The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Illustrated)

By this means Servius introduced an entirely new principle into Roman society; wealth began to indicate rank, as religion had done before.

The effect of this mixing of the most diverse nations was, that from the beginning Rome was related to all the peoples that it knew. It could call itself Latin with the Latins, Sabine with the Sabines, Etruscan with the Etruscans, and Greek with the Greeks.

The ancients said their laws came from the gods. The Cretans attributed their laws, not to Minos, but to Jupiter. The Lacedaemonians believed that their legislator was not Lycurgus, but Apollo. The Romans believed that Numa wrote under the dictation of one of the most powerful divinities of ancient Italy — the goddess Egeria. The Etruscans had rece

Marriage, then, was obligatory. Its aim was not pleasure; its principal object was not the union of two beings who were pleased with each other, and who wished to go united through the pleasures and the trials of life. The effect of marriage, in the eyes of religion and of the laws, was the union of two beings in the same domestic worship, in order

According to the oldest belief of the Italians and Greeks, the soul did not go into a foreign world to pass its second existence; it remained near men, and continued to live under ground.1

This priest of the public hearth bore the name of king. Sometimes they gave him other titles. As he was especially the priest of the prytaneum, the Greeks preferred to call him the prytane; sometimes also they called him the archon. Under these different names of king, prytane, and archon we are to see a personage who is, above all, the chief of th

Everywhere these tyrants, with more or less violence, had the same policy. A tyrant of Corinth one day asked advice concerning government of a tyrant of Miletus. The latter, in reply, struck off the heads of grain that were higher than the others. Thus their rule of conduct was to cut down the high heads, and to strike at the aristocracy, while dep

Before the tomb there was an altar for the sacrifices, as before the temples of the gods.19

The belief of primitive ages, as we find it in the Vedas, and as we find vestiges of it in all Greek and Roman law, was that the reproductive power resided exclusively in the father. The father alone possessed the mysterious principle of existence, and transmitted the spark of life.