BOOK II, The Family.
CHAPTER I, Religion Was the Constituent Principle of the Ancient Family.
If we transport ourselves in thought to those ancient generations of men, we find in each
house an altar, and around this altar the family assembled.
The family meets every morning to address its first prayers to the sacred fire, and
in the evening to invoke it for a last time.
In the course of the day the members are once more assembled near the fire for the meal,
of which they partake piously after prayer and libation.
In all these religious acts, hymns, which their fathers have handed down, are sung in
common by the family.
Outside the house, near at hand, in a neighboring field, there is a tomb — the second home
of this family.
There several generations of ancestors repose together; death has not separated them.
They remain grouped in this second existence, and continue to form an indissoluble family.
Between the living part and the dead part of the family there is only this distance
of a few steps which separates the house from the tomb.
On certain days, which are determined for each one by his domestic religion, the living
assemble near their ancestors; they offer them the funeral meal, pour out milk and wine
to them, lay out cakes and fruits, or burn the flesh of a victim to them.
In exchange for these offerings they ask protection; they call these ancestors their gods, and
ask them to render the fields fertile, the house prosperous, and their hearts virtuous.
Generation alone was not the foundation of the ancient family.
What proves this is, that the sister did not bear the same relation to the family as the
brother; that the emancipated son and the married daughter ceased completely to form
a part of the family; and, in fine, several other important provisions of the Greek and
Roman laws, that we shall have occasion to examine farther along.
Nor is the family principle natural affection.
For Greek and Roman law makes no account of this sentiment.
The sentiment may exist in the heart, but it is not in the law.
The father may have affection for his daughter, but he cannot will her his property.
The laws of succession — that is to say, those laws which most faithfully reflect the
ideas that men had of the family — are in open contradiction both with the order of
birth and with natural affection.
The historians of Roman laws, having very justly remarked that neither birth nor affection
was the foundation of the Roman family, have concluded that this foundation must be found
in the power of the father or husband.
They make a sort of primordial institution of this power; but they do not explain how
this power was established, unless it was by the superiority of strength of the husband
over the wife, and of the father over the children.
Now, we deceive ourselves sadly when we thus place force as the origin of law.
We shall see farther on that the authority of the father or husband, far from having
been a first cause, was itself an effect; it was derived from religion, and was established
by religion.
Superior strength, therefore, was not the principle that established the family.
The members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection,
or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire, and of dead ancestors.
This caused the family to form a single body, both in this life and in the next.
The ancient family was a religious rather than a natural association; and we shall see
presently that the wife was counted in the family only after the sacred ceremony of marriage
had initiated her into the worship; that the son was no longer counted in it when he had
renounced the worship, or had been emancipated; that, on the other hand, an adopted son was
counted a real son, because, though he had not the ties of blood, he had something better
— a community of worship ; that the heir who refused to adopt the worship of this family
had no right to the succession; and, finally, that relationship and the right of inheritance
were governed not by birth, but by the rights of participation in the worship, such as religion
had established them.
Religion, it is true, did not create the family; but certainly it gave the family its rules;
and hence it comes that the constitution of the ancient family was so different from what
it would have been if it had owed its foundation to natural affection.
The ancient Greek language has a very significant word to designate a family.
It is επιστιον, a word which signifies, literally, that which is near a hearth.
A family was a group of persons whom religion permitted to invoke the same sacred fire,
and to offer the funeral repast to the same ancestors.