gens. At Athens, again, we may see a trace of the government of the village community surviving in the ἄρχων τοῦ γένους, or head of the gens, who was at the same time its chief priest. And as regards the common tenure of land, though we have no evidence from Athens, we have some reason to believe that even this characteristic of the village community survived for a considerable time in the Roman gens; but the evidence for this view, which has been brought together by Mommsen, is too complicated to be inserted here.[1]
We see then that the two leading ideas of the village community, those of kinship by blood (real or assumed) and of a common worship, are also found in the gentes of Rome and Athens; and further, that there is some ground for believing that the form of government and the method of land-tenure were originally the same both in gens and village. And as we can discover no other origin for the gentes and γένη, we are justified in concluding that they are really survivals of associations which existed before the State came into existence, i.e. of some form of village community. They survived into the life of the State, and even to the very end of it, because the ties of kinship and religion could not be dissolved among them, and were strong enough to hold them firmly
- ↑ For the ἄρχων τοῦ γένους see the new edition of Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities, i. 906; and for the common cultivation of land by Roman gentes, Mommsen, Hist. of Rome, i. 193; Laveleye, Primitive Property, p. 164 foll., criticised by F. de Coulanges, op. cit. p. 100 foll.
