By Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Willard Small
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Additional resources for The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome
Example text
74 Marriage is, therefore, a grave step for the young girl, and not less grave for the husband; for this religion requires that one shall have been born near the sacred fire, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, 33 in order to have the right to sacrifice to it. And yet he is now about to bring a stranger to this hearth; with her he will perform the mysterious ceremonies of his worship; he will reveal the rites and formulas which are the patrimony of his family. There is nothing more precious than this heritage; these gods, these rites, these hymns which he has received from his fathers, are what protect him in this life, and promise him riches, happiness, and virtue.
The ancient Greek language has a very significant word to designate a family. It is , a word which signifies, literally, that which is near a hearth. A family was a group of persons whom religion permitted to invoke the same sacred fire, and to offer the funeral repast to the same ancestors. Chapter II: Marriage. The first institution that the domestic religion established, probably, was marriage. We must remark that this worship of the sacred fire and of ancestors, which was transmitted from male to male, did not belong, after all, exclusively to man; woman had a part in it.
98 The birth of a daughter did not fulfil the object of the marriage; indeed, the daughter could not continue the worship, for the reason that on the day of her marriage she renounced the family and worship of her father, and belonged to the family and religion of her husband. The family, like the worship, was continued only by the males — a capital fact, the consequences of which we shall see farther on. It was, therefore, the son who was looked for, and who was necessary; he it was whom the family, the ancestors, and the sacred fire demanded.