[Sidenote: Female kinship among the Athenians, the Epizephyrian Locrians, the Cantabrians, and the Germans.] In Attica tradition ran that of old the women were the common property of the men, who coupled with them like beasts, so that while every one knew his mother, nobody knew who his father was. This system of sexual communism was abolished by Cecrops, the first King of Athens, who introduced individual marriage in its place.[923] Little weight could be attached to this tradition, if it were not supported to a certain extent by the Attic usage which always allowed a man to marry his half-sister by the same father but not his half-sister by the same mother.[924] Such a rule seems clearly to be a relic of a time when kinship was counted only through women. Again, the Epizephyrian Locrians in Italy traced all ancestral distinction in the female, not the male line. Among them the nobles were the members of the hundred houses from whom were chosen by lot the maidens to be sent to Troy.[925] For in order, it is said, to expiate the sacrilege committed by the Locrian Ajax when he violated Cassandra in the sanctuary of Athena at Troy, the cities of Locris used annually to send to the Trojan goddess two maidens, whom the Trojans slew, and, burning their bodies on the wood of certain trees which bore no fruit, threw the ashes into the sea. If the maidens contrived to escape they took refuge in the sanctuary of Athena, which they thenceforth swept and washed, never quitting it except at night, and always going barefoot, shorn, and clad in a single garment. The custom is said to have been observed for a thousand years down to the fourth century before our era.[926] Among the Locrians, as elsewhere, the system of female kinship would seem to have gone hand in hand with dissolute morals; for there is reason to think that of old the Locrians, like the Lydians and Armenians, had been wont to prostitute their daughters before marriage, though in later times the custom fell into abeyance.[927] The Cantabrians of Spain seem also to have had mother-kin; for among them it was the daughters who inherited property and who portioned out their brothers in marriage.[928] Again, the ancient Germans deemed the tie between a man and his sister’s children as close as that between a father and his children; indeed some regarded the bond as even closer and more sacred, and therefore in exacting hostages they chose the children of a man’s sister rather than his own children, believing that this gave them a firmer hold on the family.[929] The superiority thus assigned to the maternal uncle over the father is an infallible mark of mother-kin, either present or past, as may be observed, for instance, in very many African tribes to this day, among whom both property and political power pass, not from father to son, but from the maternal uncle to his nephews.[930] Similarly, in Melanesia the close relation of the mother’s brother to his nephew is