was the offspring of a father of family X and a mother of family Y, he was for all practical purposes of ordinary society half an X and half a Y himself, although for most legal purposes he might be an X pure and simple. For instance, Cicero[1] says of a youth in whom he was interested, that he must be educated worthily of his grandfather Caepio, his father Lucullus, and his near kinsman Cato.
Of these, Caepio was the maternal grandfather, and Cato was connected with him by the circumstance that his mother was, by another marriage, the boy's grandmother. Here then we have relationships on the spear and distaff sides treated as on an equal footing, which is exactly what, for most purposes, we ourselves do to-day. Not dissimilar is the way in which connections through the wife are put on the same footing as relations by blood in the tabu mentioned by Plutarch, quaest. Rom. 40 (274a), who tells us that a son-in-law observed the same precaution of not exposing his body before his father-in-law as a son did before his father, and that this was an old custom; "anciently," he says, "they used not to bathe together." However, "ancient" (παλαιὸν) is a vague word, and in a work written about the first quarter of the second century a.d. need not refer to anything older than, say, the age of Cicero.
As to (b), all we know for certain is that the plebeians had not, or were considered not to have, a patrilinear clan organisation; see Livy, x. 8, 9, uos solos gentes habere, i.e. "you (the patricians) assert that the gens is an institution which only you possess." If, as I believe, they were not a homogeneous political unit but a haphazard collection of all manner of elements, this is just what we should expect to find. If, on the other hand, they had a matrilinear organisation, why do we not hear any such stories told of
- ↑ De finibus, iii. 2. 8; see Madvig's note on the passage, in which the rather complicated family tree is worked out in full, with references to the ancient authorities.
