have taken centuries to develop, and to have reached its real
significance only under the empire. Of the four elements therefore we
have established the pre-eminence of the family and the importance of
the state as based on the family idea; the individual may be disregarded
in this early period, and there is left only the clan, which however
offers a difficult problem. The family and the state were destined to
hold their own, merely exchanging places in the course of time, so that
the state came first and the family second; the individual was to grow
into ever increasing importance, but the clan is already dying when
history begins. It is a pleasant theory and one that has a high degree
of probability that there may have been a time when the clan was to the
family what the state is when history begins, and that when the state
arose out of a union of various clans, the immediate allegiance of each
family was gradually alienated from its clan and transferred to the
state, so that the clan gave up its life in order that the state, the
child of its own creation, might live. If this be so, we can see why the
social importance of the clan ceases so early in Roman history.

The centre therefore of early religious life is the family, and the
state as a macrocosm of the family; and the father of each family is its
chief priest, and the king as the father of the state is the chief
priest of the state. As for the individual the only god which he has for
worship is his "double," called in the case of a man his _Genius_ and in
that of a woman her _Juno_, her individualisation of the goddess Juno,
quite a distinct deity, peculiar to herself. But even here the family
instinct shows itself, and though later the Genius and the Juno
represent all that is intellectual in the individual, they seem
originally to have symbolised the procreative power of the individual in
relation to the continuance of the family. The family and the state,
however, side by side worshipped a number of deities.