Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/111

 C'lIAP. Vll. THE KIGHT OP SUCCESSION. 105 The will was not known in ancient Hindu law. Athenian legislation, up to Solon's time, forbade it absolutely, and Solon himself permitted it only to those who left no children.^ Wills were for a long time forbidden or unknown at Sparta, and were authorized only after the Peloponnesian war." A.ristotle speaks of a time when the case was the same at Corinth and at Thebes.^ It is certain that the power of trans- mitting one's property arbitrarily by will was not rec- ognized as a natural right ; the constant principle of the ancient ages was, that all property should remain in the family to which religion had attached it. Plato, in his treatise on the Laws, which is largely a commentary on the Athenian laws, exjDlains very clearly the thought of ancient legislators. He sup- poses that a man on his death-bed demands the power to make a will, and that he cries, " O gods, is it not very hard that I am not able to dispose of my property as I may choose, and in favor of any one to whom I please to give it, leaving more to this one, less to that one, according to the attachment they have shown for me ?" But the legislator replies to this man, "Thou who canst not promise thyself a single day, thou who art only a jiilgrim here below, does it belong to thee to decide such affairs? Thou art the master neither of thy property nor of thyself: thou and thy estate, all these things, belong, to thy ftimily ; that is to say, to thy ancestors and to thy jiosterity." * For us the ancient laws of Rome ai'e very obscure ; they were obscure even to Cicero. What we know reaches little farther back than the Twelve Tables, ' Plutarch, Solon, 21. * Id., Agis, 5. » Aristotle, Folit, II. 3, 4. * Plato, Laws, XI.