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This notion of a divine agency, suggesting the Themistes, and itself impersonated in Themis, must be kept apart from other primitive beliefs with which a superficial inquirer might confound it. The conception of the Deity dictating an entire code or body of law, as in the case of the Hindoo laws of Menu, seems to belong to a range of ideas more recent and more advanced.
"They have neither assemblies for consultation nor THEMISTES, but everyone exercises jurisdiction over his wives and his children, and they pay no regard to one another." And this description of the beginnings of history is confirmed by what may be called the last lesson of prehistoric ethnology.
But, even after the State has been organised, the laws have still an extremely limited application. Whether they retain their primitive character as Themistes, or whether they advance to the condition of Customs or Codified Texts, they are binding not on individuals, but on Families.
The earliest notions connected with the conception, now so fully developed, of a law or rule of life, are those contained in the Homeric words "Themis" and "Themistes."
The Civil laws of States first make their appearance as the Themistes of a patriarchal sovereign, and we can now see that these Themistes are probably only a developed form of the irresponsible commands which, in a still earlier condition of the race, the head of each isolated household may have addressed to his wives, his children, and his slaves.
"'Toîsin d' out' agorai boulêphóroi oute thémistes, themisteúei dè hékastos paídôn ed alóchôn, out' allélôn alégousin."
However that may be, the verses condense in themselves the sum of the hints which are given us by legal antiquities. Men are first seen distributed in perfectly insulated groups, held together by obedience to the parent. Law is the parent's word, but it is not yet in the condition of those themistes which were analysed in the first chapter of this work.
I may add that an Englishman should be better able than a foreigner to appreciate the historical fact that the "Themistes" preceded any conception of law, because, amid the many inconsistent theories which prevail concerning the character of English jurisprudence, the most popular, or at all events the one which most affects practice, is certainly a theory which assumes that adjudged cases and precedents exist antecedently to rules, principles, and distinctions.
The "Themistes" have too, it should be remarked, the characteristic which, in the view of Bentham and Austin, distinguishes single or mere commands from laws.
"Themis" and "Themistes" are much less remotely linked with that persuasion which clung so long and so tenaciously to the human mind, of a divine influence underlying and supporting every relation of life, every social institution. In early law, and amid the rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this belief meet us on all sides.
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