6. The name which the _houses_ or γένεα bore at Sparta, and the number of them which was contained in an oba, may be perhaps ascertained from a passage of Herodotus,(325) in which he mentions the Enomoties, Triacades, and Syssitia, as military institutions established by Lycurgus. Other inferences from this passage we shall not anticipate, remarking only that the Syssitia appear to have answered to the obæ, from which it is probable that the Triacades were contained in these latter divisions. Now in Attica, at an early period, a triacas was the thirtieth part of a phratria, and contained thirty men, the same number as a γένος.(326) Following then the argument from analogy (by which we are so often surprised and guided in our inquiries into the early political institutions), triacas was in Sparta also the name of a house, which was so called, either as being the thirtieth part of an oba, or, as appears to me more probable, because it contained thirty houses. The relation of the triacas to the enomoty,—a small division of warriors, which originally contained twenty-four men,—is quite uncertain. The basis of the whole calculation, and in this case a sufficiently fixed standard, was found in Sparta in the families (οἶκοι) connected with the landed estates; indifferently whether these contained several citizens, or whether they had become extinct and been united with other families.(327) 7. We now proceed to mention another division of the citizens of Sparta, which concerns the difference of rank. In a certain sense indeed all Dorians were equal in rights and dignity; but there were yet manifold gradations, which, when once formed, were retained by the aristocratic feelings of the people. In the first place, there was the dignity of the Heraclide families, which had a precedence throughout the whole nation;(328) and, connected with this, a certain pre-eminence of the Hyllean tribe; which is also expressed in Pindar. Then again, in the times of the Peloponnesian war, “men of the first rank” are often mentioned in Sparta, who, without being magistrates, had a considerable influence upon the government.(329)