Before the pecuniary classification of the Atticans introduced by Solon, the phratries and gentes, and the trittyes and naukraries, were the only recognized bonds among them, and the only basis of legal rights and obligations, over and above the natural family. The gens constituted a close incorporation, both as to property and as to persons. Until the time of Solon, no man had any power of testamentary disposition: if he died without children, his gennêtes succeeded to his property,[99] and so they continued to do even after Solon, if he died intestate. An orphan girl might be claimed in marriage of right by any member of the gens, the nearest agnates being preferred;[100] if she was poor, and he did not choose to marry her himself, the law of Solon compelled him to provide her with a dowry proportional to his enrolled scale of property, and to give her out in marriage to another; and the magnitude of the dowry required to be given,—large, even as fixed by Solon, and afterwards doubled,—seems a proof that the lawgiver intended indirectly to enforce actual marriage.[101] If a man was murdered, first his near relations, next his gennêtes and phrators, were both allowed and required to prosecute the crime at law;[102] his fellow demots, or inhabitants of the same deme, did not possess the like right of prosecuting. All that we hear of the most ancient Athenian laws is based upon the gentile and phratric divisions, which are treated throughout as extensions of the family. It is to be observed that this division is completely independent of any property qualification,—rich men as well as poor being comprehended in the same gens.[103] Moreover, the different gentes were very unequal in dignity, arising chiefly from the religious ceremonies of which each possessed the hereditary and exclusive administration, and which, being in some cases considered as of preëminent sanctity in reference to the whole city, were therefore nationalized. Thus the Eumolpidæ and Kêrȳkes, who supplied the Hierophant, and superintended the mysteries of the Eleusinian Dêmêtêr,—and the Butadæ, who furnished the priestess of Athênê Polias as well as the priest of Poseidôn Erechtheus in the acropolis,—seem to have been reverenced above all the other gentes.[104] When the name Butadæ was adopted in the Kleisthenean arrangement as the name of a deme, the holy gens so called adopted the distinctive denomination of Eteobutadæ, or “The True Butadæ.”[105] [99] Plutarch, Solon. 21. We find a common cemetery exclusively belonging to the gens, and tenaciously preserved (Demosth. cont. Eubulid. p. 1307; Cicero, Legg. ii, 26). [100] Demosth. cont. Makartat. p. 1068. See the singular additional proviso in Plutarch, Solon, c. 20. [101] See Meursius, Themis Attica, i, 13.