e gentile name_ who were not in any
way disqualified. {267} Thus, in America, or Australia, or Africa, all
persons bearing the same totem name belong to that totem kin. Festus
defines members of a gens as persons of the same stock and same family
name. Varro says (in illustration of the relationships of words and
cases) 'Ab AEmilio homines orti AEmilii sunt gentiles.' The two former
definitions answer to the conception of a totem kin, which is united by
its family name and belief in identity of origin. Varro adds the
element, in the Roman gens, of common descent from one male ancestor.
Such was the conception of the gens in historical times. It was in its
way an association of kinsfolk, real or supposed. According to the Laws
of the Twelve Tables the gentiles inherited the property of an intestate
man without agnates, and had the custody of lunatics in the same
circumstances. The gens had its own sacellum or chapel, and its own
sacra or religious rites. The whole gens occasionally went into mourning
when one of its members was unfortunate. It would be interesting if it
could be shown that the sacra were usually examples of ancestor-worship,
but the faint indications on the subject scarcely permit us to assert
this.

On the whole, Sir Henry Maine strongly clings to the belief that the gens
commonly had 'a real core of agnatic consanguinity from the very first.'
But he justly recognises the principle of imitation, which induces men to
copy any fashionable institution. Whatever the real origin of the gens,
many gentes were probably copies based on the fiction of common ancestry.

On Sir Henry Maine's system, then, the gens rather proves the constant
existence of recognised male descents among the peoples where it exists.

The opposite theory of the gens is that to which Mr. M'Lennan inclined.
'The composition and organisation of Greek and Roman tribes and
commonwealths cannot well be explained except on the hypothesis that they
resulted from the joint operation, in early times, of exogamy, and the
system of kinship through females only.' {268} 'The gens', he adds, 'was
composed of all the persons in the tribe bearing the same name and
accounted of the same stock. Were the gentes really of different stocks,
as their names would imply and as the people believed? If so, how came
clans of different stocks to be united in the same tribe? . . . How came
a variety of such groups, of different stocks, to coalesce i