Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/151

145 CHAPTER VI.

GENS AND STATE IN ROME.

The legend of the foundation of Rome sets forth that the first colonization was undertaken by a number of Latin gentes (one hundred, so the legend says) united into one tribe. A Sabellian tribe (also said to consist of one hundred gentes) soon followed, and finally a third tribe of various elements, but again numbering one hundred gentes, joined them. The whole tale reveals at the first glance that little more than the gens was borrowed from reality, and that the gens itself was in certain cases only an offshoot of an old mother gens still existing at home. The tribes bear the mark of artificial composition on their foreheads; still they were made up of kindred elements and after the model of the old spontaneous, not artificial tribe. At the same time it is not impossible that a genuine old tribe formed the nucleus of every one of these three tribes. The connecting link, the phratry, contained ten gentes and was called curia. Hence there were thirty curiae.

The Roman gens is recognized as an institution identical with the Grecian gens. The Grecian gens being a continuation of the same social unit, the primordial form of which we found among the American Indians, the same holds naturally good of the Roman gens, and we can be more concise in its treatment.

At least during the most ancient times of the city, the Roman gens had the following constitution:

1. Mutual right of inheritance for gentiles; the