Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/799

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 783

But in those days the ancient Spartan state was already greatly modified in its interior and exterior relations and structure.

Because originally real estate is not private property, it is explained why the laws of the Twelve Tables permit the creditor to seize the person of his insolvent debtor, but not to seize his property. Thus it was for a long time among the Hindoos. Credit was at the beginning personal before it could become real and landed. Mommsen acknowledges that

the idea of property was with the Romans, not originally associated with immovable property, but only with the possession of slaves and of cattle. .... The Romans of the first centuries cultivated the farm land in common, probably in different clans ; each of these clans cultivated the estate belonging to it, and the product was then distributed among the different families that formed the clan.

The clan was a differentiation produced within the tribe, as the families or houses were a differentiation within the clan. On the contrary, the city extended itself by the fusion of several tribes. And the more the city grew, the more were the primitive groups limited and individualized. Their own frontiers do, however, not disappear; they only become less and less rude limitations. But even in a purely graphic form the limits are by no means less real. In this and in other regards the evolution of the frontiers which had become at a certain time simple interior divisions has been identical with that of the frontiers of the state which consists of several cities. Also this state can become a simple interior division.

In ancient times the conception of the frontier of the state was in such wise adequate to that of the boundaries of property that the ceremonies used at the founding of a city and at the delimita- tion of the family domain were analogous. Fustel de Coulanges describes, after Plutarch, the customary ceremonies, and especially those employed at the foundation of Rome. Romulus digs first a small circular trench, into which he throws a clod of soil which he had brought from the city of Alba. Thereupon every one of his companions throws into the trench a little soil which each had brought from his native land. According to the idea of the ancient, religion forbids a man to separate himself from the land of his deified ancestors and from the hearth. This, in my opinion,