Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/152

 146 THE FAMILY. BOOK II. 4. The Family ( Gens) was at first the only Form of Society. What we have seen of the family, its domestic re- ligion, the gods which it had created for itself, the laws that it had established, the right of jn-imogeniture on which it had been founded, its unity, its develop- ment from age to age until the formation of the gens, its justice, its priesthood, its internal government, — car- ries us forcibly, in thought, towards a primitive epoch, when the family was independent of all superior power, and when the city did not yet exist. When we examine the domestic religion, those gods who belonged only to one family and exercised their providence only within the walls of one house, thia worship which was secret, this religion which would independent in certain respects, marked its individuality by adopting a surname {cognomen). Each person was, moreover, distinguislicd by a particular denomination, agnomen, as Caius, or Quintus. But the true name, the official name, the sacred name, was that of the gens ; this, coming from the first known ancestor, was to last as long as the family and the gods lasted. It was the same in Greece. Every Greek, at least if he belonged to an ancient and regularly established family, had, like the Roman patrician, three names. One was his individual name; another was that of his father; and as these two generally alter- nated with each other, they were, together, equivalent to the hereditary cognomen, which at Eome designated a branch of the gens. Lastly, the third name was that of the entire gens. Ex- amples : MiXTid3)]i KifKSvos JaxtuSya, and in the following gen- eration, KifKov IIt?.TiuSov Joa-iLSr^^. The Lakiadai formed a yivo?, as the Cornelii formed 2, pans. It "was the same with the Butadae, the Phytalidaj, &;c. Plrdar never extols his heroes without recalling the name of their yivoq. Tiiis name, in Greek, usually ended in iSi]? or a(5»;?, and thus had an adjective form, just as the name of the gens amoxig tut Itomans invariably ended ii>