[57] Garcilasso de la Vega, First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, i. 308.
[58] Müller, History of the Doric Race, ii. 302. Hearn, The Aryan Household, p. 156 sq.
[59] Gaius, Institutiones, i. 56.
Prohibitions of intermarriage also very often relate to persons belonging to different classes or castes of the same community.[60] To mention a few instances. The wild tribes of Brazil consider alliances between slaves and freemen highly disgraceful.[61] In Tahiti, if a woman of condition chose an inferior person as her husband, the children he had by her were killed.[62] In the Malay Archipelago marriages between persons of different rank are, as a rule, disapproved of, and in some places prohibited.[63] In India intermarriage between different castes, though formerly permissible, is now altogether prohibited.[64] In Rome plebeians and patricians could not intermarry till the year 445 B.C., nor were marriages allowed between patricians and clients; and Cicero himself disapproved of intermarriages of ingenui and freedmen.[65] Among the Teutonic peoples in ancient times any freeman who married a slave became a slave himself.[66] As late as the thirteenth century a German woman who had intercourse with a serf lost her liberty;[67] and both in Germany and Scandinavia, when the nobility emerged as a distinct order from the class of freemen, marriages between persons of noble birth and persons who, although free, were not noble came to be considered misalliances.[68] Even in modern Europe there survive traces of the former class endogamy. According to German Civil Law, the marriage of a man belonging to the high nobility with a woman of inferior birth is still regarded as a disparagium, and the woman is not entitled to the rank of her husband, nor is the full right of inheritance possessed by her or her children.[69] Although in no way prevented by law, marriages out of the class are generally avoided by custom. As Sir Henry Maine observes, “the outer or endogamous limit, within which a man or woman must marry, has been mostly taken under the shelter of fashion or prejudice. It is but faintly traced in England, though not wholly obscured. It is (or perhaps was) rather more distinctly marked in the United States, through prejudices against the blending of white and coloured blood. But in Germany certain hereditary dignities are still forfeited by a marriage beyond the forbidden limits; and in France, in spite of all formal institutions, marriages between a person belonging to the noblesse and a person belonging to the bourgeoisie (distinguished roughly from one another by the particle ‘de’) are wonderfully rare, though they are not unknown.”[70]
[60] Westermarck, op. cit. p. 368 sqq.
[61] von Martius, Beiträge zur Ethnographie Amerika’s, i. 71. von Spix and von Martius, Travels in Brazil, ii. 74.
[62] Ellis, Polynesian Researches, i. 256. Cook, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, ii. 171 sq.
[63] Westermarck, op. cit. p. 371.
[64] Monier-Williams, Hinduism, p. 155.
[65] Mommsen, History of Rome, i. 371. Rossbach, op. cit. pp. 249, 456 sq.