This relatively high and stable form of the family among the Greeks and Romarts began early to decay, especially among the Greeks. After the conquest of Greece by Rome the de cay spread rapidly to Roman society. Mar riages began to upon a contract basis and the relationships of the sexes became very unstable. Later Greco-Roman family life was extremely demoralized, and in urban centres, especially in Rome, from the 1st to the 3d cen turies A.D., there was a close approach to a con dition of general promiscuity in sex relations.
Family Life of 'the Ancient Germans. —The family life of the ancient Teutonic tribesman seems to have conformed to the same general type as that of the early Greeks and Romans, only it was much cruder. The patriarchal family existed, but it was much less fully developed, and there were survivals of the maternal system. The wife was regarded, as among all patriarchal peoples, as the prop erty of her husband, who theoretically had the right to sell wife and children. Yet women held a relatively high position as Tacitus, their earliest historian, testifies. There was little polygamy practised, and divorce was very rare. The ancient German family was, then, of a crude but of a relatively pure and stable type.
Effect of Christianity on the Family. — The early Christian Church made one of its first tasks the reconstituting of the family life, which, as we have seen, was de moralized in later Greco-Roman civilization, upon a pure and stable basis. It early sought to limit and abolish divorce. This it practically accomplished about the 12th century A.D., through the recognition of marriage as one of the church sacraments, making marriage again a religious bond. At the same time it endeav ored to lessen prostitution, to put a stop to the exposure of children and to exalt the position of women. In all of these endeavors it was more or less successful. Unfortunately, the
type of family life which it set up, how ever, was patterned after the patriarchal type found among the Hebrews and in early Greece and Rome. Thus women were again subjected and deprived largely of the legal rights which they had won to some extent under Roman law.
This religious authoritative family persisted down to the Reformation, and practically even to very recent times. The Protestant reform ers, however, recognized that marriage was a civil relation, created by the state and only to be broken by the state. From this arose the civil marriage laws of modern European states. In the 18th and 19th centuries, however, the view again grew up that the basis of the family was essentially private contract, marriage being made and broken by mutual consent of the parties.
Partly as a result of this contract view of marriage and the family, but even more largely because of certain general social and economic conditions, the family life in many nations of the present has become very unstable. The re ligious view of the family has apparently lost its hold among large masses of the population of many countries in Europe and in America. The recent history of the family, therefore, centres largely about the question of divorce (see article on Divotcz) and the toleration of other forms of the family than permanent monogamy in moral and legal standards. See article on MARRIAGE, HISTORY OF.
Dealey, J. Q.,