In consonance with the conception of the State as an extended family, we find certain ancient family-cults taken over into the religion of the Polis. As the private family was knit together by the worship of the Hearth in the hall and of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, ‘the God of the Garth,’ in the courtyard of the house, so the City has its common Hestia or Holy Hearth, upon which often a perpetual fire was maintained in its ‘Prytaneion’ or Common Hall; and the Cult of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος was established in ancient days on the Akropolis of Athens. The organisation of the ‘phratries’ was consecrated to the high deities, Zeus Athena and--among some Ionic communities--to Aphrodite; and the decisions of the ‘phrateres’ or ‘Brothers’ on questions of adoption and legitimacy of citizens were delivered from the altar of Zeus Phratrios; while the union of the local districts or ‘demes’ was sanctified by the cult of Zeus or {67} Aphrodite Pandemos, the God or Goddess of ‘all the demes.’ Also, the Polis organised and maintained the kindred-festivals of commemoration proper to the family or gens or phratria, the All-Souls celebration of the dead which was held at the end of the Anthesteria; the γενέσια, the funeral feasts of the γένη; the ‘Apatouria,’ the joint festival of the phratries; while the great achievement of the consolidation of the scattered groups into the single city was celebrated at Athens by the festival of the Συνοικέσια, the ‘Union of all the Houses,’ and the Panathenaia, the all-Attic feast of Athena. The picture that these facts present of a State-religion based on the idea of the family and of kinship is mainly drawn from Athens, of which the religious record is always the richest; but it reflects undoubtedly the system of the other Hellenic states as well. Many of their records attest the belief that some one of the high divinities was the ancestor or ancestress of the whole people, and this ancestry was understood in the physical and literal sense. Thus Apollo ‘Patroös’ was the divine ancestor, being the father of Ion, of the Ionic population of Attica, and even the non-Ionic stock of that community, desired for political purposes to affiliate themselves to this God.[67.1] In the same sense he was called Γενέτωρ, ‘the Father’ in Delos.[67.2] Zeus was the father of Arkas, the eponymous hero of the Arcadians, and was worshipped as Πατρῶος at Tegea[67.3]; Hermes also was ancestral God of part of {68} the Arcadian land and identified with the ancestor Aipytos.[68.1] These religious fictions came to exert an important influence on morality and also to develop a certain spiritual significance which will be considered later.