orship of the family deities, and
thus the family would represent a kind of half-way house between the age
of magic and all such superstitions, and the age of the rigid
regulation of worship by the law of a City-state. By the second
proposition he means that the religious experience of the family is far
simpler, and therefore far less liable to change than that of the State.
Greek forms and ideas of religion, for example, hardly penetrated into
its worship:[133] new deities do not find their way in--the family
experience did not call for them as did that of the State. It may be
said without going beyond the truth that the religion of the family
remained the same in all essentials throughout Roman history, and the
great priesthoods of the State never interfered with it in any such
degree as to affect its vitality.[134]

But in order to understand the religion of the family, we must have some
idea of what the family originally was. When a stock or tribe
(_populus_) after migration took possession of a district, it was beyond
doubt divided into clans, _gentes_, which were the oldest kinship
divisions in Italian society. All members of a clan had the same name,
and were believed to descend from a common ancestor.[135] According to
the later juristic way of putting it, all would be in the _patria
potestas_ of that ancestor supposing that no deaths had ever occurred in
the gens; and, indeed, the idea that the gens is immortal in spite of
the deaths of individuals is one which constitutes it as a permanent
entity, and gives it a quasi-religious sanction. For primitive religion,
as has been well said, disbelieves in death; most of the lower races
believe both in a qualified immortality and in the non-reality or
unnaturalness of death.[136] In regard to the kinship of a clan, death
at any rate has no effect: the bond of union never breaks.

Now a little reflection will show that a clan or gens of this kind might
be maintained intact in a nomadic state, or during any number of
migrations; it is, in fact, manifestly appropriate to such a mobile
condition of society, and expresses its natural need of union; and when
the final settlement occurs, this body of kin will hold together in the
process, whether or no it has smaller divisions within it. We may be
certain that this was the one essential kin-division of the Latin stock
when it settled in Latium, and all through Roman history it continues
so, a permanent entity though familie