and hypergamous Brahmin neighbours, let us look at the two main points which are put forward.
(1) In the year 309/445 the tribune Canuleius proposed among other reforms to allow intermarriage between patricians and plebeians. This, Livy tells us, roused a storm of patrician opposition, and he gives us his idea of the arguments brought against it.[1] The new law, declare the opponents of the tribune, means nothing but confusion and savagery. "What do these mixed marriages amount to but a general, almost a bestial, mating of plebs and patricians? The son of such a union would not know of what blood he was, what rites he should follow, but would be half noble, half commoner." To this and much more of the same sort, Canuleius answers, that no one compels a patrician to give his daughter to a plebeian or anyone else, and that the right of inter-marriage is a part of common citizenship, so that to deny it is to say that the plebeian is not a Roman at all. Along with this goes the repeated assertion that the gens with its clan-rites was a patrician institution, unknown to the plebs.[2] Does this not mean (a) that the son of a plebeian mother and a patrician father would be a patrician by father-right, a plebeian by mother-right; (b) that the elaborate system of patrilinear families grouped into patrilinear clans was paralleled among the plebeians by some matrilinear system which in the eyes of the patricians was no system?
In considering the first of these points we must remember the date of our authorities. Not one word of the authentic discussions of the Lex Canuleia has come down to us, and we have only the arguments which a historian writing more than 400 years later thought might reasonably have been used. Now to Livy and his contemporaries, if a man
