Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/151

 <mAP. X. THE GENS AT KOME AND IN" GREECE. 145 This truth admitted, all that the ancient writers have told us of the gens becomes clear. The close unity ■w^hich we have remarked among its members is no longer surprising ; they are related by birth, and the worship which they practise in common is not a fiction ; it comes to them from their ancestors. As they are a single family, they have a common tomb. For the same reason the law of the Twelve Tables declares them qualified to inherit each other's property. For the same reason, too, they bear the same name. As all liad, in the beginning, a single undivided patrimony, it was a custom, and even a necessity, that the entire gens •should be answerable for the debt of one of its mem- bers, and that they should pay the ransom of the pris- oner and the fine of the convict. All these rules be- <;ame established of themselves while the gens still retained its unity; when it was dismembered they could not disappear entirely. Of the ancient and sa- cred unity of this family there remain persistent traces in the annual sacrifices which assembled the scattered members ; in the name that remained common to them; in the legislation which recognized the right o^ gentiles to inherit; in their customs which enjoined them to aid each other.* lis ; but lie could not be a gentilis without being an agn.ite. The law of the Twelve Tables gave the inheritance, in default of ag- nates, to those who were only gentiles of the deceased, that is to say, who were of his gens, witiiout being of his branch or of his familia. is connected with this old religion. Every gens transmitted the name of the ancestor from generation to generation witii the same care as it perpetuated its worsiiip. What the Honians called nomcn was this name of the ancestor wliicii all the members of the gens bore. A day came when each branch, becoming 10
 * The use of patronymics dates from this high antiquity, and