The Religious Experience of the Roman People From the...

131 Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, lect. viii. Dr. Frazer finds traces of Mutterrecht only in the succession to the kingship of Alba and Rome, of which the evidence is of course purely legendary. If the legends represent fact in any sense, they point, if I understand him rightly, to a kingship held by a non-Latin race, or, as he calls it, plebeian. Binder, Die Plebs, p. 403 foll., believes that the original Latin population, i.e. the plebs of later times, lived under Mutterrecht.

132 Aust, Religion der Römer, p. 212.

133 In historical times the household deities were often represented by images of Greek type: e.g. the Penates by those of the Dioscuri. Wissowa, Rel. und Kult. p. 147, and Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 95 foll., and 289. See also De Marchi, La Religione nella vita privata, i. p. 41 foll. and p. 90 foll.

134 De Marchi, op. cit. i. 13 foll. In the ordinary and regular religion of the family the State, i.e. the pontifices, did not interfere; but they might do so in matters such as the succession of sacra, the care of graves, or the fulfilment of vows undertaken by private persons. See Cicero, de Legibus, ii. 19. 47.

135 Mucius Scaevola, the great lawyer, defined gentiles as those "qui eodem nomine sunt, qui ab ingenuis oriundi sunt, quorum maiorum nemo servitutem servivit, qui capite non sunt deminuti," Cic. Topica, vi. 29. This is the practical view of a lawyer of the last century b.c., and does not take account of the sacra gentilicia, which had by that time decayed or passed into the care of sodalitates: Marquardt, p. 132 foll.; De Marchi, ii. p. 3 foll. The notion of descent from a common ancestor is of course ideal, but none the less a factor in the life of the gens; it crops up, e.g., in Virgil, Aen. v. 117, 121, and Servius ad loc.

136 Crawley, The Tree of Life, p. 47.

137 For the alleged extinction of the gens Potitia, and the legend connected with it, Livy i. 7, Festus 237.

138 See Marquardt, Privataltertümer, p. 56, and note 6.

139 There is, I believe, no doubt that the etymological affinities of the word familia point to the idea of settlement and not that of kin; e.g. Oscan Faama, a house, and Sanscrit dhâ, to settle.

140 The exact meaning and origin of the word has been much discussed. It is tempting to connect it with pax, paciscor, and make it a territory within whose bounds there is pax; see Rudorff, Gromatici veteres, ii. 239, and Nissen, Italische Landeskunde, ii. 8 foll.

141 See Rudorff, Grom. vet. ii. 236 foll.; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. 116 foll.; Kornemann in Klio, vol. v. (1905) p. 80 foll.; Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 1 foll.

142 Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. 22 foll.; Kornemann, l.c.; Roby in Dict. of Antiquities, s.v. "Agrimetatio," p. 85. The view that there was freehold garden land attached to the homestead gains strength from a statement of Pliny (N.H. xix. 50) that the word used in the XII. Tables for villa, which was the word in classical times for the homestead, was hortus, a garden, and that this was heredium, private property. See Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. 23. It would indeed be strange if the house had no land immediately attached to it; we know that in the Anglo-Saxon village community the villani, bordarii and cotagii, had their garden croft attached to their dwellings, apart from such strips as they might hold from the lord of the manor in the open fields. See Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, p. 148. For the centuriatus ager, Roby l.c. We have no direct knowledge of the system in the earliest times, but it is almost certain that it was old-Italian in outline, and not introduced by the Etruscans, as stated, e.g., by Deecke-Müller, Etrusker, ii. 128.

143 For Latium this is proved by the sepulchral hut-urns found at Alba and also on the Esquiline. One of these in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford shows the construction well. See article "Domus" in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie; Helbig, Die Italiker in der Poebene, p. 50 foll. Later there was an opening in the roof.

144 Von Duhn in Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1896, p. 125 foll., and article "Domus" in Pauly-Wissowa.

145 This is Aust's admirable expression, Religion der Römer, p. 214.

146 See the author's Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 242.

147 Serv. Aen. i. 270; Marquardt, p. 126.

148Ap. Gellium, iv. 1. 17. For the sacredness of food and meals, see below (Lect. VIII. p. 172).

149 See a paper by the author in Classical Rev. vol. x. (1896) p. 317, and references there given. Cp. the passage of Servius quoted above (Aen. i. 730), where a boy is described as announcing at the daily meal that the gods were propitious. For the purity necessary I may refer to Hor. Odes, iii. 23 ad fin., "Immunis aram si tetigit manus," etc.

150Primitive Culture, i. 393.

151 The feminine counterpart of Genius was Juno, of which more will be said later on. Each woman had her Juno; but this "other-soul" has little importance as compared with Genius.

152 See J. B. Carter in Hastings' Dict. of Religion and Ethics, i. 462 foll. For Genius in general, Birt in Myth. Lex. s.v.; Wissowa, R.K. p. 154 foll.; Stewart, Myths of Plato, p. 450, for the connexion of souls with ancestry.

153 See the fifth of Plutarch's Quaestiones Romanae, and Dr. Jevons' interesting comments in his edition of Phil. Holland's translation, pp. xxii. and xxxv. foll. Cp. the throwing the fetters of a criminal out by the roof of the Flamen's house.