6. The Gens and the State in Rome¶
Core Argument¶
In the legendary founding of Rome, the gens was already a modified institution, yet it remained the basic unit of social organisation. The Roman gens was identical in form to the Greek gens, representing a further development of the original structure found among the Iroquois. Its constitution included mutual inheritance within the gens, though father-right excluded female lines, and the Twelve Tables show custom being penetrated by new legal provisions arising from increased wealth and monogamy. Other features included common burial places, common religious rites, an obligation not to marry within the gens (observed in practice but never written law), common land, vestigial mutual protection (the state having assumed this function), the right to bear the gentile name, the right to adopt strangers, and the right to elect and depose chiefs. These rights are the perfect counterpart of the Iroquois gens.
Engels refutes Mommsen’s claim that the Roman gens was endogamous. The sole evidence, a passage from Livy granting a freedwoman the right to marry outside her gens, is misinterpreted. Engels argues that the woman entered her husband’s gens on marriage; the husband could bequeath the right to marry out because the property was his. The gens was originally exogamous.
Ten gentes formed a curia (phratry), ten curiae a tribe, and three tribes constituted the Roman people. The senate comprised the 300 gentile presidents (patres). The assembly of curiae (comitia curiata) elected the rex, who was a military leader and high priest, not an absolute king. Rome lived in a military democracy. The plebs, excluded from the old gentes, curiae, and tribes, could own land and serve in the military but held no office. Their struggle with the populus caused the revolution that ended the old gentile constitution.
The new constitution, attributed to Servius Tullius and modelled on Greek examples, created the comitia centuriata, an assembly based on military service and property, not gentile lineage. The male population liable for arms was divided into six property classes. The cavalry and first class together held 98 of 193 centuries, giving them decisive control. This assembly assumed all political rights of the old comitia curiata, reducing the curiae and gentes to private and religious associations. Four local tribes replaced the three old kinship tribes. Thus, before the monarchy’s abolition, the old blood-based order was destroyed, replaced by a state based on territorial division and wealth, with public power vested in those liable for military service, opposed to slaves and proletarians. The expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus and the replacement of the rex by two consuls furthered this constitution. The subsequent history of the Republic was shaped by struggles between patricians and plebeians, culminating in the merging of the patrician nobility into a class of great landowners and money owners who, using slave labour, ruined the peasantry and opened the door to the emperors and the German barbarians.