Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/75

CHAP. IV. adoption, you will leave Menocles, who is dead, without a son; and consequently no one will perform the sacrifices in his honor, no one will offer him the funeral repast, and thus he will be without worship."

To adopt a son, was then, to watch over the perpetuity of the domestic religion, the safety of the sacred tire, the continuation of the funeral offerings, and the repose of the manes of the ancestors. There being no reason for adoption, except the necessity of preventing the extinction of a worship, it was permitted only to one who had no son. The law of the Hindus is formal on this point. That of the Athenians is not less so ; all the orations of Demosthenes against Leochares are proof of this. No particular passage proves that this was the case in the old Roman law, and we know that in the time of Gaius a man might have at the same time sons by nature and sons by adoption. It appears, however, that this point was not admitted as legal in Cicero's time; for in one of his orations the orator expresses himself thus: "What is the law concerning adoption? Why, that he may adopt children who is no longer able to have children himself, and who filled of having them when he was of an age to expect it. To adopt is to seek, by regular and sacerdotal law, that which by the ordinary process of nature ho is no longer able to obtain." Cicero attacks the adoption of Clodius, taking the ground that the man who has adopted him already has a son, and