To trace further this moral development in the ancient world we must now turn from following its course among the Greeks to follow it among that kindred people, the Romans, who, through the political unification of the world, reënforced this growing universalism in the moral domain, and thereby reached that ethical conception of collective humanity which Israel had reached through spiritual intuition, and Hellas through philosophical reflection and widening culture.[521] CHAPTER XI ROMAN MORALS: AN IDEAL OF CIVIC DUTY I. INSTITUTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF LIFE DETERMINING THE EARLY MORAL TYPE [Sidenote: The Roman family: ancestor worship and the _patria potestas_] The family in early Rome may more unreservedly be pronounced a seed plot of morals than in the case of any other ancient people save the Chinese. It was ancestor worship which made it such a nursery of morality, for the cult of ancestors made the family a group of co-worshipers about the domestic hearth. This worship purified and braced morality, since the tutelary spirits were believed to watch over the morals of the family and to punish wrongdoing. No impure act could be committed in the presence of the chaste hearth fire, and no one guilty of unexpiated crime dared to come into its presence.[522] But it was in constituting the father the high priest of the family group that this domestic worship exercised its greatest influence upon early Roman morality. It gave a religious sanction to the father’s authority and made the _patria potestas_ for many centuries a molding force in the moral life of the Roman people.[523] A little further on we shall see how, in the atmosphere of the home thus constituted, was fostered in the youth the virtues of submission to rightful authority, respect for law, and obedience to magistrates--virtues which were one secret of the strength and triumphs of early Rome. [Sidenote: The city state] Next after the family the state was the most important agency in the creation of the Roman type of virtue. We have to do here, as in Greece, with the city state. This was the chief sphere of duty of the Roman during his mature and active life. Consequently, just as it was the nature of the city state which in Greece determined in large measure what should constitute the supreme virtues and duties of the Greek ideal of character, so was it the constitution of Rome as a city state that, as we shall see a little later, determined what should be the leading virtues and duties entering into the Roman ideal of goodness. This made that ideal to be preëminently an ideal of civic duty. “Never since the fall of paganism have the civic virtues shone out so brilliantly.”[524] [Sidenote: The occupations of farming and war]