Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/156

Rh 1-1-1 to settle in Attica. It is very doubtful, however, whether such pedigrees as this were very seriously put forward by those who claimed them; aml it is certain that, almost along the whole line, they were unsupported by evidence. We have the authority of Pollux (viii. 111) for stating that the Athenian -yévea, of which there were thirty in eacl1 gbpa-rpfa, were organized without any exclusive regard being had to blood-relationship; they were constantly receiving accessions from without; and the public written registers of births, adoptions, and the like do not appear to have been preserved with such care as would have made it possible to verify a pedigree for any considerable portion even of the strictly historical period (see Schoenlann, Grieclzisclze Alter(Iu'imer, i. 137, 338).‘ The great antiquity of the early Iloman (patrician) gentes is indisputable; and the rigid exclusiveness with which each preserved its /uzreditates genlilitiaa or sacra gentilitia is sutﬁciently illustrated by the fact that towards the close of the republic there were not n1ore than ﬁfty patrician families (Dionys., i. 85). Yet even in these it is obvious that, owing to the frequency of resort to the well-recognized practice of adoption, while there was every guarantee for the historical identity of the family, there was none (documents apart) for the personal genealogy of the indivi- dual. There is no evidence that suﬁicient records of pedi- gree were kept duriug the earlier centuries of the Roman comznonwealth. In later times, it is true, even plebei-an families began to establish a prescriptive right (known as the jus imaginum) to preserve in their halls the busts of those of their members who had attained to curule office, and to exhibit these in public on appropriate occasions. Under these imagines majorum'-’ it became usual to inscribe on the wall their respective tituli, the relationship of each to each being indicated by means of connecting lines ; and thus arose the stemmata gentilitia, which at a later time began to be copied into family records. In the case of plebeian families (whose stemmata iii no case went farther back than 366 B.C.), these written genealogies were probably trustworthy enough; but in the case of patricians who went back to _/Eneas,-'3 so much cannot, it is obvious, be said; and from a comparatively early period it was clearly recognized that such records lent themselves too readily to the devices of the falsiﬁer and the forger to deserve much conﬁdence or reverence (Pliny, II. .'., xxxv. 2 ; J uv. viii. 1). The many and great social changes which marked the closing centuries of the Vestern empire almost invariably militate:l with great strength against the maintenance of an aristocracy of birth ; and from the time of Constantine the dignity of patrician ceased to be heredl'tary.4 .l[ocler‘>z.——Tlie passion for genealogizing, which has been and is a marked characteristic of all the aristocracies of 1 All the earlier Greek historians appear to have constructed their narratives on assumed genealogical bases. The four books of Hecataeus of .liletus dealt respectively with the traditions about Deucalion, about Hercules and the Heraclidaa, about the early settlements in Pelopon- nesus, and about those in Asia Minor. The works of I-lellanieus of Lesbos bore titles (Aeuxalméueia and the like) which sufficiently explain their nature; his disciple, Damastes of Sigeum, was the author of genealogical histories of Trojan heroes; Apollodorus Atheniensis made use of three books -yeuea)o-yimﬁu by Acusilaus of Argos; Pherecydes of Leros also wrote -yeueaIo-yfai. See Nicolai, (:'r2'ech1'scIze Litvraturgeschichte, i. 254 sq.; Schubart, Quccstt. gcneal. Izistoricce, 1832; Marckschelfel, De I/enealogica Grazcurum poesi, 1840. 3 The chief authority on this subject is Polybius (vi. 53). 3 At the funeral of Drusus the images of }Eneas, of the Alban kings, of Romulus, of the Sabine nobles, of Attus Clausus, and of “ the rest of the Claudians” were exhibited.—Tac., Ann. iv. 9. 4 The Roman stemmata had, as will be seen afterwards, great interest for the older modern genealogists. Reference may be made to Glandorp's llescriptio Gentis Antonia: (15:79); to the l)escript1'o I.'c)7,[f3 .Iuli(t: (1576) of the same author; :nd to lIiibncr's Ttzbcllmz, See also I’.nperti's T ubulw Gmealo_qz'c(I: sire stemimlta nobiliss. gent. Ram. (1794, 1311); l)rumann’s (leschichte Items (1834); and Becker's 1Iot77.(llH('_.."L (l. rijm. .ll(r_'/-I/ziiuurr, vol. ii. GENEALOGY modern Europe, can be directly traced to the influence of feudalism aml the principles of hereditary privilege which that system, in its later phases at least, so peculiarly en- couraged. Along with the sharp separation of those families which alone were regarded as capable of holding real property or ﬁlling the higher olﬁccs of state, or indeed of en- gaging in any of what were reckoned as the more ennol»ling pursuits of life,arose the necessity for being able to determine with accuracy who were aml who were not the persons entitled by birth to take a place within the privileged caste. When, for example, the practice arose of holding tournaments, in which no one was allowed to take part who could not give evidence of gentle descent, the necessity for the professional genealogist became at once apparent. It was not, however, until about the end of the 15th century that the vanguard of the great army of writers upon this fertile subject began to appear. It was perhaps natural that, ﬁnding as they did the gulf of separation between noble and base to be so great as it was, they should have leapt to the conclusion that it had existed from the ﬁrst; at all events their knowledge and their ignoranee combined to support. them in their con- jecture. As they forced their way up the stream of time, indeed, they were met at a comparatively early stage by a great barrier——consisting less in the paucity and inaccessi- bility of authentic documents than in what one might almost call the fatal fact of the absence of family names. Prior to the middle of the 11th century these were entirely unknown ; the documents speak merely of Ebcrliardus, Fridericus, Ernestus, and the like, with at most the addition of the title. About 1050 began the custom of using sur- names, but it made way so very slowly that-, even at the close of the 12th century, it had not diffused itself beyond the ranks of the higher nobility, and throughout the 13th the old habit of self-designation by the Christian name merely was still exempliﬁed in a vast number of instances.5 The ditﬁ- culty, however, in an age when the laws of evidence were so imperfectly understood, did not count for much with the courtly genealogists of the 15th and following centuries. The insuperable obstacle which barred their advance along the path of sober research only furnished them with a pre- text for all the sooner making their escape into the region of imagination and conjecture, where no impediments occurred in tracing the ascending series until the name of the ﬁrst created person was reached. The appended bibliography will help to make clear the degrees by which genealogists have gradually been brought to conﬁne themselves to the limits of the veriﬁable. At present, if we understand by a genealogy a tabulated and, as far as possible, an exhaustive statement of all the ramiﬁcations of a series of human generations, and by genealogical science that branch of history which aims at securing fulness and accuracy in the accounts men give of the antecedents of families which have attained to distinction, the 111odern gene- alogist cannot but be conscious that he occupies a compara- tively narrow ﬁeld, and one from which the larger interests of mankind are daily further receding. In the more ancient meaning of the word genealogy indeed, when it is used to denote that grander task of the historian which consists in tracing the origin, not of privileged families or castes merely, but of races and groups of races, and even of the species itself, the subject is one that has an ever widening and deepening signiﬁcance ; but in this sense it does 11ot call for treatment apart from the biological sciences. Among the earliest of the genealogists of modern times may be mentioned Benvenuto dc San C-corgio (1l[0nti.sfcr)'ati .-‘|lm'chionum. ct I’rincI'pmn. 7'cg1'(c propaginis succcssionumquc sc7'[r.'s, 1515), l'hili- 5 Gatterer, Abriss dcr f-'mcalo_r/1'6, sec. 41 (1788). According to this author, there is only one class of crises in which it is possible to trace a pedigree beyond the 11th er-ntury,—those cases, namely, where a family happens to have established a fund for the deliverance of the souls of certain ancestors (Christian names specified) from purgatory.