμβασιλέυῃ. —Iliad, 2. 203. This conception shows itself not merely on occasion in the poet, as perhaps in the well-known epithets, Jove-born, Jove-nurtured, friend of Jove, or in the genealogies which connect with the gods the princely races by ties of blood, but he has a distinct theory on the subject variously expressed. ἐπεὶ οὔποθ' ὁμοίης ἔμμορε πμῆς σκηπτοῦχος βασιλὲυς, ᾧ τε Ζεὺς κῦδος ἔδωκε. Agamemnon's sceptre, the symbol of his rule over the Peloponnesus, is referred to the immediate gift of Jupiter.