Roman Public Life

by A. H. J. Greenidge

A faint trace of hereditary clientship, based on a purely moral sanction, and accompanied perhaps by the performance of some of the duties of the old relationship, still exists in the second century. The family of Marius, we are told, had been clients of the plebeian Herennii, and some of the rights of the relationship were held to extend to him. But we are also told that at this period a principle was recognised that this bond was for ever broken by the client’s attainment of curule office,[31] that is, by the ennoblement of him and his family.

§ 3. Roman Family Organisation—The Gens, the Familia, the Bondsman and the Slave—The Disposition of Property—The Conception of “Caput”

The clan (gens) was an aggregate of individuals supposed to be sprung from a common source, a social union, with common rights in private law, which had as its theoretical basis the notion of descent from a single ancestor. According to the juristic theory of the clan, all its individual members would, if their descent could be traced through every degree, have sprung from two individuals who were within the power of this ultimate ancestor, a sign of this original potestas being the common gentile name.[32]

The members of a clan are to one another either agnati or gentiles. In many cases the difference of nomenclature was based merely on the degree of certainty in the relationship. They were agnati when the common descent could be traced through all its stages; they were gentiles when the common descent was only an imagined fact, based on the possession of a common name. As a rule agnati are also gentiles; but there might be groups of agnates who could never be gentiles—groups, that is, of proved relationship through the male line, who could not, for reasons which we shall soon specify, form a gens.

If we believe that the Roman Patriciate represented those who alone possessed the legal status of heads of families (patres)[33]—since, the familia being the unit of the clan, the rights of a clan-member (gentilis) imply the position of a paterfamilias—it follows that the Roman gentes were, as they are represented by tradition, originally exclusively patrician, and that the terms gentilis, gentilitas implied a perfect equality of status among the only true members of the state.

The words became restricted to a certain section of the community in consequence of the evolution of plebeian rights, i.e. in consequence of the Plebeians becoming in strict law patres familias. The logical consequence of this should have been, where groups of such families bore a common name and were believed to have a common descent, that these groups should form gentes. But history is illogical, and this conclusion was not reached.

No such group could possibly form a gens of its own, if it could be regarded as having been originally in dependence on a patrician clan. Although in course of time legally independent and freed from all trammels of clientship, it was yet disqualified from clan-brotherhood by this original connexion; it remained an offshoot (stirps), a mere dependent branch, and could never be a self-existent gens. This disqualification is exhibited in the definition of gentilitas given by the jurist Scaevola (consul 133 B.C.), which gives as two of its conditions free birth in the second degree, and the absence of servile blood in one’s ultimate ancestry.[34] This definition excludes from membership of a gens all those Plebeians who had sprung originally from emancipated slaves. No one who could be proved to have the taint of servile blood could ever be a gentilis. But there is every reason to believe that servitus was interpreted in a further sense, that clientship was regarded as a quasi-servile position, and debarred a group of families, whose ancestor could be proved to be a client, for ever from being a clan.

As a rule it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to furnish this proof; but there was one legal sign of it—the bearing by a plebeian stirps of the same name as a patrician clan. The presumption of the law, in the case of the coexistence of a plebeian group of families with a patrician group of the same name, was apparently that the former had once been clients of the latter, and could never, therefore, form a gens of their own.[35]

But, if there were plebeian families that had no origin in clientship, there was nothing to prevent these from being gentes. It is true that Patricians sometimes made the claim that all the plebeian families had originated from clientship.[36] But this is, as we saw,[37] probably not true of the origin of many of the plebeian families, and there is abundant evidence that the theory was not recognised by law. We know, for instance, that gentile inheritances were shared by the plebeian Minucii, and gentile sepulchres by the plebeian Popilii.[38]

The foregoing description shows that the gens rests on a natural basis, that it professedly represents the widest limits of blood-relationship; hence it would seem to follow that it could not be artificially created or its members redistributed; that the numbers of the clans could not be regulated numerically, except conceivably by the addition to the existing number of a precise number of added clans—a most improbable procedure; and that, as being a natural and not an artificial creation, it was a union which was not likely to be of primary importance politically, and the rights of whose members were in all probability those of private rather than of public law. These expectations are verified, but the attempts to point out certain purely political characteristics of these associations deserve examination.[39]