ROMAN, a name applied to the rulers and people of ancient Rome, who succeeded the Greeks in their Asiatic territories. Tho Romans conquered most parts of Europe, the northern part of Africa, Syria, and Palestine, and left last ing improvements in tho roads and education of tho countries which they occupied. Tho official language WILS Latin, and tho modern Romance languages, viz. Italian, Wallachian, Provencal, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, are closely related to each other, all derived frorn Latin. According to tho author of the Periplus of the Red Sea, Aden • had been destroyed by the Romans shortly before his time ; and Dean Vincent is of opinion that tho Ciesar in whose reign this event took place was the emperor Claudius. The object of destroying so flourishing a port is not difficult to determine. From the time that the Romans first visited Arabia under /Elius Gallus, they had always maintained a foot ing on the shores of the Red Sea, and it is pro bable that Claudius, being desirous of appropiiating tho Indian trade to the Romans, sought a pretext of quarrel with Aden, in order that he might by its destruction divert the Indian trade to the ports of Egypt. Valerian, a Roman emperor, having b6en conquered by Shalpur in a fort near Antioch, was led into Susiana,, where the Persian monarch, undertaking some extensive structures (at Shushter), obliged his captive to assist in the work, by procuring experienced artists froin Rome or Greece, and he promised that liberty should be the reward of the co-operation. The task was performed, and Shahpur observed his promise, but first cut off the Roman emperor's nose, to brand him with an indelible mark of captivity.
Among the Hindus of India are many social customs similar to those of the ancient Romans. Among the religious rites of the ancient Romans, their lustral ceremonies and their worship of 'Priapus were the same with those of the modern Hindus. Tho village community of India, also, is at once an organized patriarchal society and an assemblage of eo-proprietors. The personal rela tions to each other of the men who compose it aro indistinguishably confounded with their proprie tary rights, and to tho attempts of British func tionaries to separate the two may be assigned some of the most formidable miscarriages of British Indian administration. So soon as a son of a Hindu is born, he acquires a vested interest in his father's substance ; and the domain thus held in common is sometimes administered by an elected manager, but rnoro generally by tho eldest representative of tho eldest line of the stock. The village community, however, is more than a body of co-proprietors ; it is an organized society, having its staff of officers for internal govern ment. This seems the type of the Gens or House of the ancient Roman.s ; and although both in
India and at Rome each community was assumed to have sprung from two common anceators, the fact was that diet° houses anti villages were recruited by new members, who were admitted by adoption, or by some analogous proem& The researches of Ifaxthausen and Tengoborski have lately proved that the Russian village* aro or ganized coinmunities of a similar character. And the same principle seems to prevail in Servia, in Croatia, and tho Austrian Sclavonia--in fact, wherever feudality has had small influence, and wherever there is the nearest affinity between the western and tho eastern world. The colonists of New Zealand have been long engaged in dis putes with tho natives, which turned upon the precise point under discussion. While the Colonial Government insisted that any member of a tribe is entitled to sell his land to whomsoever he pleases, tho natives 'insist that although one member may transfer it to any other member of the same tribe, he cannot transfer it to any person who is not a member without the consent of the whole tribe, because of the existence of what haa been called a tribal right. Thus showing that in tho mind of a New Zealander the idea of joint ownership precedes that of separate ownership. By tho Roman law, tho father was certainly re garded rather as a steward than a proprietor of his goods, and accordingly was not, at first, per mitted to dispose of his property aa he pleased after his death, and on many of these points the Roman law and tho Hindu law assimilates. The Romans generally burned, but they sometimes buried their dead, as Hindus now do ; children who died in infancy were interred in tho immediate neighbour hood of their former homes. Their sepulchral urns 'with the ashes of tho dead were commonly buried about two feet below the surface, and their me morial stones were often inscribed. They used the sarcophagus or massive stone coffin, and also the tumulus or barrow. The Romans bore their dead with much lamentation to the funeral pile, on which, aft,er being lighted, they cast the robes and arms of the deceased, as well as the slaughtered bodies of his favourite animals. The Romans had peculiar modes of divination,—their dies fasti, nefasti, their auguries, ete. Amongst the Hindus are the village gods, of which each village adores two or three, as its special guardians, but some times as its dreaded persecutors and tormentor& They bear some resemblance to the penates or tares of the Romans ; and, like them, they aro sometimes tho recognised god of the whole nation, either in their generally received characters, or in local incarnations, but much oftener they aro tho spirits of deceased persons, who have attracted the notice of tho neighbourhood.