Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/79



and mother, sons and daughters, home and homestead, servants and chattels—such are the natural elements constituting the household in all cases, where polygamy has not obliterated the distinctive position of the mother. But the nations that have been most susceptible of culture have diverged widely from each other in their conception and treatment of the natural distinctions which the household thus presents. By some they have been apprehended and wrought out more profoundly, by others more superficially; by some more under their moral, by others more under their legal aspects. None has equalled the Roman in the simple but inexorable embodiment in law of the principles chalked out by nature herself.

The family formed an unity. It consisted of the free man, who upon his father's death had become his own master, and the spouse, whom the priests by the ceremony of the sacred salted cake (confarreatio), had solemnly wedded to share with him water and fire, with their sons and sons' sons and the lawful wives of these, and their unmarried daughters and sons' daughters, along with all goods and substance pertaining to any of its members. The children of daughters, on the other hand, were excluded, because, if born in wedlock, they belonged to the family of the husband; and if begotten out of wedlock, they had no place in a family at all. A house of his own, and the blessing of children, appeared to the Roman citizen as the end and essence of life. The death of the individual was not an evil, for it was a matter of necessity; but the extinction of a household or of a clan was an evil, even for the com-