Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/392

 386 THB KEV0LUTI0N8. BOOK IV. society was the gens, with its worship, its hereditary- chief, and its clier.tship. For liini the city could not be anything except an assembly of the chiefs of the gentes. It did not enter his mind that there could be any other political system than that which rested upon worship, or other magistrates than those who performed the public sacrifices, or other laws than those whose sacred formulas religion had dictated. It was useless to say to him that the plebeians also had within a short time adopted a religion, and that they offered sacrifices to the Lares of the public squares. lie would reply that this religion had not the essential char.-icter of a real religion, that it was not hereditaiy, that the* fires were not ancient fires, and that these Lares were not real ancestors. He would have added, that the plebeians, in adopting a worship, had done what they had no right to do, and to obtain one, had violated all principle; that they had taken only the external forms of worship, and had neglected the essential principle; it was not hereditary; that, in fine, this image of religion was ab- solutely the op])08ite of religion. Since the patrician persisted in thinking that heredi- tary religion alone should govern men, it followed that he saw no religion possible for the plebs. lie could not understand how the social power could be regularly exercised upon this class of men. The sacred law could not be applied to them ; justice was sacred ground^ which was forbidden to them. So long as there had been kings, they had taken upon themselves to govern the plc'bs, and they had done this according to certain rules, which had nothing in common with the ancient religion, and which necessity or the public interest had produced. But by the revolution, which had abolished royalty, religion had assumed its empire ; it necessarily