Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/86

 80 THE FAMILY. BOOK II. ligion, Avas the most certnin emblem, the most un- doubted mark of the rigiit of property. Let us return to the primitive ages of the Aryan race. The sacred enclosure, which the Greeks call ei^y.o:^ and the Latins herctum, was the somewhat spa- cious enclosure in which the family had its house, its flocks, and the small field that it cultivated. In the midst rose the protecting fire-god. Let us descend to the succeeding ages. The tribes have reached Greece and Italy, and have built cities. The dwellings are brought nearer together : they are not, however, contiguous. The sacred enclosure slill exists, but is of smaller proportions; ottenest it is reduced to a low wall, a ditch, a furrow, or to a mere open space, a few feet Avide. But in no case could two houses 1^ joined to each other ; a party wall was supposed to be an im- possible thing. The same wall could not be common to two houses; for then the sacred enclosure of the gods would have disappeared. At Rome the law fixed two ieet and a half as the widlh of the free s]iace, which was always to separate two houses, and this space was consecrated to "the god of the enclosure."* A result of these old religious rules was, that a com- munity of property <vas never established among the •with the fire-god, the new god assumed the title of loxiiog. It is not less true that, in the beginning, the real protector of the enclosure was the domestic god. Dionysius of Halicarnassus assorts this (I. G8), when he says that the &ioi ioxiioi are the same as the Penates. This follows, moreover, from a compari- son of a passage of Pausanias (IV. 17) with a passage of Eu- ripides {Troad.f 17), and one of Virgil {JEn., II. 514) ; the three passages relate to the same fact, and show that Ztu? inxiTog was no other than the domestic fire. ' Festus, V. Amlitus. Varro, L. L., V. 22. Serviua, ad uEn, II. 409.