The institution of individual, or rather familial property, that of masculine filiation, and of patriarchal monogamy, dismembered the gens, which at length became merely nominal. The law of the Twelve Tables, however, still decides that the succession shall be vacant if, at the death of the father, the nearest agnate refuses to "take the family," and in default of an agnate the gentiles shall take the succession. The nominal gens persisted for a long time in the ancient world; thus every Roman patrician had three names—that of his gens, that of his family, and his personal name.[1] At Athens, in the time of Solon, the gens still inherited when a man died without children. The long duration of Greco-Roman society enables us to follow the whole evolution of the family in it. It would be going beyond the facts to affirm the existence of a still confused consanguinity in the ancient gens; but it seems very probable that this gens first adopted the maternal and then the paternal family, which last became somewhat modified, in the sense of the extension of feminine rights. This extension was slow, and it was not till the time of Justinian that equal shares were given to sons and daughters in succession, or even that widows were entrusted with the care of their children. VII. The Family in Barbarous Europe.
Organisation into clans more or less consanguineous, then into phratries and tribes, seems natural in many primitive societies; and outside the Greco-Roman world the barbarous populations of Europe had all adopted it. In these clans, has kinship begun by being confused? Has exogamy prevailed? On these particular points precise information is wanting; doubtless evolution cannot everywhere have been uniform. One thing is, however, certain, namely, that the Celtic populations have preserved the institution of the clan much longer than any others. In Wales and Ireland the clan was still the social unit; it was responsible for the crimes of its members, paid the fines and received the compensations. In Ireland, and surely elsewhere, there
- ↑ A. Giraud-Teulon, loc. cit., p. 372.
