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(To the clerk.) Now call, please, the clansmen and thereafter the members of the gens.In the early period, before the reforms of Cleisthenes (509 B.C.), the four tribes into which the Athenians were at that time divided contained each three phratriae, or clans, and these in turn were divided into thirty γένη. Even after Cleisthenes the phratriae and γένη retained a position of religious, if no longer political, significance. To render γένος in this sense we have no better word than the Latin gens.
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The Witnesses
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Now take the depositions of the demesmen and the members of the gens in regard to the clansmen, to show that they elected me president of the clan.
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The Depositions
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You have heard, then, the testimony given by my relatives and fellow-clansmen and by the members of the deme and of the gens, who are the proper persons to be called upon to testify. And from this you may learn whether a man who has this support is a citizen or an alien. If we were seeking protection in the testimony of one or two people only, we might be open to the suspicion that we had suborned them; but if it appears that my father in his lifetime and I myself at present have been put to the test before all the groups to which each one of you belongs (I mean those of clan, of kindred, of the deme, and of the gens), how can it be, how can it possibly be, that all these persons have been suborned to appear, they not being in truth relatives of mine?
