Analogies, borrowed from very different people and parts of the world, prove how readily these enlarged and factitious family unions assort with the ideas of an early stage of society. The Highland clan, the Irish sept,[93] the ancient legally constituted families in Friesland and Dithmarsch, the phis, or phara, among the Albanians, are examples of a similar practice:[94] and the adoption of prisoners by the North American Indians, as well as the universal prevalence and efficacy of the ceremony of adoption in the Grecian and Roman world, exhibit to us a solemn formality under certain circumstances, originating an union and affections similar to those of kindred. Of this same nature were the phratries and gentes at Athens, the curiæ and gentes at Rome, but they were peculiarly modified by the religious imagination of the ancient world, which always traced back the past time to gods and heroes: and religion thus supplied both the common genealogy as their basis, and the privileged communion of special sacred rites as means of commemoration and perpetuity. The gentes, both at Athens and in other parts of Greece, bore a patronymic name, the stamp of their believed common paternity: we find the Asklepiadæ in many parts of Greece,—the Aleuadæ in Thessaly,—the Midylidæ, Psalychidæ, Blepsiadæ, Euxenidæ, at Ægina,—the Branchidæ at Miletus,—the Nebridæ at Kôs,—the Iamidæ and Klytiadæ at Olympia,—the Akestoridæ at Argos,—the Kinyradæ in Cyprus,—the Penthilidæ at Mitylene,[95]—the Talthybiadæ at Sparta,—not less than the Kodridæ, Eumolpidæ, Phytalidæ, Lykomêdæ, Butadæ, Euneidæ, Hesychidæ, Brytiadæ, &c., in Attica.[96] To each of these corresponded a mythical ancestor more or less known, and passing for the first father as well as the eponymous hero of the gens,—Kodrus, Eumolpus, Butes, Phytalus, Hesychus, &c. [93] See Colonel Leake’s Travels in Northern Greece, ch. 2, p. 85 (the Greek word φράτριαι seems to be adopted in Albania); Boué, La Turquie en Europe, vol. ii, ch. 1, pp. 15-17; chap. 4, p. 530; Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland (vol. vi, pp. 1542-1543, of Tonson’s edition of Spenser’s Works, 1715); Cyprien Robert, Die Slaven in Turkey, b. 1, chs. 1 and 2. So, too, in the laws of king Alfred in England, on the subject of murder, the guild-brethren, or members of the same guild, are made to rank in the position of distant relatives, if there happen to be no blood relatives:—