Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/45

Rh nothing, but the useful act, and compelled every citizen to fill up every moment of his brief life with unceasing work; which made it a duty even in the boy modestly to cover the body; which deemed every one a bad citizen who wished to be different from his fellows; which viewed the state as all in all, and a desire for the state's extension as the only aspiration not liable to censure,—who can in thought trace back these sharply-marked contrasts to that original unity which embraced them both, prepared the way for their development, and at length produced them? It would be foolish presumption to desire to lift this veil; we shall only endeavour to indicate in brief outline the beginnings of Italian nationality and its connections with an earlier period; to direct the guessings of the discerning reader rather than to express them.

All that may be called the patriarchal element in the state rests in Greece and Italy on the same foundations. Under this head comes especially that moral and honourable constitution of the relations of the sexes, which enjoined monogamy on the husband, and visited with heavy penalties the infidelity of the wife, and which recognized the equality of the two sexes and the sanctity of marriage in the high position which it assigned to the mother within the domestic circle. On the other hand, the rigorous development of the marital, and still more of the paternal authority, regardless of the natural rights of persons as such, was a feature foreign to the Greeks, and peculiarly Italian; it was in Italy alone that moral subjection became transformed into legal slavery. In the same way the principle of the slave being completely destitute of legal rights a principle involved in the very nature of slavery—was maintained by the Romans with merciless rigour, and carried out to all its consequences; whereas, among the Greeks, alleviations of its harshness were early introduced, both in practice and in legislation, the marriage of slaves, for example, being recognized as a legal relation.

On the household was based the clan, that is, the community of the descendants of the same progenitor; and out of the clan, among the Greeks as well as the Italians, arose the state. But while under the weaker political develop-