Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/792

 77 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

inner organization was at the same time in equipoise with the exterior milieu. The gens is the real, primitive family, with its common territory, common cult, and common right. This com- munity is at the same time positive for its members and negative toward foreign groups. The frontiers between gentes as well as between cities of gentes are sociological and primarily economic. Later they are gradually transformed, together with the economic transformation of the gens and of the city. The cult, the private and public right, will follow this very evolution.

The primitive forms do not, however, disappear completely; they are only covered by superficial allusions. Cicero * 3 says : " Religio Larum posita in fundi villaeque conspectu ; " so when the clan and the family are already greatly modified, the primitive custom is persistent. Only when property has been individualized to a great extent, and when, besides, there are many families without property, the tombs begin to be grouped in cemeteries, in special fields which establish among the dead the community which has disappeared from among the living. Yet in each case, always and everywhere, the religious form molds itself con- formably to the prevailing economic forms and conceptions.

Primitively each field and each house were surrounded by a boundary to separate them from the domicile and estate of other families. This boundary was not a stone fence, but a strip of ground several feet wide. It remained uncultivated in order to mark distinctly the separation ; and later the law enacted that it must remain untilled. It is the same custom and the same idea which we find in greater measure in the military frontiers of the states. The plow must never touch this separating strip, nor was it desirable that the military frontier should cease being a desert. There was, however, this difference: the uncultivated strip of ground between the estates of different owners contained the tombs. The habitations of the dead protected the living family. At the frontier of the states a more material protection was neces- sary : a military force. But was this not always, for the enemy, a menace of death, if not of the dead ?

The Roman law declared the strip of ground separating

"Dt Ugibut. II, ii.