ily property. The power of the house-master--even apart from
the fact that it appeared in operation only within the house--was
of a transient, and in some degree of a representative, character.
Wife and child did not exist merely for the house-father's sake in
the sense in which property exists only for the proprietor, or in
which the subjects of an absolute state exist only for the king;
they were the objects indeed of a legal right on his part, but they
had at the same time capacities of right of their own; they were
not things, but persons. Their rights were dormant in respect of
exercise, simply because the unity of the household demanded that
it should be governed by a single representative; but when the
master of the household died, his sons at once came forward as its
masters and now obtained on their own account over the women and
children and property the rights hitherto exercised over these by
the father. On the other hand the death of the master occasioned
no change in the legal position of the slave.

Family and Clan (-Gens-)

So strongly was the unity of the family realized, that even the
death of the master of the house did not entirely dissolve it.
The descendants, who were rendered by that occurrence independent,
regarded themselves as still in many respects an unity; a principle
which was made use of in arranging the succession of heirs and in
many other relations, but especially in regulating the position
of the widow and unmarried daughters. As according to the older
Roman view a woman was not capable of having power either over
others or over herself, the power over her, or, as it was in this
case more mildly expressed, the "guardianship" (-tutela-) remained
with the house to which she belonged, and was now exercised in the
room of the deceased house-master by the whole of the nearest male
members of the family; ordinarily, therefore, by sons over their
mother and by brothers over their sisters. In this sense the
family, once founded, endured unchanged till the male stock of its
founder died out; only the bond of connection must of course have
become practically more lax from generation to generation, until
at length it became impossible to prove the original unity. On
this, and on this alone, rested the distinction between family and
clan, or, according to the Roman expression, between -agnati- and
-gentiles-. Both denoted the male stock; but the family embraced
only those individuals