Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/56

40 40 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. the only object of whose spiritual existence was the torment and final destruction of their undutiful posterity. Such " negligence was nothing less than the crime of parricide, multiplied as many times as there were ancestors in the family." ^ The logical result of such a religion could be nought else than the closer union of the members of a family, and, finally, the firm establishment of the family as the unit of any subsequent poHtical group. There was another religious custom of those primitive times so closely linked with the worship of the dead that both, at the time they become known to history, though perhaps originally distinct (a question now Impossible to determine), formed together but one religion. This was the worship of the sacred fire, which in the far interior of every Roman house burnt with an undying flame upon the family altar. This fire was to these ancient men a god, a powerful, beneficent god, whose protection they were con- tinually beseeching. Yet the sacred fire of each household was but the special providence of its own particular family, and was sometimes called by the name of an ancestor. For in the practice of this twofold religion there were no rules common to all the families of a community or a race. The rites and ceremonies of each household were secret. The divine fire and the ancestral spirit were blended into the household gods {Lares, Penates). These gods protected their own worshippers, and left the stranger to the care of his own divinities. No interference on the part of the community or state, even in much later times, was ever thought of. Of this exclusive religion of the family, the father was the high- priest. He had supreme authority in all matters pertaining to the family worship ; he alone was able to perpetuate the ancestral religion, by teaching his sons the songs, rituals, and ceremonies that he had learned from his father ; and on his death he too was numbered among the ancestral gods. Before the family altar women had no independent place. They took part in the cere- monies only through their fathers or husbands. Nor did they attain godship after their decease. In death, as in life, their iden- tity was lost in that of their male relatives. And in this old religious supremacy of the man, rather than in his physical supe- riority, do we find the origin of woman's political and legal sub- ordination, so characteristic of all, or nearly all, Aryan races. ^ Coulanges, ubi supra, p. 43.