In those cities, indeed, which date from very early times, there was no occasion for a division. We do not find it in Athens. Why? Because we know that Attica was at first occupied by some hundreds of independent families, γένη; and that these families afterwards were grouped into phratries, and finally into a city. There is no partition here, for each family keeps the land which has belonged to it for centuries. But when it is a case of a colony, a body of people who emigrate and take possession of fresh territory, a division is quite needful. Only this division does not, as M. Viollet would suppose, come at the end of a period of non-division; it is the first step in the establishment of the colony. The practice is one of the most re-markable, and one of the best authenticated of those early times. It proves that the Greek city never cultivated its land in common; that it had no wish for a common ownership of the soil; that the very idea of such a system was unknown to it. If M. Viollet had studied the κληρουχία in all the authorities which refer to it, he would not have supposed for a moment that it could be a proof of community in land, and he would have taken care not to bring it forward in support of a theory of which it is in reality the refutation. 10. I shall not dwell long upon another argument of M. Viollet’s (p. 481). I have elsewhere pointed out that in the most ancient Greek law, as well as in early Hindoo law and with many other peoples, the land originally attached to a family was so closely bound up with it that it could neither be sold, nor transferred to another family, either by bequest or as dower.[221] This rule is clearly explained in many Greek writings; it is the result of the conception of property not as an individual right, but as a family right. A father was compelled to leave it to his sons. Even if there were no son, he could not bequeath or sell it; it must pass to the nearest relation. M. Viollet imagines that there is another explanation. The prohibition of sale and bequest results, according to him, from the circumstance that land was originally common to all. I do not follow the argument. If the soil was originally the common property of the people, and the people maintained a kind of eminent domain over it (which is M. Viollet’s theory), one cannot see why the law should have forbidden the sale of land to another member of the same people; one cannot see why the law should have prohibited any family from parting with it, even in favour of the people itself. The old rule, or rather the ancient custom which forbids a family to separate itself from its land, cannot be a proof of community in land. It only proves the ownership of property by the family. As Plato says, in a passage where he expresses not his own private utopias but the ideas of the men of his time: “You cannot leave your property to whomsoever you please, because your property belongs