Of corporate action in their own interests, or with a view to the interests of the state, there is little evidence, although there are traces of common activity for the purpose of keeping up the dignity of the family. The patrician Claudii repudiate by common agreement the _praenomen_ “Lucius,” because two of its bearers had been respectively convicted of highway robbery and murder,[66] and the patrician Manlii renounce the _praenomen_ “Marcus” in consequence of a crime committed by a clansman of that name;[67] but such an agreement could hardly in historical times have had other support than the will of individual members to observe it. Perhaps the closest of the later ties of the _gens_ were its common worship and sacrifices. They never, as in Greece, rose to the rank of great public worships, but excessive care was taken by the state to maintain them; chiefly from the view that, if the worship of a race died out, the community would lose the favour of the divinity to which it had belonged. Hence the close connexion of gentile _sacra_ with property and inheritance.[68] Property, in the last resort, passed to the _gentiles_; and the _sacra_, that they might be maintained, were a necessary burden associated with it. For the _sacra_ to pass out of the family was of little importance; had they passed out of the _gens_, there was no security for their continuance. In cases of transition from a family of one clan to a family of another, it was the duty of the _pontifices_ to inquire how the continuity of the sacred rites might be maintained,[69] and hence one of the forms observed in the case of a change of _gens_ by adrogation was the _sacrorum detestatio_, a public declaration that the individual who sought this change had ceased to claim any participation in the _sacra_ of his race. The care for the continuity of the _sacra_ of the clan was long one of the professed, and perhaps real, bars to marriage between Patricians and Plebeians.[70] This question of the _sacra_ is an index to the fact that membership of a _gens_ might be either natural or artificial. The natural mode of entrance was by birth; and in the case of the patrician clans, before the right of intermarriage was extended to the Plebs, marriage with a patrician mother and by the ceremony of the _confarreatio_ was necessary to constitute _gentilitas_ for the child. Later any form of marriage sufficed, as it had doubtless always done in the case of the plebeian clans. The child, in accordance with the patriarchal principle, belonged to the clan of his father.