Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/346

 840 THE REVOLUTIONS. ' BOOK IV. These new senators must have been taken from patri- cian families; they had not the same title as the oM members of the senate; these latter were called patres (chiefs of families) ; the new ones were called conscripti (chosen).' Does not this difference of name make it probable that the hundred new senators, who were not family chiefs, belonged to younger branches of patrician gentes ? We may suppose that this class of the younger branches, being numerous and energetic, lent its sup- jjort to the enterprise of Brutus and the fathers, only on the condition of receiving civil and political rights. These branches thus acquired, through the need which the patres had of them, what the same class conquered by its arms at Ileraclea, Cnidus, and Marseilles. The right of primogeniture, then, disappeared every- where — an important revolution which began to trans- form society. The Italian gens and the Hellenic yivo^ lost their primitive unity. The different branches sep- arated ; thenceforth each had its share of the property, Its domicile, its own interests, and its independence. Singidi singidas familias incipiunt habere, says the jurisconsult. There is in the Latin language an old expression which appears to date fiom this epoch ; familiam ducere, they said of one who separated from the gens, and established a new stock, just as they said ducere coloniam of one who quitted the metropolis, and went to found a colony. The brother who thus separated from the oldest brother had thenceforth his own sacred fire, which, doubtless, he had lighted at the common fire of the gens, as the colony lighted its fire at the prytaneum of the metropolis. The gens no longer • Festiis, V. Conscripti, AUecti. Plutarch, lioTn. Quest., 58. For several contiu-ies the patres were distinguislied from the conscripti.