community are always so bound up with its
social organisation that a satisfactory knowledge of the one is
practically impossible without some knowledge of the other.
Unfortunately there is no field in Roman history where theories are so
abundant and facts so rare as in regard to the question of the early
social organisation. But without coming into conflict with any of the
rival theories we may make at least the following statements. In the
main the community was fairly uniform and homogeneous, there were no
great social extremes and no conspicuous foreign element, so that each
individual, had he stopped to analyse his social position, would have
found himself in four distinct relationships: a relationship to himself
as an individual; to his family; to the group of families which formed
his clan (_gens_); and finally to the state. We may go a step further on
safe ground and assert that the least important of these relations was
that to himself, and the most important that to his family. The unit of
early Roman social life was not the individual but the family, and in
the most primitive ideas of life after death it is the family which has
immortality, not the individual. The state is not a union of individuals
but of families. The very psychological idea of the individual seems to
have taken centuries to develop, and to have reached its real
significance only under the empire. Of the four elements therefore we
have established the pre-eminence of the family and the importance of
the state as based on the family idea; the individual may be disregarded
in this early period, and there is left only the clan, which however
offers a difficult problem. The family and the state were destined to
hold their own, merely exchanging places in the course of time, so that
the state came first and the family second; the individual was to grow
into ever increasing importance, but the clan is already dying when
history begins. It is a pleasant theory and one that has a high degree
of probability that there may have been a time when the clan was to the
family what the state is when history begins, and that when the state
arose out of a union of various clans, the immediate allegiance of each
family was gradually alienated from its clan and transferred to the
state, so that the clan gave up its life in order that the state, the
child of its own creation, might live. If this be so, we can see why the
social importance of the clan ceases so ear