Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The People 67
The boy was later reintroduced to his phratry at about the age of
sixteen. The ceremony of induction, which included a sacrifice, was
accompanied by a ritual cutting of the candidate’s hair, an action
that symbolically marked the end of his growing years. As before,
all the members of the phratry voted to acknowledge his legitimacy.
It is not known whether girls were also admitted to phratries, nor is
it known what procedure was used to determine whether a girl was
the legitimate offspring of Athenian parents.
The Deme
In the Classical Period, the whole of Attica, including the city
of Athens, was divided into 139 local districts known as demes,
many of which dated back to very early times. Some, in fact, may
even have predated the foundation of Athens as a polis. It was
Kleisthenes who converted the demes into political units, each with
its own local assembly, cults, dêmarchos or local mayor, and treasury.
Demes varied considerably in size and importance. Some were little
more than hamlets, whereas others, such as Acharnai, situated on
the northern borders of Attica, were very substantial settlements in
their own right. A few even had their own theater. Each functioned
as a kind of miniature polis. Every deme was required to keep a
register, in which it recorded the names of all its demesmen who
had reached the age of 18. This register served as an official record
of the citizen body. For all public purposes, an Athenian citizen was
required to identify himself by his demotic —that is, the adjective that
designated the deme in which he was registered. He retained his
demotic even if he went to live elsewhere in Attica. This meant that
each Athenian family was identified in perpetuity by the demotic
that it possessed at the time of Kleisthenes’ reforms.
The Tribe
All Greeks believed themselves to be descended from one of two
racial groups. Dorian communities, so named because they traced
their descent to the Dorian invasion, divided themselves into three
tribes, and Ionian communities, who took their name from their
mythical founder Ion, son of Apollo, into four. The Athenians
claimed to be Ionians, whereas the Spartans claimed to be Dorians.
To what extent these tribal divisions corresponded to a genuine
racial division is unknown, but it certainly helped to fuel tensions
between the two rival groups.