Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/70

 G4 THE FAMILY. BOOK II. by laws, usage still forbade it. Finally, it appears froin a passage of Pollux, that in many Greek cities the law punished celibacy as a crime.' This was in accordance with the ancient belief : man did not belong to himself; he belonged to the family. He was one member in a series, and the series must not stop with him. He was not born by chance ; he had been intro- duced into life that he might continue a worship ; he must not give up life till he is sure that tliis worship will be continued after him. But to beget a son is not sufficient. The son who is to perpetuate the domestic religion must be the fruit of a religious marriage. The bastard, the natural son, he whom the Greeks called ridog^ and the Romans spwms, could not perform the part which religion assigned to the son. In fact, the tie of blood did not of itself alone constitute the family ; the tie ot a com- mon worship had to be added. Now, the son born of a woman who had not been associated in the worship of the husband by the ceremony of marriage could not himself take any part in the worship.* He had no right to oflEer the funeral repast, and the family was not perpetuated for him. We shall see, farther on, that for the same reason he had not the right of in- heritance. Marriage, then, was obligatory. Its aim was not pleasure; its principal object was not the union of two beings who were pleased with each other, and who wished to go united through the pleasures and the trials of life. The effect of marriage, in the eyes of religion and of the laws, was the union of two beings ' Pollux. T!I. 43. ' Isaeus, VII. Demosthenes, in ilncai-t.