The History of Rome, Book I: The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the MonarchyMommsen, Theodor
History
The History of Rome, Book I: The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the Monarchy
Mommsen, Theodor
Rome -- History
All that may be called the patriarchal element in the state rested
in Greece and Italy on the same foundations. Under this head comes
especially the moral and decorous arrangement of social life,(9)
which enjoined monogamy on the husband and visited with heavy
penalties the infidelity of the wife, and which recognized the
equality of the sexes and the sanctity of marriage in the high
position which it assigned to the mother within the domestic circle.
On the other hand the rigorous development of the marital and still
more of the paternal authority, regardless of the natural rights of
persons as such, was a feature foreign to the Greeks and peculiarly
Italian; it was in Italy alone that moral subjection became
transformed into legal slavery. In the same way the principle of
the slave being completely destitute of legal rights--a principle
involved in the very nature of slavery--was maintained by the Romans
with merciless rigour and carried out to all its consequences;
whereas among the Greeks alleviations of its harshness were early
introduced both in practice and in legislation, the marriage of
slaves, for example, being recognized as a legal relation.
On the household was based the clan, that is, the community of the
descendants of the same progenitor; and out of the clan among the
Greeks as well as the Italians arose the state. But while under
the weaker political development of Greece the clan-bond maintained
itself as a corporate power in contradistinction to that of
the state far even into historical times, the state in Italy made
its appearance at once complete, in so far as in presence of its
authority the clans were quite neutralized and it exhibited an
association not of clans, but of citizens. Conversely, again, the
individual attained, in presence of the clan, an inward independence
and freedom of personal development far earlier and more completely
in Greece than in Rome--a fact reflected with great clearness in
the Greek and Roman proper names, which, originally similar, came
to assume very different forms. In the more ancient Greek names
the name of the clan was very frequently added in an adjective form
to that of the individual; while, conversely, Roman scholars were
aware that their ancestors bore originally only one name, the later
-praenomen-. But while in Greece the adjectival clan-name early
disappeared, it became, among the Italians generally and not merely
among the Romans, the principal name; and the distinctive individual
name, the -praenomen-, became subordinate. It seems as if the small
and ever diminishing number and the meaningless character of the
Italian, and particularly of the Roman, individual names, compared
with the luxuriant and poetical fulness of those of the Greeks,
were intended to illustrate the truth that it was characteristic
of the one nation to reduce all to a level, of the other to promote
the free development of personality. The association in communities
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