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.”[1096] 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.[1097] 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.[1098] 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._