house, or one in which her father had no voice, or in which her children were not legally the children of her husband. Marquardt's suggestion that all the less formal types of marriage were plebeian inventions at a time when the patrician-made law paid little attention to their doings has much to recommend it; but the invention of a quasi-civil type of marriage proves nothing about original social organisation, but merely that secular ideas of jurisprudence were coming into being, as we know they did.
(IV.) But if no evidence for mother-right can be found in any definite section of the population, may we not still look for sporadic cases of it among particular families or clans? This, coupled with the numerous fairly good traditions to the effect that various great houses were immigrants, would warrant us in assuming a matrilinear stock somewhere in Italy outside Etruria. Now we know that some of the noble houses had peculiar ways of their own; for instance, the Cornelii inhumed their dead, whereas most people burned them, down to the early part of the last century b.c.
A daring attempt, showing, I am afraid, more zeal than knowledge, has been made to show that the great Iulio-Claudian house, at the time of the early Empire, really did use this system, and showed it by its line of succession.[1] No Iulio-Claudian emperor was succeeded by his son; the line ran thus:
(i) Augustus, m. (1) Scribonia, by whom he had issue, a daughter, the elder Iulia. (2) Livia Drusilla, mother by her former husband, Ti. Claudius Nero, of
(ii) Tiberius Caesar Augustus, m. (1) Vipsania Agrippina, and had issue, Drusus Caesar, who predeceased his father, but left issue, none of whom was ever emperor.
- ↑ J.R.A.I. vol. xlv. (1915), pp. 317 sqq. With the parts of this article dealing with other civilisations than that of Rome I am not now concerned. The author further assumes the Iulio-Claudians to have been a royal house like the Pharaohs; an idea contradicted by the whole history of the period.
