The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (classic novels .txt) 📕

raised in the tribal territory by conscription. The local tribe furthermore furnished, equipped and fully manned five war vessels. It was designated by the name of the Attic hero who was its guardian deity. It elected fifty councilmen into the council of Athens.

Thus we arrive at the Athenian state, governed by a council of five hundred elected by and representing the ten tribes and subject to the vote of the public meeting, where every citizen could enter and vote. Archons and other officials attended to the different departments of administration and justice.

By this new constitution and by the admission of a large number of aliens, partly freed slaves, partly immigrants, the organs of gentile constitution were displaced in public affairs. They became mere private and religious clubs. But their moral influence, the traditional conceptions and views of the old gentile period, survived for a long time and expired only gradually. This was evident in another state institution.

We have seen that an essential mark of the state consists in a public power of coërcion divorced from the mass of the people. Athens possessed at that time only a militia and a navy equipped and manned directly by the people. These afforded protection against external enemies and held the slaves in check, who at that time already made up the large majority of the population. For the citizens, this coërcive power at first only existed in the shape of the police, which is as old as the state. The innocent Frenchmen of the 18th century, therefore, had the habit of speaking not of civilized, but of policed nations (nations policées). The Athenians, then, provided for a police in their new state, a veritable "force" of bowmen on foot and horseback. This police force consisted—of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than lending himself to such an ignominious service. That was still a sign of the old gentile spirit. The state could not exist without a police, but as yet it was too young and did not command sufficient moral respect to give prestige to an occupation that necessarily appeared ignominious to the old gentiles.

How well this state, now completed in its main outlines, suited the social condition of the Athenians was apparent by the rapid growth of wealth, commerce and industry. The distinction of classes on which the social and political institutions are resting was no longer between nobility and common people, but between slaves and freemen, aliens and citizens. At the time of the greatest prosperity the whole number of free Athenian citizens, women and children included, amounted to about 90,000; the slaves of both sexes numbered 365,000 and the aliens—foreigners and freed slaves—45,000. Per capita of each adult citizen there were, therefore, at least eighteen slaves and more than two aliens. The great number of slaves is explained by the fact that many of them worked together in large factories under supervision. The development of commerce and industry brought about an accumulation and concentration of wealth in a few hands. The mass of the free citizens were impoverished and had to face the choice of either competing with their own labor against slave labor, which was considered ignoble and vile, besides promising little success, or to be ruined. Under the prevailing circumstances they necessarily chose the latter course and being in the majority they ruined the whole Attic state. Not democracy caused the downfall of Athens, as the European glorifiers of princes and lickspittle schoolmasters would have us believe, but slavery ostracizing the labor of the free citizen.

The origin of the state among the Athenians presents a very typical form of state organization. For it took place without any marring external interference or internal obstruction—the usurpation of Pisistratos left no trace of its short duration. It shows the direct rise of a highly developed form of a state, the democratic republic, out of gentile society. And finally, we are sufficiently acquainted with all the essential details of the process.

CHAPTER VI. GENS AND STATE IN ROME.

The legend of the foundation of Rome sets forth that the first colonization was undertaken by a number of Latin gentes (one hundred, so the legend says) united into one tribe. A Sabellian tribe (also said to consist of one hundred gentes) soon followed, and finally a third tribe of various elements, but again numbering one hundred gentes, joined them. The whole tale reveals at the first glance that little more than the gens was borrowed from reality, and that the gens itself was in certain cases only an offshoot of an old mother gens still existing at home. The tribes bear the mark of artificial composition on their foreheads; still they were made up of kindred elements and after the model of the old spontaneous, not artificial tribe. At the same time it is not impossible that a genuine old tribe formed the nucleus of every one of these three tribes. The connecting link, the phratry, contained ten gentes and was called curia. Hence there were thirty curiae.

The Roman gens is recognized as an institution identical with the Grecian gens. The Grecian gens being a continuation of the same social unit, the primordial form of which we found among the American Indians, the same holds naturally good of the Roman gens, and we can be more concise in its treatment.

At least during the most ancient times of the city, the Roman gens had the following constitution:

1. Mutual right of inheritance for gentiles; the wealth remained in the gens. Paternal law being already in force in the Roman the same as in the Grecian gens, the offspring of female lineage were excluded. According to the law of the twelve tablets, the oldest written law of Rome known to us, the natural children had the first title to the estate; in case no natural children existed, the agnati (kin of male lineage) took their place; and last in line came the gentiles. In all cases the property remained in the gens. Here we observe the gradual introduction of new legal provisions, caused by increased wealth and monogamy, into the gentile practice. The originally equal right of inheritance of the gentiles was first limited in practice to the agnati, no doubt at a very remote date, and afterwards to the natural children and their offspring of male lineage. Of course this appears in the reverse order on the twelve tablets.

2. Possession of a common burial ground. The patrician gens Claudia, on immigrating into Rome from Regilli, was assigned to a separate lot of land and received its own burial ground in the city. As late as the time of Augustus, the head of Varus, who had been killed in the Teutoburger Wald, was brought to Rome and interred in the gentilitius tumulus; hence his gens (Quinctilia) still had its own tomb.

3. Common religious rites. These are well-known under the name of sacra gentilitia.

4. Obligation not to intermarry in the gens. It seems that this was never a written law in Rome, but the custom remained. Among the innumerable names of Roman couples preserved for us there is not a single case, where husband and wife had the same gentile name. The law of inheritance proves the same rule. By marrying, a woman loses her agnatic privileges, discards her gens, and neither she nor her children have any title to her father's estate nor to that of his brothers, because otherwise the gens of her father would lose his property. This rule has a meaning only then when the woman is not permitted to marry a gentile.

5. A common piece of land. In primeval days this was always obtained when the tribal territory was first divided. Among the Latin tribes we find the land partly in the possession of the tribe, partly of the gens, and partly of the households that could hardly represent single families at such an early date. Romulus is credited with being the first to assign land to single individuals, about 2.47 acres (two jugera) per head. But later on we still find some land in the hands of the gentes, not to mention the state land, around which turns the whole internal history of the republic.

6. Duty of the gentiles to mutually protect and assist one another. Written history records only remnants of this law. The Roman state from the outset manifested such superior power, that the duty of protection against injury devolved upon it. When Appius Claudius was arrested, his whole gens, including his personal enemies, dressed in mourning. At the time of the second Punic war the gentes united for the purpose of ransoming their captured gentiles. The senate vetoed this.

7. Right to bear the gentile name. This was in force until the time of the emperors. Freed slaves were permitted to assume the gentile name of their former master, but this did not bestow any gentile rights on them.

8. Right of adopting strangers into the gens. This was done by adoption into the family (the same as among the Indians) which brought with it the adoption into the gens.

9. The right to elect and depose chiefs is not mentioned anywhere. But inasmuch as during the first years of Rome's existence all offices were filled by election or nomination, from the king downward, and as the curiae elected also their own priests, we are justified in assuming the same in regard to gentile chiefs (principes)—no matter how well established the rule of choosing the candidates from the same family have been.

Such were the constitutional rights of a Roman gens. With the exception of the completed transition to paternal law, they are the true image of the rights and duties of an Iroquois gens. Here, also, "the Iroquois is still plainly visible."

How confused the ideas of our historians, even the most prominent of them, are when it comes to a discussion of the Roman gens, is shown by the following example: In Mommsen's treatise on the Roman family names of the Republican and Augustinian era (Römische Forschungen, Berlin, 1864, Vol. I.) he writes: "The gentile name was not only borne by all male gentiles including all adopted and wards, except, of course, the slaves, but also by the women.... The tribe (so Mommsen translates gens) is a common organization resulting from a common—actual, assumed or even invented—ancestor and united by common rites, burial grounds and customs of inheritance. All free individuals, hence women also, may and must claim membership in them. But the definition of the gentile name of the married women offers some difficulty. This is indeed obviated, as long as women were not permitted to marry any one but their gentiles. And we have proofs that for a long time the women found it much more difficult to marry outside than inside of the gens. This right of marrying outside, the gentis enuptio, was still bestowed as a personal privilege and reward during the sixth century.... But wherever such outside marriages occurred in primeval times, the woman must have been transferred to the tribe of her husband. Nothing is more certain than that by the old religious marriage woman was completely adopted into the legal and sacramental group of her husband and divorced from her own. Who does not know that the married woman releases her active and passive right of inheritance in favor of her gentiles, but enters the legal group of her husband, her children and his gentiles? And if her husband adopts her as his child into his family, how can she remain separated from his gens?" (Pages 9-11.)

Here Mommsen asserts that the Roman women belonging to a certain gens were originally free to marry only within their gens; the Roman gens, according to him, was therefore endogamous, not exogamous. This opinion which contradicts the evidence of all other nations,