Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/87

 CHAP. TI. THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 81 ancients. A pl)alansteiy was never known among them. Even Pythagoras did not succeed in establish- ing institutions which the most intimate religion of men resisted. Neither do we find, at any epoch in the lite of the ancients, anything that resembled that multitude of villages so general in France during the twcll'th century. Every family, having its gods and its worship, was required to have its particular p^.ace on the soil, its isolated domicile, its property. According to the Greeks, the sacred fire taught men to build houses ; ' and, indeed, men who were fixed by their religion to one spot, which they believed it their duty not to quit, would soon begin to think of raising in that place some solid structure. The tent covers the Arab, the wagon the Tartar; but a familj' that has a domestic hearth has need of a permanent dwelling. The stone house soon succeeds the mud cabin or the wooden hut. The family did not build for the life of a single man, but for generations that were to succeed each other in the same dwelling. The house was always placed in the sacred en- closure. Among the Greeks, the square which com- posed the enclosure was divided into two parts ; the firet part was the court ; the house occupied the sec- ond. The hearth, placed near the middle of the whole enclosure, was thus at the bottom of the court, and near the entrance of the house. At Rome the dispo- sition was different, but the principle was the same. The hearth remained in the middle of the enclosure, but the buildings rose round it on four sides, so as to enclose it within a little court. We can easily understand the idea that inspired this ' Diodorus, V. C8.