the fully historical epoch were patrilinear. Their whole code of law shows it, and it is an interesting study to note the stages by which, under a system of father-right in its most rigid form, which extended so far as to give a man the power of life and death over his wife and children, feminist ideas won their way to such an extent that for all practical purposes, apart from public life, the woman of the early Empire was but little worse off than her husband or brother. The contention is, not that all these facts have been misinterpreted, but that they do not show the whole picture, and that somewhere in the complex Roman state there was a stratum, or part of a stratum, which was matrilinear.[1] The search for this stratum has led investigators into many quarters, and mother-right has been looked for among the patricians generally, in the royal and the imperial families, and especially in that miscellaneous body, the Plebs.
(I.) It has been held that certain legends point to the existence, in times not so remote but that some memory of them survived among antiquarians, of matrilinear customs in the original stock of Latium. Here much stress is laid[2] upon a passage in Vergil, Aen. xi. 336-342, which I translate in full:
- ↑ The writer, who declines to be drawn at present into any elaborate discussion of the make-up of the Roman people, is of opinion that the following, practically the ancient account, is the true one: a strong but relatively not very numerous body, containing it may be Sabine elements, but not wholly Sabine, as its non-labialising language shows, makes up the Patricians; attached to these is, not a second, conquered community, but a number of broken men, exiles from other states, dispossessed inhabitants of the land, and so forth, who join themselves as clients to the great Patrician houses. These are the Plebs, and it was not until relatively late times that they began to have any political consciousness at all, or to consider themselves in any way as a unity. Hence all original public institutions are purely Patrician, whether they be religious or secular.
- ↑ Ridgeway, Who were the Romans? p. 36. "Tum Drances idem infensus, quem gloria Tumi | obliqua inuidia et stimulis agitabat amaris | largus opum et lingua melior, sed frigida bello | dextera, consiliis habitus non futtilis auclor, | seditione potens (genus huic materna superbum | nobilitas dabat, incertum de patre ferebat) | surgit," &c.
