Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/88

 82 THE FAMILY. BOOK II. system of construction. The walls are raised around the hearth to isolate and defend it, and we may say, as the Greeks said, that religion taught men to build liouses. In this house the family is master and pro- prietor ; its domestic divinity assures it this right. The house is consecrated by the perpetual presence of gods; it is a temple Vvhich preserves them. "What is there more holy," says Cicero, "what is there more carefully fenced round with every descrip- tion of religious respect, than the house of each indi- vidual citizen ? Here is his altar, here is his hearth, here are his household gods; here all his saci-ed rights, all his religious ceremonies, are preserved." ' To enter this house with any malevolent intention was a sacri- lege. The domicile was inviolable. AccordinG: to a Roman tradition, the domestic god repulsed the robber, and kept off the enemy." Let us pass to another object of worship — the tomb ; and we shall see that the same ideas were attached to this. The tomb held a very important place in the religion of the ancients ; for, on one hand, worship was due to the ancestors, and on the other, the principal ceremony of this worship — the funeral repast — was to be performed on the very spot where the ancestors rested.^__ The tiamily, therefore, had a common tomb, where its members, one after another, must come to sleep. For this tomb the rule was the same as fur the hearth. It was no more permitted to unite two families in the same tomb than it was to establish two domestic hearths in the same house. To bury one out ' Cicero, Pio Domo, 41. 2 Ovid, Fast., V. 141. ' Such, at least, was the ancient rule, since they believed that the funeral repast served as food for the dead. Eurip., Tioad., 881.