Our indications are slight and dim; but the poet of the _Odyssey_ seems to be aware that an ὀμφή or oracular deliverance might be used to dethrone a royal dynasty.[137.1] The dedication of a tithe of the captives taken in war to Apollo was a custom connected with the earliest settlements and migration, for Apollo disposed of his captives by colonising them on some vacant land. The practice appears to have been a very early one, for this is the legend of the pre-Dorian settlement of the Dryopes in the Peloponnese;[137.2] also there is evidence for the institution in pre-historic Greece of that religious system of colonisation which the Latins called the Ver Sacrum.[137.3] In fact, the religion of Apollo, especially the common worship of Apollo Πυθαεύς, served more than any other cult as a bond of connection between the independent communities already--I believe--in pre-Homeric days; and to this earliest epoch may belong that interesting ritual of the Hyperborean offerings brought by sacrosanct Hellenic pilgrims down from the north along the primeval routes of the Aryan immigration.[137.4] {138} The narrower systems of family and phratry tell the same story of the constructive power of religion. The primitive grouping into septs and phratries and tribal subdivisions, of which the traces are not yet discovered in the civilisation of Babylon, has left its deep imprint on historic Greek society; and religion is intimately interwoven with the domestic and phratric cults, not only in that these are much concerned with worship of heroes and ancestors, but that the high divinities also, Zeus Φράτριος, Athena Φρατρία and Ἀπατουρία, take these institutions under their charge. Hence all adoptions and admissions of new members into the phratry had to be performed at the altar. The marriage ceremony was a religious ritual--in Attica, at least, a religious communion like the Roman Confarreatio,[138.1] and the mutual duties of parents and children, kinsmen and tribesmen, were consecrated by the early ideas concerning the divine nature.[138.2] A festival such as the Ἀπατούρια, instituted to cement a social organisation, and to all appearances of great antiquity, has nothing like it in the Babylonian festival calendar, so far as I am aware; and again, to the many political and social titles of the Hellenic divinities such as Πολιεύς, Ἀγοραῖος, Πάνδημος, Βουλαῖος, it would be hard to find parallels in the cult-terminology of Babylon.