it is necessary
to put the familia into its proper relation with this territorial union.

The pagus is the earliest Italian administrative unit of which we know
anything; a territory, of which the essential feature was the boundary,
not any central point within the boundary. In all probability it was
originally the land on which a gens had settled, though settlement
produces changes, and the land of gens and pagus was not identical in
later times. But within this boundary line, of which we shall hear
something more presently, how were the component parts, the familiae of
the gens, settled down on the land? Of the village community so familiar
to us in Teutonic countries, there is no certain trace in Latium.
_Vicus_, the only word which might suggest it, is identical with the
Greek [Greek: oikos], a house; later it is used for houses standing
together, or for a street in a town. But the vicus in the country has
left no trace of itself as a distinct administrative union like our
village community; the vico-magistri of the Roman city were urban
officers; and what is more important, we know of no religious festivals
of the vicus, like those of the pagus, of which there are well-attested
records. The probability then is that the unit within the pagus was not
the village but the homestead, and that these stood at a distance from
each other, as they do in Celtic countries, not united together in a
village, and each housing a family group working its own land and owning
its own cattle.[141] The question of the amount and the tenure of the
land of this group is a very difficult one, into which it is not
necessary to enter closely here. There can, however, be no doubt that it
possessed in its own right a small piece of garden ground (_heredium_),
and also an allotment of land in the arable laid out by the settlers in
common--_centuriatus ager_; whether the ownership of this was vested in
the individual paterfamilias or in the gens as a whole, does not greatly
matter for our purposes.[142] Lastly, as it is certain that the familia
owned cattle and sheep, we may be sure that it enjoyed the right of
common pasture on the land not divided up for tillage.

We see all this through a mist, and a mist that is not likely ever to
lift; but yet the outlines of the picture are clear enough to give us
the necessary basis for a study of the religion of the familia. The
religious points, if I may use the expression--those points, that is,
whic