Ancient society

by Lewis Henry Morgan

When the Latins, and their congeners the Sabellians, the Oscans and the Umbrians, entered the Italian peninsula probably as one people, they were in possession of domestic animals, and probably cultivated cereals and plants.[282] At the least they were well advanced in the Middle Status of barbarism; and when they first came under historical notice they were in the Upper Status, and near the threshold of civilization.

The traditionary history of the Latin tribes, prior to the time of Romulus, is much more scanty and imperfect than that of the Grecian, whose earlier relative literary culture and stronger literary proclivities enabled them to preserve a larger proportion of their traditionary accounts. Concerning their anterior experience, tradition did not reach beyond their previous life on the Alban hills, and the ranges of the Appenines eastward from the site of Rome. For tribes so far advanced in the arts of life it would have required a long occupation of Italy to efface all knowledge of the country from which they came. In the time of Romulus[283] they had already fallen by segmentation into thirty independent tribes, still united in a loose confederacy for mutual protection. They also occupied contiguous territorial areas. The Sabellians, Oscans, and Umbrians were in the same general condition; their respective tribes were in the same relations; and their territorial circumscriptions, as might have been expected, were founded upon dialect. All alike, including their northern neighbors the Etruscans, were organized in gentes, with institutions similar to those of the Grecian tribes. Such was their general condition when they first emerged from behind the dark curtain of their previous obscurity, and the light of history fell upon them.

Roman history has touched but slightly the particulars of a vast experience anterior to the founding of Rome (about 753 B. C.). The Italian tribes had then become numerous and populous; they had become strictly agricultural in their habits, possessed flocks and herds of domestic animals, and had made great progress in the arts of life. They had also attained the monogamian family. All this is shown by their condition when first made known to us; but the particulars of their progress from a lower to a higher state had, in the main, fallen out of knowledge. They were backward in the growth of the idea of government; since the confederacy of tribes was still the full extent of their advancement. Although the thirty tribes were confederated, it was in the nature of a league for mutual defense, and neither sufficiently close or intimate to tend to a nationality.

The Etruscan tribes were confederated; and the same was probably true of the Sabellian, Oscan and Umbrian tribes. While the Latin tribes possessed numerous fortified towns and country strongholds, they were spread over the surface of the country for agricultural pursuits, and for the maintenance of their flocks and herds. Concentration and coalescence had not occurred to any marked extent until the great movement ascribed to Romulus which resulted in the foundation of Rome. These loosely united Latin tribes furnished the principal materials from which the new city was to draw its strength. The accounts of these tribes from the time of the supremacy of the chiefs of Alba down to the time of Servius Tullius, were made up to a great extent of fables and traditions; but certain facts remained in the institutions and social usages transmitted to the historical period which tend, in a remarkable manner, to illustrate their previous condition. They are even more important than an outline history of actual events.

Among the institutions of the Latin tribes existing at the commencement of the historical period were the gentes, curiæ and tribes upon which Romulus and his successors established the Roman power. The new government was not in all respects a natural growth; but modified in the upper members of the organic series by legislative procurement. The gentes, however, which formed the basis of the organization, were natural growths, and in the main either of common or cognate lineage. That is, the Latin gentes were of the same lineage, while the Sabine and other gentes, with the exception of the Etruscans, were of cognate descent. In the time of Tarquinius Priscus, the fourth in succession from Romulus, the organization had been brought to a numerical scale, namely: ten gentes to a curia, ten curiæ to a tribe, and three tribes of the Romans; giving a total of three hundred gentes integrated in one gentile society.

Romulus had the sagacity to perceive that a confederacy of tribes, composed of gentes and occupying separate areas, had neither the unity of purpose nor sufficient strength to accomplish more than the maintenance of an independent existence. The tendency to disintegration counteracted the advantages of the federal principle. Concentration and coalescence were the remedy proposed by Romulus and the wise men of his time. It was a remarkable movement for the period, and still more remarkable in its progress from the epoch of Romulus to the institution of political society under Servius Tullius. Following the course of the Athenian tribes and concentrating in one city, they wrought out in five generations a similar and complete change in the plan of government, from a gentile into a political organization.

It will be sufficient to remind the reader of the general facts that Romulus united upon and around the Palatine Hill a hundred Latin gentes, organized as a tribe, the Ramnes; that by a fortunate concurrence of circumstances a large body of Sabines were added to the new community whose gentes, afterwards increased to one hundred, were organized as a second tribe, the Tities; and that in the time of Tarquinius Priscus a third tribe, the Luceres, had been formed, composed of a hundred gentes drawn from surrounding tribes, including the Etruscans. Three hundred gentes, in about the space of a hundred years, were thus gathered at Rome, and completely organized under a council of chiefs now called the Roman Senate, an assembly of the people now called the comitia curiata, and one military commander, the rex; and with one purpose, that of gaining a military ascendency in Italy.

Under the constitution of Romulus, and the subsequent legislation of Servius Tullius, the government was essentially a military democracy, because the military spirit predominated in the government. But it may be remarked in passing that a new and antagonistic element, the Roman senate, was now incorporated in the centre of the social system, which conferred patrician rank upon its members and their posterity. A privileged class was thus created at a stroke, and intrenched first in the gentile and afterwards in the political system, which ultimately overthrew the democratic principles inherited from the gentes. It was the Roman senate, with the patrician class it created, that changed the institutions and the destiny of the Roman people, and turned them from a career, analogous to that of the Athenians, to which their inherited principles naturally and logically tended.

In its main features the new organization was a masterpiece of wisdom for military purposes. It soon carried them entirely beyond the remaining Italian tribes, and ultimately into supremacy over the entire peninsula.

The organization of the Latin and other Italian tribes into gentes has been investigated by Niebuhr, Hermann, Mommsen, Long and others; but their several accounts fall short of a clear and complete exposition of the structure and principles of the Italian gens. This is due in part to the obscurity in which portions of the subject are enveloped, and to the absence of minute details in the Latin writers. It is also in part due to a misconception, by some of the first named writers, of the relations of the family to the gens. They regard the gens as composed of families, whereas it was composed of parts of families; so that the gens and not the family was the unit of the social system. It may be difficult to carry the investigation much beyond the point where they have left it; but information drawn from the archaic constitution of the gens may serve to elucidate some of its characteristics which are now obscure.