Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/800

 784 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

may be explained by the fact that the patrimony belongs to the community, and that, by leaving this, one lost all right to the former. Thence was derived, in case of emigration, the custom of taking along symbolically the soil and the hearth, represented by small portions thereof. The divinities and the cult followed. When Danton replied to those who advised him to flee, " Do you carry away your country at the sole of your shoes?" this refusal to escape proved that at Danton's time the economic conditions and ideas were changed. Since then the capitalist, by a return to the primitive forms, has become a thorough cosmopolitan. As Adam Smith has already remarked, he carries with him his capital as previously the emigrant took with him a little ancestral soil. Patria was the terra patrum, Vatcrland, in the most realistic sense the land which contains the manes, or ancestral remains, and gave shelter to the patres, or heads of the families of the com- munity, those who will be the patres or senators of the city.

According to Plutarch the circular trench, dug at the founda- tion of a city, was called mundus, or region of the nether manes. It was, according to Festus, eius part em conservatam dus mani- bus; likewise Servius says : Aras infcrorum vacant mundos. Ara was the field, and also the altar erected upon the field for the cult of the ancestors, the previous owners of the field. These had even now their own field the one beneath. The base of the cult is economic ; the altar is the superstructure of the arable field. At the trench, which was thus filled with the shares of the soil from the different territories, left by each of the members of his crowd, Romulus imitates the family head who erects upon the family estate the tombs or altars of his ancestors. He sets up an altar for the ancestors, and then he kindles the hearth of the city. " The trench," says Ovid, 27 " is filled with soil, and the altar is con- structed above it. A new hearth is lighted there, and the fire is kept burning." Around the altar the city arises, as the house sur- rounds the domestic hearth, and as the family tomb is situated in the clomain. We have seen that frequently, on the contrary, the tomb was at the edge of the field. The formation of the city meant centralization. It was natural that, with the constitution ,->f

F<uti. IV, 8aj.