descendants on the male side could worship the same ancestors and were
relatives in the full religious and legal sense. These were known as
"agnates." Later, some relationship on the mother's side came to be
recognized, but relatives on the mother's side were known as a
"cognates," and for a long time property could not pass to them. Indeed,
in the earliest times the property of the family, as we have already
implied, was kept as a unit, held in trust by the eldest living member
of the family group for the good of all the family. In other words, the
house father in earliest times did not possess the right to make a will
but the property of the family passed intact from him to his eldest male
heir.

(4) _The Marriage Ceremony among the Early Romans_ was necessarily
of a religious character. It was constituted essentially of the
induction of the bride into the worship of her husband's ancestors. But
before this could be done the bride's father had first to free her from
the worship of her household gods, in later times a certificate of
manumission being given not unlike the manumission of the slave. After
the bride had been released from the worship of her father's ancestors,
the bridegroom and his friends brought her to his father's house, where
a ceremony of adoption was practically gone through with, adopting the
bride into the family of her husband. The essence of this ceremony, as
we have already said, was the induction of the bride into the worship of
her husband's ancestors through their both making an offering on the
family hearth and eating a sacrificial meal together. After that the
wife worshiped at her husband's altar and had no claim upon the
household gods of her father.

Under such circumstances it is not surprising that marriage was
practically indissoluble. A wife who was driven out of her husband's