their sisters; for that sister’s, not brother’s children are meant by the ambiguous ἀδελφῶν of the Greek and the vague alterius of the Latin, seems clear from the explanation (quite wrong) given in both, that Matuta is no other than Ino, daughter of Kadmos, who was unfortunate in her own children, but proved a good nurse to Dionysos, the child of her sister Semele.
But what does it all mean? It is easy to say, as Wissowa[1] does, that this is “a reminiscence of an earlier system of kinship, different from that of later times,” but what system? There have been oddities of law, Greek and English, which made a mother no kin to her children; but an arrangement under which her closest kin were her nephews and nieces is yet to be discovered. My suggestion, which I make for what it is worth, is that here and there (as G.B.[1] vii. i. p. 36) we hear of the aunt as the attendant of a girl at puberty; but that Mater Matuta had anything to do with puberty-rites, or indeed that there was anything considerable of the kind for her to have to do with at Rome, is a mere guess.
Equally insoluble on sociological grounds are the tabus on the names of husband and daughter in sacris Cereris, vouched for by Servius on Aen. iv. 58; the reason for the former appears to me to be simply that even the name of a male was excluded from this women’s rite, and the names of near relations specified to show, a fortiori, that no others were to be spoken of. In any case, the rite is pretty certainly Greek.
(III.) Admitting, however, that the patricians were patrilinear, it has been suggested that the plebeians were not, and that that formed the great stumbling-block to the union of the orders, especially by way of intermarriage, in the old days. Setting aside the objection that it need not have kept them apart for a moment, seeing that matrilinear Nayar girls mate freely with their patrilinear
