Gens
group · 2 works · 4 mentions · 6 anchored passages
Clan · Clans · Gentes · clan organization · gens · gentiles · the Gens
in the texts
Institutes of Roman Law
The Roman clan organization, based on patriarchal descent through the male line, representing the earliest unit of legal organization before the State, with rights of guardianship, land ownership, and inheritance.
It is even possible that a further divergence of practice may have existed in the most primitive society, or societies, out of which the City and Monarchy of Rome developed—that a considerable amount of autonomy in legal relations may have existed in the Clans (Gentes) and Villages (Vici), out of which the earliest Rome was formed.
In the first place, the Patricians maintained that they alone formed Gentes, and the condition of being a member of a Gens, or Gentilis, was that the man who made the claim should be able to point to a perfectly free ancestry.
The organization of the Gens was based on the patriarchal idea in its extreme form:
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
Morgan's term for a body of kinsmen and kinswomen who never intermarry, bearing a common mark of kinship.
Both hold that a definite stage of human development is marked by the appearance of a group which Morgan calls the ‘Gens’ and McLennan the ‘exogamous totem-kin,’ a body of kinsmen and kinswomen never intermarrying and witnessing to their kinship by a common mark on their persons.
Again, above the Agnatic Kindred, there was yet another and a more extensive group, of which the origin was lost in antiquity, but which was believed by the Romans themselves to have been formed as the Agnati were formed—that is, by descent through males alone from a real common male ancestor.