I have thus tried to sketch the life of the early Latin family in its relations with the various manifestations of the Power in the universe. We have seen enough, I think, to conclude that it had a strong desire to be in right relations with that Power, and to understand its will; but we may doubt whether that desire had as yet become very effective. The circumstances of the life of the Latin farmer were hardly such as to rid him of much of the _religio_ that he had inherited from his wilder ancestors, or had found springing up afresh within him as he contended with the soil, the elements, and the hostile beings surrounding him, animal, human, and spiritual. He is living in an age of transition; he is half-way between the age of magic and a new age of religion and duty. NOTES TO LECTURE IV [131] Frazer, _Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship_, lect. viii. Dr. Frazer finds traces of Mutterrecht only in the succession to the kingship of Alba and Rome, of which the evidence is of course purely legendary. If the legends represent fact in any sense, they point, if I understand him rightly, to a kingship held by a non-Latin race, or, as he calls it, plebeian. Binder, _Die Plebs_, p. 403 foll., believes that the original Latin population, _i.e._ the plebs of later times, lived under Mutterrecht. [132] Aust, _Religion der Roemer_, p. 212. [133] In historical times the household deities were often represented by images of Greek type: _e.g._ the Penates by those of the Dioscuri. Wissowa, _Rel. und Kult._ p. 147, and _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 95 foll., and 289. See also De Marchi, _La Religione nella vita privata_, i. p. 41 foll. and p. 90 foll. [134] De Marchi, _op. cit._ i. 13 foll. In the ordinary and regular religion of the family the State, _i.e._ the pontifices, did not interfere; but they might do so in matters such as the succession of _sacra_, the care of graves, or the fulfilment of vows undertaken by private persons. See Cicero, _de Legibus_, ii. 19. 47. [135] Mucius Scaevola, the great lawyer, defined _gentiles_ as those "qui eodem nomine sunt, qui ab ingenuis oriundi sunt, quorum maiorum nemo servitutem servivit, qui capite non sunt deminuti," Cic. _Topica_, vi. 29. This is the practical view of a lawyer of the last century B.C., and does not take account of the _sacra gentilicia_, which had by that time decayed or passed into the care of _sodalitates_: Marquardt, p. 132 foll.; De Marchi, ii. p. 3 foll. The notion of descent from a common ancestor is of course ideal, but none the less a factor in the life of the gens; it crops up, _e.g._, in Virgil, _Aen._ v. 117, 121, and Servius _ad loc._ [136] Crawley, _The Tree of Life_, p. 47. [137] For the alleged extinction of the gens Potitia, and the legend connected with it, Livy i. 7, Festus 237.