Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/160

 BOOK THIRD. THE CITY. CHAPTER I. The Phratry and the Cury. The Tribe. As yet we have given no dates, nor can we now. In the history of these antique societies the ej^ochs are more easily marked by the succession of ideas and of institutions than by that of years. The study of the ancient rules of private law has enabled us to obtain a glimpse, beyond the times that are called historic, of a succession of centuries during which the family was the sole form of society. This family might then contain within its wide compass several thousand human beings. But in these limits human association was yet too narrow ; too narrow for material needs, since this family hardly sufficed for all the chances of life ; too narrow for the moral needs of our nature, for we have seen how incomplete was the knowledge of the divine, and how insufficient was the morality of this little world. The sraallness of this primitive society corresponded well with the narrowness of the idea then entertained of the divinity. Every family had its gods, and men neither conceived of nor adored any save the domestic 154