s may die.[137] Every Roman lawyer
will recognise this fact as true, and I need not dwell on it now.

It is when the gens has settled upon the land that the family begins to
appear as a fact of importance for our purpose. Such operations as the
building of a permanent house, the clearing and cultivation of a piece
of land, can best be carried out by a smaller union than the gens, and
this smaller union is ready to hand in the shape of a section of the
gens comprising the living descendants of a _living_ ancestor, whether
of two, three, or even four generations.[138] This union, clearly
visible to mortal eye, and realisable in every-day work, settles
together in one house, tends its own cattle and sheep, cultivates its
own land with the help of such dependants as it owns, slave or other,
and is known by the word _familia_. This famous word, so far as we know,
does not contain the idea of kinship, at any rate as its leading
connotation; it is inseparable from the idea of land-settlement,[139]
and is therefore essentially _das Hauswesen_, the house itself, with the
persons living in it, free or servile, and with their land and other
property, all governed and administered by the paterfamilias, the master
of the household, who is always the oldest living male ancestor. The
familia is thus an economic unit, developed out of the gens, which is a
unit of kin and little more. And thus the religion of the familia will
be a religion of practical utility, of daily work, of struggle with
perils to which the shepherd and the tiller of the soil are liable; it
is not the worship of an idea of kinship expressed in some dimly
conceived common ancestor; the familia, as I hope to show, had no common
ancestor who could be the object of worship, except that of the gens
from which it had sprung. The life of the familia was a realisation of
the present and its needs and perils, without the stimulus to take much
thought about the past, or indeed about the future; for it, sufficient
for the day was the evil thereof; for what had been and what was to come
it could look to the gens to which it owed its existence. But in
practical life the gens was not of much avail; and instead of it,
exactly as we might expect, we find an artificial union of familiae, a
union of which the essential thing is not the idea of kin, but that of
the land occupied, and known all over Italy by the word _pagus_.[140]
Before I go on to describe the religion of the family,