Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/128

122 was the rule. Becker in "Charikles" directly assumes that nobody was permitted to intermarry in the gens.

9. The right to adopt strangers in the gens. It was exercised by adoption into the family under public formalities; but it was used sparingly.

10. The right to elect and depose the archons. We know that every gens had its archon. As to the heredity of the office, there is no reliable information. Until the end of barbarism, the probability is always against strict heredity. For it is absolutely incompatible with conditions where rich and poor had perfectly equal rights in the gens.

Not alone Grote, but also Niebuhr, Mommsen and all other historians of classical antiquity were foiled by the gens. Though they chronicled many of its distinguishing marks correctly, still they always regarded it as a group of families and thus prevented their understanding the nature and origin of gentes. Under the gentile constitution, the family never was a unit of organization, nor could it be so, because man and wife necessarily belonged to two different gentes. The gens was wholly comprised in the phratry, the phratry in the tribe. But the family belonged half to the gens of the man, and half to that of the woman. Nor does the state recognize the family in public law. To this day, the family has only a place in private law. Yet all historical records take their departure from the absurd supposition, which was considered almost inviolate during the eighteenth century, that the monogamous family, an institution scarcely older than civilization, is the nucleus around which society and state gradually crystallized.

"Mr. Grote will also please note," throws in Marx, "that the gentes. which the Greeks traced to their mythologies, are older than the mythologies. The latter together with their gods and deml-gods were created by the gentes."