Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/134

 128 THE FAMILY. BOOK 11. that from tliis union flow rigorous duties, the neglect of which brings with it the gravest consequences in this life and in the next. Hence came the serious and sacred character of the conjugal union among the an- cients, and the purity which the family long preserved. This domestic morality prescribed still other duties. It taught the wife that she ought to obey; the hus- band, that he ought to command. It instructed botli to respect each other. The wife had rights, for she had her place at the sacred fire; it was her duty to see that it did not die out.* She too, then, has her priest- hood. Where she is not found, the domestic worship is incomplete and insuflBcient. It was a great misfor- tune to a Greek to have a " hearth deprived of a wife." ' Among the Romans the presence of the wife was so necessary in the sacrifices that the priest lost his office on becoming a widower.^ It was, doubtless, to this division of the domestic priesthood that the mother of the fiimily owed the veneration with which they never ceased to surround her in Greek and Roman society ; hence it came that the wife had the same title in the family as the hus- band. The Romans said pater familias and mater familias j the Greeks, olxodeaTiuiT;; and olxdianoifu • the Hindus, grihapati and grehapatni. Hence also came this formula, which the wife pronounced in the Roman marriage : uhi tu Caius, ego Caia — a formula which tells us that, if in the house there was not equal authority, there was equal dignity. As to the son, we have seen him subject to the • Cato, 143. Dionys. of Ilalic, II. 22. Laws of Manu, III. <>2; V. 151. ' Plutarch, Rom. Quest., 50.
 * Xenophon, Govt, of the Laccdamonians.