as guardian, and when it pleases the gods, she preserves it." The Orestes of Euripides takes up the same theory when he says to Tyndarus—"My father has begotten me, and thy daughter has given birth to me, as the earth receives the seed that another confides to it; without a father, there could be no child." These patriarchal theories naturally consecrated the slavery of woman. The laws of Solon still recognised the right of women to inherit, in default of paternal relations of the male sex, to the fourth degree, but in the time of Isæus the law refused to the mother any place among the heirs of her son.[1]
In fact, throughout the historic period the Greco-Roman world is patriarchal. In Greece and at Rome woman is despised, subjected, and possessed like a thing; while the power of the father of the family is enormous. It is especially so at Rome, where, nevertheless, the family is not yet strictly consanguineous, for it includes the wife, children, and slaves, and where agnation has for its basis the patria potestas. "All those are agnates who are under the same paternal power, or who have been, or who could be, if their ancestor had lived long enough to exercise his empire. . . . Wherever the paternal power begins, there also begins kinship. Adoptive children are relations. . . . A son emancipated by his father loses his rights of agnation."[2] At the commencement of Roman history, we see, therefore, clans, or gentes, composed of families, of whom some are patrician—that is, able to indicate their agnatic lineage—and the others plebeian. The "justæ nuptiæ" are for the former; the latter unite without ceremony, more ferarum. The family is possessed by the pater familias; he is the king and priest of it, and becomes one of its gods when his shade goes to dwell among the manes. In this last case, the family simply changes masters; "the nearest agnate takes the family," says the law of the Twelve Tables. Something very similar existed in Greece, for we have seen that at Athens the right of marrying their sisters, left to brothers who were heirs, was not even exhausted by a first marriage.[3]
