Laudator Temporis Acti

Homer, Odyssey I. Edited with an Introduction, Translation, Commentary, and Glossary by Simon Pulleyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 224-225 (on line 407):

γαίης...γενεὴ...πατρὶς ἄρουρα Just as πόθεν (170 n.) refers to familial rather than geographical origins, so these words probably have less to do with place than with kinship. Old Iranian evidence suggests that Indo-European thought recognized four levels of belonging (Benveniste 1969: 1.293-319): nmāna- ('house'), vīs ('clan'), zantu ('tribe'), and dahyu ('country', 'nation'). Whilst γενεή is cognate with Avestan zantu, there are no other etymological correspondences here. We are probably dealing with lexical replacement: γαῖα (not γαίη in the nom., Chantraine 1958: 198) corresponds with dahyu and πατρὶς ἄρουρα with nmāna- (by reference to the ancestral turf). The Homeric terms are arranged in descending order of magnitude and there are three rather than four. Nevertheless, they likely reflect a traditional PIE constellation of ideas.

Émile Benveniste, Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, tr. Elizabeth Palmer (Chicago: HAU Books, 2016), pp. 240-241 (my corrections in square brackets were made after consultation of the original French):

The social organization proper rests on a quite different classification: society is considered not in the light of the nature and hierarchy of its classes, but as what may be called its national extension, a man being regarded as belonging to circles of increasing magnitude. This structure is clearest in ancient Iran. It comprises four concentric circles, four social and territorial divisions which, proceeding from the smallest unit, increase in size until they comprise the whole of the community. The terms which designate them are:

1. dam-, dǝmāna-, nmāna- (equivalent forms which are distributed according to the date of the texts), “family” and “house.” The second form, dǝmāna-, is derived from the first, dam-, by suffixation, and dǝmāna- evolved by sound change to nmāna-.

2. Above this, vīs ‘clan’, a group of several families.

3. Above this, zantu ‘tribe’, properly “the whole of those of the same birth.”

4. Finally, dahyu, which may be rendered as “country.”

Alongside each of these Iranian terms we can put the Sanskrit correspondent: dam ‘house’ (Av. dam-); viś- ‘community, people’ (Av. vīs-); jantu- ‘creature’ (Av. zantu-). To the fourth term, Avestan dahyu- ‘country’, corresponds Vedic dasyu which, in circumstances which we shall try to determine, has taken on the sense of “barbarian enemy population.” But in India we do not find an organic connection between these four terms. They no longer form a whole. The ancient schema is already altered. Iranian society has been more conservative.

The same observation is true of the classical languages. We find words that are the congeners of the first three terms: Gr. démos (δέμος) [sic, read dómos (δόμος)], Lat. domus; Gr. woîkos (wοῖĸoς); Lat. metis [sic, read vīcus]; and Gr. génos (γένος) (a neuter in -s), Lat. gens (a feminine in -ti, hence Lat. *genti- as compared with *gentu-, the prototype of the Iranian term). But in the classical world they do not constitute a series any more than they do in India. The correspondence is simply etymological. In Greek and Latin, these inherited words are not arranged as they are in Iranian. There is not even parallelism between Latin and Greek. Far from constituting two distinct social units, Gr. dómos and (w)oîkos signify practically the same thing, “house.” Date, dialect and style govern the choice of one or the other. Nor does Latin present the Iranian structure: vīcus is not the superior grade to domus; it differs from vīs in Iranian and also from (w)oîkos in Greek.

Furthermore, in Greece and Rome, new words unknown to Indo-Iranian joined this ancient series; e.g. Gr. phulḗ (φυλή) and Lat. tribus.