VI. The Greco-Roman Family.
The chief object of this book being to study the evolution of the family and of marriage, I need not describe in detail the Greco-Roman family, which has, besides, served as a theme for so many writers. It certainly appears, contrary to the opinion of the Romans themselves, to have emerged tardily enough from the primitive clan or gens. This Roman gens was composed, really or fictitiously, of consanguine individuals, living under an elected chief, and having the same name. The union of several gentes formed the curia or the phratry. Grouped together, the phratries or curiæ constituted tribus. And lastly, the assembly of the tribus formed the nation: Rome or Athens.[1087] It is therefore the clan, or gens, and not the family, which has been at Rome, and at Athens the cellule, according to the fashionable expression, of ancient society.
At the dawn of history, these clans were already agnatic; they had adopted paternal filiation, and each of them claimed a common masculine ancestor; but the right of the gens to the heritage, and in certain cases the possession of an ager publicus, still proved the antique community of property; and a number of indications and traditions bore witness in favour of the existence of a prehistoric phase of the maternal family, preceding agnation. Bachofen goes much further, and not without a show of reason. He insists, for example, that kinship in the Latin clan may at first have been confused. He alleges, on this point, that in the time of Numa the word parricide signified, not the murder of a father, but that of a free man of some sort; that in the family tribunal the cognates of the wife figured, and that the cognates wore mourning for each other; that the cognates of the wife, and those of the husband of a wife, had over her the jus osculi, or the right of embracing her, etc.; lastly, that the Etruscan Servius, the founder of plebeian liberty, was conceived, says the legend, during a great annual festival, when the people reverted to primitive sexual disorder.[1088]
The Greek γένος resembled the Roman gens. Its members had a common sepulture, common property, the mutual obligation of the vendetta, and an archon.[1089]
In the protohistoric clans of Greece maternal filiation was first of all established. The Cretans said motherland (μητρίς), and not fatherland (πατρίς). In primitive Athens the women had the right of voting, and their children bore their name—privileges which were taken from them, says the legend, to appease the wrath of Neptune, after an inundation.[1090] Tradition also relates that at Athens, until the time of Cecrops, children bore the name of their mother.[1091]
Among the Lycians, says Herodotus, the matriarchate endured a long time, and the children followed the status of their mother. Uterine brothers were carefully distinguished from german brothers for a long period in Greece; the former are called ὁμογάστριοι in Homer, and the latter ὄπατροι; and uterine fraternity was regarded as much more close. Lycaon, pleading with Achilles, says, in order to appease him, that he is not the uterine brother of Hector.[1092] At Athens and Sparta a man could marry his father’s sister, but not his mother’s sister.[1093] In Etruria the funeral inscriptions in the Latin language make much more frequent mention of the maternal than the paternal descent. Sometimes they mention only the name of a child and that of his mother (Lars Caius, son of Caulia, etc.); sometimes they indicate the father’s name by simple initials, whilst that of the mother is written in full.[1094]
As in so many other countries, the paternal family succeeded the maternal family in the ancient world, but not without difficulty. To begin with, the fact of marriage did not suffice alone to establish paternal filiation; the declaration of the father was necessary, as well in Greece as in Rome. In his Oresteia, Æschylus puts in opposition before Minerva the old maternal right and the new paternal right. The chorus of the Eumenides, representing the people, defends the ancient customs; Apollo pleads for the innovators, and ends by declaring, in a fit of patriarchal delirium, that the child is not of the blood of the mother. “It is not the mother who begets what is called her child; she is only the nurse of the germ poured into her womb; he who begets is the father. The woman receives the germ merely as guardian, and when it pleases the gods, she preserves it.” The Orestes of Euripides takes up the same theory when he says to Tyndarus—“My father has begotten me, and thy daughter has given birth to me, as the earth receives the seed that another confides to it; without a father, there could be no child.” These patriarchal theories naturally consecrated the slavery of woman. The laws of Solon still recognised the right of women to inherit, in default of paternal relations of the male sex, to the fourth degree, but in the time of Isæus the law refused to the mother any place among the heirs of her son.[1095]
In fact, throughout the historic period the Greco-Roman world is patriarchal. In Greece and at Rome woman is despised, subjected, and possessed like a thing; while the power of the father of the family is enormous. It is especially so at Rome, where, nevertheless, the family is not yet strictly consanguineous, for it includes the wife, children, and slaves, and where agnation has for its basis the patria potestas. “All those are agnates who are under the same paternal power, or who have been, or who could be, if their ancestor had lived long enough to exercise his empire.... Wherever the paternal power begins, there also begins kinship. Adoptive children are relations.... A son emancipated by his father loses his rights of agnation.”[1096] At the commencement of Roman history, we see, therefore, clans, or gentes, composed of families, of whom some are patrician—that is, able to indicate their agnatic lineage—and the others plebeian. The “justæ nuptiæ” are for the former; the latter unite without ceremony, more ferarum. The family is possessed by the pater familias; he is the king and priest of it, and becomes one of its gods when his shade goes to dwell among the manes. In this last case, the family simply changes masters; “the nearest agnate takes the family,” says the law of the Twelve Tables. Something very similar existed in Greece, for we have seen that at Athens the right of marrying their sisters, left to brothers who were heirs, was not even exhausted by a first marriage.[1097] The institution of individual, or rather familial property, that of masculine filiation, and of patriarchal monogamy, dismembered the gens, which at length became merely nominal. The law of the Twelve Tables, however, still decides that the succession shall be vacant if, at the death of the father, the nearest agnate refuses to “take the family,” and in default of an agnate the gentiles shall take the succession. The nominal gens persisted for a long time in the ancient world; thus every Roman patrician had three names—that of his gens, that of his family, and his personal name.[1098] At Athens, in the time of Solon, the gens still inherited when a man died without children.
The long duration of Greco-Roman society enables us to follow the whole evolution of the family in it. It would be going beyond the facts to affirm the existence of a still confused consanguinity in the ancient gens; but it seems very probable that this gens first adopted the maternal and then the paternal family, which last became somewhat modified, in the sense of the extension of feminine rights. This extension was slow, and it was not till the time of Justinian that equal shares were given to sons and daughters in succession, or even that widows were entrusted with the care of their children.