Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/791

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 77$

which they rested, and in which they continuously took an interest the fatherland.

In Greece it was customary to bury the dead in the fields of each family and not in cemeteries or at the roadside. Gains 4 quotes a law of Solon concerning this. Plutarch, 5 Marcellinus, 8 and Demosthenes 7 confirm this custom. The same kind of burial was customary in Italy, as is shown by the Law of the Twelve Tables and the later jurists, such as Pomponius 8 and Julius Paulus, 9 and by other passages of the Digesta. 10 Siculus Flaccus 11 says expressly: "Certainly there were two ways of placing the tomb. Some put it at the limit of the field ; others in the center." Thus the communal family was tied to the past by the tombs of the ancestors. It was the patria; the domain of the ancestors was the mundus, the economically and morally complete circle which lived by the direct consummation of its products and sufficed for itself. It was the elementary group which, associated with others, constituted the city. And this city likewise possessed its limits and its gods.

Cato has the formula with which the Italian peasant invoked the Manes to guard his field, to protect it against thieves, and to grant an abounding harvest. One can, then, explain why the tomb was placed sometimes within the field and sometimes at its border. It was placed at the border where the field was exposed to plundering and in the middle where the security was greater. It was likewise with the city of the living : the military forces and the fortified places were at the boundaries. The world of the dead was the image of that of the living. Tibullus 12 speaks in the same terms of the Lares agri custodes.

Because a stranger could be neither owner nor heir, he was not protected by the same cult and the same right. In Greece the stranger was under the jurisdiction of the "archon polemarch;" in Rome he was judged by the praetor peregrinus. Thus the


 * Digesta, X, i, 13. * Arts tides, I; Cimon, XIX.

Life of Thucydides, XVII. 'Against Collides, XIII, XIV.

Digesta, XLVII, 12 and 15. Digesta, VIII, i, 14.

" Especially XIX, I, 53 ; XI, 7, 2 and 9, and XI, 7, 43 and 46.

11 Fragmenta terminalia, ed. Goez, p. 147. ** I, i, 23.