Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/65

 CHAP. II. MARRIAGE. 59 This cake, eaten during the recitation of prayers, in the presence and under the very eyes of the domestic divinities, makes the union of the husband and wife sacred. Henceforth they are associated in the same worship. The wife has the same gods, the same rites, the same prayers, the same festivals as her husband. Hence this old deiinition of marriage, which the jurists have preserved to us : NiAptice sunt divini Juris et humani com.municatio ; and this other: Uxor soda humanm rei atque divince.^ Tliis is because the wife participates in the worship of the husband ; this wife whom, according to the expression of Plato, the gods themselves have introduced into the house. The wife, thus married, also worships the dead; but it is not to her own ancestors that she cnrries the fune- ral repast. She no longer has this right. Marriage has completely detached her from the femily, and has interrupted all the religious relations that she had with it. Her offerings she carries to the ancestors of her husband; she is of their family; they have become her ancestors. Marriage has been for her a second birth ; she is henceforth the daughter of her husband ; filim loco, say the jurists. One could not belong to two families, or to two domestic religions; the wife belongs entirely to her husband's family, and to his religion. We shall see the consequences of this rule in the right of succession. The institution of sacred marriage must be as old in the Indo-European race as the domestic religion ; for the one could not exist without the other. This religion oldest; for it corresponds to the most ancient beliefs, and dis- appeared only as those beliefs died out. ' Digest, XXIII. title 2. Code, IX. 32, 4. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, II. 25 : Konuiri? '/in^^arvir xul tfowr. Stephen of Byzantium, TruTnm,