(M106) Amongst the Gods, the three brothers Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, sons of Rhea, shared their inheritance from their father Kronos. They divided everything in three, shaking lots thereover (παλλομένων). Each took equal share of honour (ἔμμορε τιμῆς), but earth and Olympos were common (ξυνή) to all.(209) But Zeus was the first-born and “knew more things”—Ἀλλὰ Ζεὺς πρότερος γεγόνει καὶ πμείονα ᾒδη(210)—and Poseidon therefore avoided open strife with him, however unwillingly. Though Zeus be the stronger, grumbles the Sea-god, let him keep to his third share and not interfere with his brothers’ pleasure on their common ground, the earth. Let him threaten his sons and daughters who needs _must_ listen to him (ἀκούσονται καὶ ἀνάγκῃ). Yet because the Erinnyes ever take the side of the eldest born—ὡς πρεσβυτέροισιν Ἐριννύες αἰὲν ἕπονται—it were good counsel to knock under, even though the division was made in perfect equality (ἰσόμορον καὶ ὁμῇ πεπρωμένον αἴσῃ).(211) (M107) This passage contrasts the recognised autocracy of the head of the family over his own household with the courteous deference of the younger brothers towards the eldest; and it is evidence, so far as it goes, that the eldest brother did not succeed to his father’s power over his grown-up brothers, but owed what influence he did not obtain from the superior advantages of his age and experience, to a superstitious feeling that something was due to him in his position of head of the eldest branch of the family. In the _Odyssey_,(212) Zeus gives Poseidon the title of “eldest and best”—πρεσβύτατον καὶ ἄριστον—and elsewhere Hera lays claim to the same birthright.(213) The power of the head of a household must have been something much more real. Telemachos declares that he is willing that some other _basileus_ in Ithaka should take the kingship, but he will be master over his own house—ἄναξ οὄκοιο ἡμετέροιο—“and over the slaves that the divine Odysseus won for me.”(214) In the Homeric Hymn to _Hestia_, that deity receives the title of honour of firstborn: the poet, by a fanciful blending of ideas, implying that the honour paid to the sacred hearth by the eldest of the family, fell to her share as the eldest born of the children of Kronos.(215) Aristotle says that every household is ruled (βασιλεύεται) by its oldest member,(216) and gives this prerogative of the household-_basileus_ as the type and origin of the kingship in the village and the State. Reference has already been made, in the section on the limitations of the ἀγχιστεία, to the passage in the Gortyn law, viz.— “The father shall have power over the children and the property to divide it amongst them.... As long as they (the parents) are alive there is no necessity for division.”(217)