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Greek Clubs

The most comprehensive statement we possess as to the various kinds of clubs which might exist in a single Greek state appears in a law of Solon quoted incidentally in the Digest of Justinian I (47. more...

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22), which guaranteed the administrative independence of these associations provided they kept within the bounds of the law. Those mentioned (apart from demes and phratries, which were not clubs as here understood) include associations for religious purposes, for burial, for trade, for privateering, and for the enjoyment of common meals. Of these, the religious clubs had by far the most important. We have a great deal of information about them, chiefly from inscriptions; and we may take them as covering those for burial purposes and for common meals, for no doubt can exist that all such unions had originally a religious object of some kind. But we have to add to Solon's list the political phratries which we meet with in Athenian history, which do not seem to have always had a religious object, whatever their origin may have been. Let us clear the ground by considering these first.

In the period between the end of the Persian Wars in 448 BC and the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC we hear of hetairies within the two political parties, oligarchic and democratic; Themistocles allegedly (Plut. Anistides, 2) belonged to one, Pericles' supporters seem to have been thus organized (Plut. Per. 7 and 13), and Cimon had a hundred hetairoi devoted to him (Plut. Cim. 17). These associations served, like the collegia sodalicia at Rome (see below), for securing certain results at elections and in the law-courts (Thuc. viii. 54), and were not regarded as harmful or illegal. But the bitterness of party struggles in Greece during the Peloponnesian War changed them in many states into political engines dangerous to local constitutions, and especially to democratic institutions; Aristotle mentions (Politics, p. 1310 a) a secret oath taken by the members of oligarchic clubs, containing the promise, \"I will be an enemy to the people, and will devise all the harm I can against them.\" At Athens in 413 BC the conspiracy against the democracy was engineered by means of these clubs, which existed not only there but in the other cities of the Delian League. (Thuc. viii. 48 and 54), and had now become secret conspiracies (crvpwi.zoo-icu) of a wholly unconstitutional kind. On this subject see Grote, Hist. of Greece, v. 360; AHJ Greenidge, Handbook of Greek Constitutional History, 208 foll.

Passing over the clubs for trade or plunder mentioned in Solon's law, of which we have no detailed knowledge, we come to the religious associations. These had several names, especially thiasi, eranoi and orgeones, and it is not possible to distinguish these from each other in historical times, though they may have had different origins. They had the common object of sacrifice to a particular deity; the thiasi and orgeones seem connected more especially with foreign deities whose rites were of an orgiastic character. Paul Foucart has written an excellent treatise on the organization of these societies (Les Associations religieuses chez les Grecs, Paris, 1873), which provides many of the following particulars. For the greater part of them the evidence consists of inscriptions from various parts of Greece, many of which Foucart published for the first time at the end of his book.