FAMILY (Lat. familia). Though we are in the habit of regarding the life of anti quity, and more particularly that of Greece, as less domestic than that of Christian Europe (and probably with reason), the idea of the family or house (Gr. oilths), as the nucleus of society, as the political unit, was there very early developed. Aristotle speaks of it as the foundation. of the state, and quotes Hesiod to the effect that the original family consisted of wik and the laboring ox, which held, as he says, to the poor the position of the slave (Polit. i. 1). The complete Greek family of the man and his wife and his slave; the two latter, Aristotle says, never having been confounded in the same class by the Greeks, as by the barbarians (lb.). In this form, the family was recognized as the model of the monarchy, the earliest, as well as the simplest, form of government. When, by the birth and growth of children, and the death of the father, the original family is broken up into several, the heads of which stand to each other in a co-ordinate rather than a strictly subordinate position, we have in these the prototypes of the more advanced forms of government. Each brother, by becoming the head of a separate family, becomes a member of an aristocracy, or the embodiment of a portion of the sovereign power, as it exists in the separate elements of which a constitutional or a democratic government is composed.
But at Rome the idea of the family was still more closely entwined with that of life in the state, and the natural power of the father was taken as the basis not only of the whole political, but of the whole social, organization of the people. In its more special aspects, the Roman idea of the family will be explained under PATRIA POTESTAS. Here it will be sufficient to state that with the Romans, as with the Greeks, it included the slave as well as the wife, and ultimately the children; a fact which indeed is indicated by the etymology of the word, which belongs to the same root as famulus, a slave. In
its widest sense, the families included even the inanimate possessions of the citizen,who, as the head of a house, was his own master (suijuris); and Gains (ii. 102) uses it as synonymous with patrimonium. In general, however, it was confined to persons—the wife, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, if such there were, and slaves of a full-blown Roman citizen. Sometimes, too, it signified all those who had sprung from a common stock, and would have been members of the family, and under the potestas of a common ancestor, had he been alive. See AGNATE. In this sense, of course, the slaves belonging to the different members of the family were not included in it. It was a family, in short, in the sense in which we speak of "the royal family," etc., with this difference, that it was possible for an individual to quit it, and to pass into another by adoption. See ADOPTION. Sometimes, again, the word was used with reference to slaves exclusively, and, analogically, to a sect of philosophers, or a body of gladiators. See Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities.
The whole social fabric is based on the grouping of human beings in families; an arrangement which is in harmony with all the conditions and wants of human life, and which tends to foster those habits and affections that are essential to the welfare of mankind. A prosperous community must be an aggregate of happy families; there being little true happiness in the world that is not intimately connected with domestic life. The formal bond of the family is marriage (q.v. : see also POLYGAMY); and an essential condition of its right development seems to be a distinct abode, which shall be not a mere shelter, but a house or home, affording a certain measure of comfort and decency. according to the standard prevalent in the community. See Genius and Design of the _Domestic Constitution, by Rev. Christopher Anderson (Edin. 1820).